Adrian steps out of his lab and closes the door behind him.

  It is nearing midnight—the night they were meant to share under the rare full moon. Mira looked too pale in the afternoon, her skin carrying that heated flush he recognized instantly, even from that distance. She definitely has a fever by now. The weather turned abruptly, a sharp, unpredicted snow sweeping in that must have sapped the last of Mira’s endurance after the long journey to Vermillion. To wake her now, to bring her out into this freezing, uncertain dark for the sake of a memory they haven't yet made, would be selfish.

  He turns away, choosing to let her rest.

  The full moon stands high above the courtyard, and in that single moment, the reason he chooses Vermillion floods back into his mind vividly—the trail of the exiled fairy, the silent myth buried inside the Vale bloodline, and the ancient fairy rhythm that continues to move beneath the world like a pulse that never fades—tonight, it feels like a ghost story he has let himself believe too deeply.

  Midnight. End of October. Full moon. Hallstatt peak cycle.

  His calculations aligned perfectly with a singular point in history, a moment preserved under many names. Eastern folklore remembered it as the Night of Spirits; the old Celtic orders called it Samhain. In fractured Sidhean script, it appeared as The Crossing Night, and within remnant Norse wood-lore, Huldra Eve. Every ancient record described the same phenomenon: a rare alignment where the boundary between worlds thins to a gossamer sheet, allowing unseen power to flow freely through the earth. Tonight, that convergence returns after two thousand years.

  He stands with his hands deep in his pockets, staring at the indifferent silver light, wrestling with the sinking fear that he has spent years chasing an impossible dream.

  Then—something moves.

  A luna moth.

  It floats on the air like a whisper, a creature born from a midnight dream rather than a cocoon. It descends softly from the canopy, and as it passes through a shaft of moonlight, the world seems to blur.

  Its wings shine crystalline, clear as spun glass, fragile and see-through save for the veins of glowing emerald that frame them. It dances on the breeze, weightless, and with every soft beat of those transparent wings, it scatters a trail of sparkling dust—a fine, glittering mist that hangs in the air like powdered starlight.

  It feels impossibly intimate, a silent vision in the freezing night. The moth glides past him, trailing its shimmering wake, and turns toward the deep woods. Driven by a pull beyond his logic, Adrian follows the trail of fairy dust into the shadows.

  The forest closes around him, vast and silent, yet the canopy overhead seems to weave a deliberate lattice of silver and black, filtering the moonlight into focused beams that pierce the dark like stage lights. He takes a step, and the ground beneath him reacts instantly. The snow under his boots melts upon contact, dissolving into a liquid sparkle that hisses softly, shining like crushed diamonds against the dark earth.

  He stops, his senses on high alert. The air feels heavy, saturated with a strange, tensive charge of electricity that prickles against his skin and vibrates in his teeth.

  The woods are moving.

  He hears the dry leaves grumble on the forest floor, shifting as if the earth itself is stretching. To his left, thick vines slide against the bark of ancient oaks, uncoiling and lengthening like waking serpents seeking the moonlight. Around his feet, the soil seems to boil with sudden energy. He watches in disbelief as forest mushrooms pop up frantically—pop, pop, pop—expanding from invisible spores to full, fleshy umbrellas in the span of a single heartbeat.

  Then, his gaze locks on the center of the grove.

  Far beyond the frantic growth, a soft blue light shines from the ground.

  A single shaft of moonlight spills through a break in the trees, catching that blue glow and amplifying it. The air above it sparkling, thick with clusters of those crystalline Luna moths. They gather in a swirling cloud, their glass-like wings refracting the light until the entire clearing glows with a thousand tiny prisms.

  And there, nestled in the roots, sits the source.

  A tiny, glowing fungus, pulsing with a rhythm that seems to match the beating of his own heart. It radiates a pure, undeniable magic that defies every biological law he knows. Adrian stands frozen, the cold forgotten. He stares at the delicate blue light, torn between the logic of a scientist and the awe of a believer. He wonders if this is truly the Celestial Bloom, the impossible specimen he has searched for across years and continents, or if the exhaustion has finally claimed his mind, painting a beautiful hallucination over the snow.

  He kneels before it, drawn in by the light. For the first time in years, a rush of wonder stirs beneath the surface of his usual composure—a deep, electric thrill of the unknown. The puzzle that has haunted him since childhood is no longer a shadow in a book; it has bloomed, unprovoked, an impossible secret unfurling in the shimmering air like a waking dream.

  ~ 30 minutes earlier — Mira’s room ~

  The fever relief medicine she had taken earlier had long surrendered to the heat.

  Mira lay tangled in damp sheets, suspended in a blurry haze where the walls of her room seemed to dissolve. The fever had unlocked a door in her mind, and an old, familiar sensation washed over her. She was floating in the illumination room—a space of cool blue light and swirling fairy dust that had visited her sleep so many times.

  A soft fluttering at the window caught her eye.

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  Against the glass, something looked like moth beating its wings. They were vast, formed of translucent blue crystal, fracturing the moon halo above into a prism of sparks. It shimmered there, a creature stepped straight out of the fairy tale playing in her head, beckoning her.

  It turned, gliding away like a ribbon of light.

  Mira didn't remember how she left her room. Her body moved on its own, pulled by the dream’s gravity.

  When she realized, she was already midway to the forest, surrounded by the cold and the mystical dreamlight moon beam.

  The trees rose like cathedral pillars, and their bark pulsed with veins of silver as if the forest possessed a secret, luminous heart, while bioluminescent fungi bloomed across the damp earth in a slow, rhythmic respiration. Motes of gold wandered through the canopy, floating with a deep, thoughtful purpose that felt entirely alive.

