Episode 1: The Wrong Summoning
She heard her own name spoken by a voice that did not belong to this world, low and broken, as though it had traveled miles of darkness to reach her ears. Mara. Not her mother's voice. She stood frozen in the middle of a room thick with candle smoke, her hand still slick with her own blood, and in the black mirror before her, a stranger's eyes stared back, wild and desperate as a cornered animal.
That was a few hours later. First, it began on an entirely ordinary afternoon, in a windowless basement, under the cold white fluorescent lights of the Greyhaven Museum.
Mara Vale had learned to live with three years of finding nothing. Three years combing through misplaced files, three years sending emails to researchers who never answered, three years lying to herself that this would be the time she finally stopped searching for her mother. But when her rubber-gloved fingers brushed against an ebony box tucked behind a steel shelf in the archive, something in her knew, before her mind had caught up, that this was no ordinary artifact.
Inside the box lay a shard of black mirror, its edges as sharp as if it had shattered only yesterday rather than lain untouched in the dark for fifteen years, and a leather-bound notebook, its spine cracked and worn, carved with a symbol Mara recognized instantly, though she had never learned it anywhere. It matched, exactly, the careless marks her mother used to scrawl on the backs of letters, symbols Mara had once dismissed as the eccentric habit of an odd woman, until the morning Celia Vale had vanished, leaving behind nothing but that very notebook.
Don't do anything stupid, she told herself, fingers trembling as she turned each page. Just log the artifact. Go home.
She did not listen to herself.
The museum's curator, a man named Halloway who had a habit of looking at Mara as though she were always hiding something, arrived before she could tuck the box away. He confiscated both the mirror and the notebook on the spot, declared them museum property, and forbade her from ever touching them again. But Mara had photographed every page before he stepped into the room, and in her coat pocket, a shard no larger than her thumb, broken off from the larger mirror when it hit the floor, still sat there, growing strangely warm every time she touched it.
That night, in her small third-floor apartment, where Greyhaven's rain tapped against the window in a steady countdown, Mara spread the photographs of the notebook across the floor. She had cross-referenced every symbol against her mother's old letters until her eyes burned, and by midnight, she had reconstructed enough to build a ritual.
She knew it was dangerous. She knew she didn't understand half of what she was doing. But three years of silence had eaten away at her until reason was no longer the thing steering her.
If I call her true name, she thought, kneeling inside a circle of salt drawn on the wooden floor, the shard of mirror set before her, a small knife cold in her palm, she will have to answer.
She drew a thin line across her palm, let three drops of blood fall onto the surface of the mirror, and spoke her mother's name in a language she did not remember learning.
Nothing happened for three seconds, long enough for her to think she had failed.
Then the mirror cracked, not into shards, but into a deep pocket of darkness, as though someone had carved a hole straight through the air in front of her. A wind, bitterly cold, rushed backward out of it, carrying the smell of damp earth and rusted iron, and the lights in Mara's room died just as a figure crashed to the floor of her apartment, heavy, bleeding, gasping for breath as if he had just fled something monstrous.
It was not her mother.
The man sprawled across the wooden floor of Mara's apartment was tall, dressed in a black cloak embroidered with silver thread, torn open at one shoulder to reveal deep gashes weeping something dark, nearly black. His hair was matted to his forehead, and when his eyes opened, they were a strange pale silver, catching the darkness like the eyes of some nocturnal predator rather than a man.
"Who are you?" he asked, his voice hoarse, forcing himself upright despite what his body clearly did not allow. "What name did you call?"
Mara stumbled back until her spine hit the bookshelf, her heart slamming hard enough that she heard it in her own ears. "I... I called my mother."
The man looked at her as though she had said something entirely meaningless. Then he looked down at his own bleeding hand, at the black mirror now shattered on the floor, and something close to horror passed across his sharp, cold face.
"Then why," he said slowly, each word dragged out of his throat, "is it me who came through the door?"
Before Mara could answer, the room began to tilt. Not figuratively, but literally, the floor beneath her feet turning soft as water, the familiar walls dissolving into shards of light, and Mara felt herself pulled down through a bottomless dark, her own scream swallowed by the cold wind dragging her under.
She fell.
She fell for a long time, long enough to think this was how she would die, until her body struck something both soft and damp, and she landed face down in a forest she had never seen in her life.
Not the forests of Greyhaven. The trunks here were pitch black, rising so high she couldn't see their crowns, and the only light came from thin roots glowing silver beneath the rotting soil. The air was heavy, sickly sweet in a way that felt wrong, as though she were breathing in something that was both being born and dying at once.
Mara's left wrist burned. She pushed up her sleeve and found a new mark there, a silver spiral rising slowly beneath her skin like ink bleeding backward, the same shape as the symbol carved into the spine of her mother's notebook.
This isn't Greyhaven, she thought, fighting down the panic rising in her chest. Where have I gone.
The sound of hooves rose in the distance, then closer, then very close, and before Mara could get to her feet, she was surrounded by figures in black armor engraved with crows, their faces cold beneath the strange silver light of the forest. Their leader, a woman with eyes sharp as knives, leveled her sword straight at Mara's wrist.
"The Anchor's mark," she said, her voice carrying both suspicion and something close to fear. "Take her. The Queen must know of this at once."
Mara didn't understand a single word of it, only that her hands were bound behind her back with a faintly glowing cord, and that she was dragged through the black forest toward a strange blue-silver light on the horizon, as though someone had hung a false sun in a sky that had never known a true dawn.
On the other side of the shattered doorway, in the small apartment now littered with salt and broken glass, the man named Kael D'Arven finally managed to stand, though every movement pulled at the wounds across his shoulder.
He looked around the unfamiliar room, at the cold white lights fixed to the ceiling that had no name he could give them, at the strange noise drifting in from beyond the window, and a cold certainty settled into his chest.
She never meant to call me. He thought, pressing a hand to the wound at his shoulder to stem the bleeding. She spoke the wrong name, and now I am trapped in the world of men, and she...
He did not know where she was. But the invisible thread tightening around his ribs, keeping time with the pain lancing down his left arm, told him that wherever the girl had gone, she was paying the same price for this ritual that he was.
Kael looked down at the shattered mirror beneath his feet. One small shard, no larger than a palm, remained intact among the wreckage, and in it, for one brief moment, he saw the reflection of a black forest he had never named aloud but recognized at once.
The Black Wood of Nythara.
And standing within that forest, faint as a shadow dragged through water, was the face of the girl who had called the wrong name, staring back at him with wide, panicked eyes, as though she, too, were seeing him in this exact instant, from the far side of an entirely different world.
The doorbell rang outside the apartment, urgent and frantic, followed by a man's voice calling Mara's name through the wood.
Kael D'Arven stood still between two worlds that were not his own, blood still dripping onto the unfamiliar floor, and in his mind there was only one question, the same question the girl on the other side must have been asking herself, somewhere far away, beneath a sky that had never known a true sunrise.
Who did you call?
And why is it that the thing that crossed the threshold, on both sides, was never the one who was named?
(End of Episode 1 — The Wrong Summoning)