Neto leaned on the old wood of the fence, shifting his weight between his elbows. His eyes set on a dirt path a few paces away, squinting through the waves of shimmering heat.
At last, he saw a flicker of orange and green, zipping around a bend in the road.
Her face was flushed from the walk and her free hand was already waving vigorously at him.
"Hi hi," she called.
Neto unlatched the small wood gate and stepped out to meet her, trying to look like his heart wasn't about to beat out of his chest.
"Take your pick of the eggs."
A gang of hens pecked at the grain in their coop beside him.
Pekay dropped her basket of flour and salt at his feet and leaned on the rail beside him, catching her breath. A strand of sandy hair had stuck to her forehead, and she pushed it back with the heel of her hand. Neto looked at the angry little hen scratching at dry dirt by the coop instead.
"Can you pick them out? I mostly came by to see you today, and I don't want to get my hands dirty."
Neto felt his cheeks catch fire.
"O-oh? Sure... It's good to see you again."
He cleared his throat, lifted the sack of flour and the twist of salt out of her basket, set them inside the gate, and carried the empty basket to the coop. It was good to have his back to her.
"By the way, I found something interesting," she called from over the fence. "In the woods. Past the abandoned house."
He reached under a hen. "Found what?"
He waited for her to answer as he filled the basket. Pekay let him wait until the silence grew uncomfortable for the both of them.
"On its own, out between the trees, there's a cobblestone wall I've never seen before."
"What's so special about a wall. You probably just forgot it was there."
"I don't forget things that easily." She pouted. "And the wall isn't what's interesting. It's like a door, you can step through it. I think it's magic."
"What?" Neto chuckled, "Are you sure you didn't bang your head against it?"
"Hmph, I knew you wouldn't believe me."
He straightened up with three eggs in one hand and found her leaning over the rail, chin on her folded arms, watching him. Her lips were pursed and the look in her hazelnut eyes was making him weak in the knees. He looked back down at the eggs.
"I believe you."
"No you don't."
"I'll go now if you'll take me. We can check it out together."
"Neto. I can't go now. You know that."
He counted the eggs in the basket. He counted them again and got a different number.
"I'm not sneaking out," he muttered, picking a bit of straw off an egg. "You know that."
"I know."
"You know what my father would do if he caught me."
"...I do."
He brought the basket back to the fence and set it on the post between them. She didn't look at it.
Neto sat beside her. She smelled like lilac and rosemary. He opened his mouth and felt it close shut while the angry hen went for his ankle.
"Fine." It slipped out of his mouth before he finished deciding on it. "I'll go tonight."
She studied him for a moment. Whatever she saw was enough.
"When the moon clears the ridge. I'll be here." She lifted the basket off the post and settled it on her hip. "You promise?"
"I promise."
Her smile that day was the most beautiful thing Neto had ever seen.
He watched the orange and green of her dress flicker between the hedgerows until it was gone. Then he carried the flour and the salt inside, milked the cows, and cleaned the barn, knowing he'd regret those words later.
______________________________________
A harvest moon began peering over the horizon while his father snored.
Well, father in name. In reality, he felt more similar to an unpaid worker on Teo's barn.
Over the years he definitely grew close with the stout, gruff farmer who adopted him, but he felt that neither him nor his adopted father held the same fondness for each other that the other families did.
The traveling merchant, Foren, had brought him to this village before Neto had his first memory. On the merchant's yearly visits, Neto would always ask where he came from, and Foren would tell him a slightly different story each time.
"Hah! I remember it like it was yesterday. An ugly, squealing baby sitting outside the orphanage of Dhvari. It was late, and you would've froze before anyone else found you. Could you believe it? I knocked on that damn door a dozen times and no one answered."
"Found you outside Dhvari's orphanage one night. Couldn't bear to let them take you. Not a proper place for a kid to grow up. I should know, since I grew up there."
"Where you came from? I've told you the story a thousand times, boy. No room left in Dhvari's orphanage, so they asked me to take you a town over. Never made it that far though since your pops here offered to take care of ya. You've grown up fine though, better than I would've guessed since you were such an ugly baby, Haha."
And so on.
Neto always wondered if the man simply had a bad memory or if there was more to the story.
'Come to think of it, he's supposed to show up tomorrow, huh.'
While exciting, it was hard for Neto to believe that another year had passed. Where had the time gone?
He lay in the dark and counted to a hundred, slowly. The door creaked, and the strap hung on its nail beside it. A grim remnant of his first attempt to sneak out to play with Pekay. Swallowing the back of his tongue, Neto eased the shutter open and went out the window in his socks, boots in one hand.
Halfway out, the snoring stopped.
He hung on the sill with one leg in the yard and one in the room and didn't breathe. The bed frame groaned through the wall, the long kind that meant rolling over, not the kind that meant feet on the floor. The snoring came back, so he eased outside tentatively.
Pekay was sitting on the warm wood of the gate, bathed in pearlescent light. When she saw him she put a finger to her lips, then grinned around it.
"You took forever."
"Had to be sure he wasn't going to wake up." He sat in the dirt to pull his boots on. The laces fought him. "He's a light sleeper."