  The crystal moth finally settled above a bloom nestled within the gnarled roots of an ancient tree—a blue-white, luminous specimen with gills as delicate as antique lace, exhaling a glistening mist into the silence. Mira crouched, the ground swaying beneath her like the deck of a ship, and she forced her trembling hands to freeze in order to capture the impossible image.

  The moment the shutter snapped, the fungus responded. A cloud of glowing spores burst upward, glittering in the air like diamond dust. As she inhaled the glittering light, the world twisted violently; a vertigo more profound than the illness seized her, and the trees appeared to shoot upward, rushing toward the heavens. She tried to tell herself this was merely the delirium’s climax, yet the sensation was absolute, leaving her to realize with a terrifying wonder that—dream or not—she was shrinking.

  The fabric of her pajamas, once clinging to her heat-slicked skin, suddenly became a cavernous weight, collapsing around her shrinking form until she was left exposed to the biting air. She shut her eyes tight, commanding her mind to break the hallucination, to force the bedroom walls to return, but when she opened them, the nightmare remained the same. A single drop of dew, heavy as a bucket of ice water, crashed onto her shoulder, staggering her with its impossible mass.

  The shock of the cold water soaking her skin felt undeniable.

  Panic, sharp and piercing. Mira scrambled for safety, her tiny hands grasping at the rim of a fallen leaf that curled upward like a sanctuary of plum silk. Dragging herself into its fold, she huddled against the veins, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. The forest had transformed into a landscape of titans. Every blade of grass was a tower; every shadow concealed a labyrinth. She was now the smallest, most fragile entity in this breathing, living world.

  Mira pressed herself deeper into the leaf’s embrace, her heart hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs. The enormity of the situation had not fully settled when the ground beneath her shuddered.

  A wet, guttural vibration rolled through the air, resonating in her chest like a drum.

  She turned her head, and the silent plea for safety died in her throat.

  Towering above her, a mountain of slick, mottled green, sat a creature that defied all logic.

  It was a frog.

  No—not a frog.

  At this size, it might as well was a monster.

  Its slick, green skin glistened under the dim glow of the fungi, its round, unblinking eyes locked directly onto her. The slow expansion and contraction of its throat sent ripples through its bulging skin, and the sheer size of it made Mira feel as insignificant as an insect.

  Her fingers dug into the velvety edge of the leave surrounding her, clutching it as though its delicate surface might somehow shield her from the unblinking gaze of the creature before her. For a fleeting moment, she dared to hope—if she stayed completely still, if she became nothing more than part of leave itself—maybe, just maybe, it hadn’t truly seen her.

  But that fragile hope shattered the instant the creature moved.

  Its thick, muscular legs tensed with a slow, deliberate readiness, and the rhythm of its throat quickened, pulsing faster with each breath it drew. Mira didn’t need to be a zoologist to understand the message etched into that sudden, predatory stillness.

  It had chosen her.

  A low gasp escaped her lips as instinct overrode thought, sending her scrambling backward, but she moved too late.

  The frog’s tongue shot forward with violent speed, a blur of motion that cracked the silence like a whip, and Mira barely managed to hurl herself to the side in time, crashing into a thick, damp patch of moss as the sticky appendage struck the exact spot she had occupied a heartbeat earlier.

  The realization clawed at her—had she hesitated for even a fraction of a second, it would’ve been over.

  Her chest rose and fell in quick, uneven gasps, the pounding of her heart nearly drowned out the rustle of leaves around her. She didn’t need to look back to know the creature was readying for another strike.

  She had to run now — if she stayed still another breath, the frog would strike again.

  And then — a sound.

  Footsteps.

  Someone else in the forest?

  Panic clamped around her chest. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this — but she also couldn’t survive alone. Her heart skittered between terror and desperate hope.

  Leaves parted.

  A huge hand pushed through the green, splitting the foliage in her direction.

  Mira froze.

  Adrian?

  Why was he here?

  The frog inched closer — throat pulsing, tongue poised — and Adrian just stood there, staring down at her as if this scene belonged inside a research journal.

  Was she really going to die while he observed?

  “Adrian! Are you seriously just going to stare? Help me!” she screamed, her arms flying up in helpless outrage.

  The frog’s tongue snapped through the air — and in the same instant her body lurched upward, weightless in the sudden safety of Adrian’s hand.

  He looked enormous — like the giant from that old fairy tale with the beanstalk — carrying her with impossible scale. And his expression — seriously, what was that expression? There was no frantic worry, just a strange gleam like he had found a rare theorem proven true.

  “Fascinating,” Adrian said under his breath.

  The word — and the spark in his eyes — felt like a needle stabbing straight into her vision.

  He didn’t pause.

  “Can you tell me exactly what happened? Did you ingest anything unusual? Any contact with foreign particles?” His tone carried the smooth tone of an academic question — more conference panel than crisis.

  Her breath trembled inside the leaf wrapped around her like a makeshift cloak. Every blade of grass around her loomed like a tower. She could barely grasp the scale of the world anymore — and yet Adrian crouched there like a scholar testing his lab subject.

  “Adrian,” she whispered, her voice stretched thin with disbelief, “I am two inches tall. Do you really think this is the time for an interview?”

  She could tell the moment it happened. His eyes rested on her shape, but his mind had already raced ahead into some silent framework she could never see. He wasn’t treating her like a terrified girl in her tiny size. He was processing her — slotting her into theories, patterns, and equations — as if she were the most extraordinary result he had ever witnessed. He was entirely caught in the gravitational pull of something wondrous.

  And Mira, somehow, had become the center of that mystery.