Chapter 7: Timeline
[Oak Hollow — Morning, Day 5]
The question had kept me up half the night, turning behind my eyes like the iron nail between my fingers: when?
I knew the story. I knew the players, the plot, the ending. What I didn't know—what mattered more than anything else—was where I'd landed in the sequence. Was Aurora a baby in a cradle? A child in a cottage? A teenager approaching the worst birthday in fairy tale history? The answer to that question determined everything.
I couldn't ask directly. "Hey Diaval, has your boss cursed any infants lately?" would blow my cover in about three seconds. So I'd do what I did in the ER when a patient couldn't tell me where it hurt: I'd read the symptoms and work backward.
Diaval arrived at my hollow at dawn. Raven form, perched on the entrance branch, making a series of short clipped sounds that I was beginning to interpret as get up, the day's not going to wait for you. He shifted to human once I emerged, and we fell into what was becoming a routine—walking the eastern meadows, Diaval a half-step behind and slightly to my left, positioned like a bodyguard who was also the warden.
"The human kingdom," I said, casual as I could manage while navigating a root-covered trail. "What's it like?"
Diaval's head tilted. "Why?"
"Curious. I'm in a magical forest surrounded by thorns. Seems reasonable to wonder what's on the other side."
"Nothing worth visiting."
"That's not really an answer."
He walked in silence for ten paces. Twelve. I was learning his rhythms—the pauses were calculation, not reluctance. He was deciding how much to share and what the cost of sharing would be.
"King Stefan rules beyond the wall," he said. Neutral tone. Careful words. "Has ruled for some years now. Mad as a rabid dog. Been that way since—" He stopped. Reset. "For a long time."
Stefan. The name confirmed it. Post-betrayal. Post-wing-theft. Stefan was king, which meant Maleficent had already lost her wings, already sealed the Moors, already—
"Years since what?" I asked, light, conversational.
Diaval's expression closed like a door slamming. Every trace of warmth—and there had been traces, small ones, growing daily—vanished behind something flat and hard.
"Don't ask about that."
"Fair enough."
We walked on. I filed the data point: Stefan was king and had been "mad" for years. That narrowed things considerably. The madness was post-curse—Stefan's paranoia spiraled after Maleficent cursed Aurora. Which meant the christening had happened. Aurora existed.
The question was her age.
---
[The Moors — Day 6, Afternoon]
I pushed the boundaries of my allowed territory. Not obviously—no dramatic expeditions toward forbidden zones—just a gradual expansion of my walking routes, drifting south and west through sections of forest Diaval hadn't explicitly shown me. He followed in raven form, a dark shape in the canopy, but his surveillance had relaxed over the past two days. I wasn't testing the thorns. I wasn't approaching the cliff. I was walking, practicing my hover, and being harmless.
On the afternoon of my sixth day, I found the southern edge.
The thorn wall curved here, and beyond it—visible through gaps where the thorns were thinner—the forest continued, but different. Less magical. More mundane. Ordinary trees with ordinary bark, growing in ordinary soil.
And there, maybe two hundred yards beyond the wall, a cottage.
Small. Stone walls, thatched roof, smoke from a chimney. A garden out front that looked enthusiastic but poorly maintained. And moving between the garden beds, three shapes that were too small to be human adults and too colorful to be children. They fluttered. Wings. Tiny wings, catching afternoon light in shades of pink, green, and blue.
The three pixies. Knotgrass, Flittle, Thistlewit. The incompetent godmothers tasked with raising a princess in secret.
My chest tightened.
Then the cottage door opened and a figure stepped out.
Golden hair. Long, loose, catching the light the way only healthy young hair does. She moved with the unconscious grace of someone who'd grown up in nature, bare feet on grass, arms swinging freely. She was carrying a basket and heading toward the garden with the easy purposefulness of someone performing a familiar task.
Aurora.
Fifteen. Maybe almost sixteen. The age was hard to judge at two hundred yards, but the proportions were right—not a child, not fully an adult. The narrow window between innocence and destiny.
I pulled back from the thorn wall before anyone could spot me. My pulse was elevated. Not from fear—from the weight of confirmation landing on my shoulders like a physical thing.
The curse was already cast. Aurora was nearly sixteen. Stefan was mad in his castle, spinning wheels locked in his dungeon, soldiers patrolling borders. And Maleficent—the woman who'd sat on a throne of thorns and interrogated me with those green eyes—was somewhere in this forest, watching over a girl she'd cursed and couldn't uncurse, and no one in this entire world knew that except her.
And me.
---
[The Moors — Day 7, Evening]
I sat in a clearing I'd found on day three—the same one where I'd tilted my face to the sun and the wallerbogs had mimicked me. A callback, though neither the wallerbogs nor I acknowledged it. They were there again tonight, a cluster of eight or nine, settled in the grass at a comfortable distance, their trunk-noses pointed skyward.
The stars were different here. I'd noticed it my first night, but now I studied them properly. No Orion. No Big Dipper. No Polaris to point north. An entirely alien sky, mapped with constellations that had no names I knew.
I counted them anyway. An old habit from residency—when the shift was long and the waiting room was finally empty and the only thing left was the thirty minutes before the next disaster, I'd go to the hospital roof and count stars. You couldn't see many in Boston. Light pollution turned the sky into a washed-out gray dome with maybe a dozen visible points. Here, there were thousands. Tens of thousands. A river of light across the sky that would have been the Milky Way if this were Earth, but wasn't, so it was just... light. Overwhelming, beautiful, nameless light.
I counted until my thoughts slowed. Until the calculations stopped and the weight of I know how this story goes settled from a roar to a hum.
Two months. Maybe less. Aurora's birthday was approaching, and when it arrived, a spinning wheel would prick her finger and she would sleep, and the only person who could wake her was the same person who'd cursed her.
I couldn't stop the curse. It was already cast, already locked, already beyond even Maleficent's ability to revoke. The story had confirmed that much.
But the story also confirmed what came after. The battle. Stefan's madness made manifest. Iron and fire and a tower and a fall. And in the middle of it all, a woman with broken wings fighting to save the girl she loved.
I could help with that. Maybe. If I earned enough trust. If I positioned myself correctly. If I was useful enough to be kept and careful enough not to be killed.
Earn trust. Become valuable. Be ready when it matters.
The wallerbogs chittered softly among themselves. One of them had fallen asleep and was snoring—a tiny, wheezing sound through its trunk-nose that was arguably the most endearing thing I'd encountered in either of my lives.
I pressed my back against the grass and let the unnamed stars fill my vision.
---
[Training Clearing — Day 7, Late Afternoon]
Diaval found me near the waterfalls—a cascade of water that fell thirty feet into a pool so clear you could count the stones at the bottom. I'd been using the open space above the pool to practice flight. The acoustics were good; the falls covered any sound I made when I hit something, which happened more often than I'd have liked.
I was mid-hover, eight feet up, trying to transition from stationary float to forward movement without the jerky acceleration that kept sending me into things. The key, I was discovering, was in the intention—not move forward as a command, but a gradual shift in where I wanted gravity to pull me. Gentle. Directional. Like leaning into a turn on a bicycle rather than yanking the handlebars.
"You're getting better," Diaval said from the pool's edge.
I wobbled. Steadied. Drifted sideways two feet before correcting. "Still can't match someone with actual wings."
He tilted his head—bird mannerism, always—and watched me complete a slow circuit of the clearing. I landed with only moderate clumsiness. My head ached, but distantly. The endurance was improving.
Diaval leaned against a rock, arms folded. The posture was becoming familiar—evaluative rest, his version of standing at ease.
"Why do you stay here?" he asked. Not hostile. Genuinely curious. "You could try the thorns."
"You told me the thorns would kill me."
"Most things in the Moors can kill you. You don't seem particularly bothered by that."
I wiped sweat from my forehead. Sat on a rock at the pool's edge, boots in the spray. The water was cold. Welcoming.
"Where else would I go?"
He didn't answer immediately. The falls filled the silence with white noise—the closest thing to a neutral soundtrack this forest offered.
"Most creatures who wander into the Moors want to leave," he said. "You haven't once tried."
"Most creatures who wander into the Moors didn't wake up here from the dead." I picked up a pebble, turned it in my fingers. "I've got no home to go back to. No people waiting. No world, even. This forest is the only thing I've got. That makes it worth staying in."
The pebble skipped once across the pool's surface before gravity reclaimed it. Diaval watched it sink.
"Hm." That sharp sound, less guarded than usual. "She won't understand that. The Mistress. She'll assume everyone wants to leave because everyone always has."
"Then I'll have to prove otherwise."
He studied me for another moment. Then he pushed off the rock and shifted—man folding into raven, feathers catching the spray from the falls. The bird circled once, dipped a wing toward me in what might have been acknowledgment, and flew north toward the cliffs.
Toward her. To report.
I sat by the waterfalls and let the mist settle on my skin, and began building the list of things I'd need to do to become indispensable.
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