"Don't worry so much, life's more fun that way." She dropped down beside him and held out her hand. "C'mon. Before you talk yourself out of it."
He took it and she pulled him up with surprising force.
They ran without speaking. Pekay led the way, with Neto close behind, admiring her curly brown hair, and toned shoulders.
A dog lifted its head in a yard as they passed and Neto stopped breathing. Pekay clicked her tongue at it and it lay back down. She continued unbothered down the middle of the road while he kept to the hedgerows, where the dew soaked his trousers to the knee.
"You do this a lot, huh?"
"Every night." She didn't turn around, then whispered almost imperceptibly, "I hate how boring it gets here."
"What's on the other side of the wall?"
"It's beautiful."
He looked back down the road toward his father's roof. There was a lamp lit in the window.
He stopped. Pekay came back for him and looked too.
"Then he's up for the cows." She took his wrist. "Or he isn't, and you can't go back either way."
Neto gulped.
"You promised, remember?"
"I did."
Past her house the path went thin and the trees closed over it. The moon came through in pieces.
Soon they arrived at a long abandoned house, oddly placed in the middle of the birchwood thicket. Its roof was caved in and a serene, chilling darkness lay behind its cracked windows.
"Here."
About a hundred feet past it, stood a short, cobblestone wall, crumbling at its edges. It stood around five feet tall and was rather unassuming.
"See?"
"I see it. Looks like it used to run all the way around that house."
She shook her head. "I know this place. It wasn't here before."
"Before what?"
"You said you believed me."
"I said it." He clicked his tongue. "I'm working on it."
"Sigh. Here, I'll show you."
She went to it. She trailed her fingers along the cobbles the way she did along his fence rail, pacing, and at the middle of the wall she stopped and turned around to face him, smiling brightly.
Then, she took a step back into the wall, and the wall didn't stop her.
He stood there, suddenly feeling very out of place. A spell of chills trickled down his spine, and he felt the hairs on his arms stand on end.
Walking around the wall segment revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The back looked like the front.
"Pekay." He whispered. "Come back out. You showed me."
He waited for a sound, but only the night symphony of the woods played on the wind.
Slowly, he made his way to the spot where Pekay disappeared, and put his hand flat on the wall.
It disappeared behind the fitted stones.
Yanking his hand back, he let out a sharp breath and turned it over. It was certainly still there, attached to his wrist.
He backed up until a root caught his heel and sat him down.
Every part of him wanted for this to be a dream. To wake in his bed, the shutter closed, and in the morning she'd come up the path with a basket and laugh and make fun of him for not keeping his promise.
'Shit.'
He got up and wiped his palm on his trousers twice before making his way back to the wall. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stepped through.
______________________________________
The air on the other side was cool and still, and the sounds of the woods were gone. It smelled of cut grass during the months where the snow melted.
Neto stood on bare, packed earth. Chest-high grass rose all around it, silver under the moon, and ran in every direction until it met the sky, rolling in long, slow swells like the Eastern Sea from Foren's stories.
A low shadow sat on the far horizon. A hill maybe? Or a thicket of trees. Above it all hung the biggest moon he had ever seen, so close it seemed to lean over the field, and the stars lay around it thick as spilled salt.
For a moment he forgot to be afraid.
'She was right. It really is beautiful.'
The bare earth ringed a stone well, waist high and worn smooth. Behind him, a short run of cobblestones rose alone out of the grass, the same wall he'd stepped through.
"Pekay? I came, all right? You can come out now."
His voice went out over the field and nothing came back.
He waded into the grass and circled the well, wider and wider, calling for her until his throat was sore. He leaned over the well last. There was no rope and no bucket, only a smell of cold stone and a dark that swallowed the moonlight a few feet down.
She had to have left a trail, but the swells closed over every gap as soon as they opened. It was a while before he noticed there was no wind to move them, the sweat on his neck went cold.
When he held his breath to listen, there were no crickets and no footsteps. Under the quiet, so low he'd taken it for the blood in his ears, a hum buzzed in the roots of his teeth. Deep and primal, like the song of the universe.
His brow set firmly creased by the time he looked up for a star he knew. He couldn't find one, and none of them held the light he was used to. They sat in the sky like nails, while the moon looked bigger than it had a minute ago, as if it were in the middle of a slow blink.
Without meaning to, he'd drifted back to an arm's length from the wall.
He was reaching for the stones when something moved.
Out toward the shadow, something dark kept popping up above the grass and dropping again, like someone hopping to see over it.
"Pekay!"
He ran, with the grass whipping his face, and was close enough to hear the stalks rustle where the dark thing had dropped.
It was a raven. Startled by Neto's sudden intrusion, it leapt into the air.
Wheeling once overhead, it flew on toward the shadow without sound, while Neto bent with his hands on his knees. Far behind him, impossibly far for how many steps he'd taken, the top of the wall disappeared below the undulating waves of grass. Then it was gone. He stood there for a while, eyes anchored on the spot where it had been.
"Pekay?" he whispered, but no one responded.
Far ahead of him, the shadow loomed, expanding and contracting like it was behind a swaying lens.
She had to be too far ahead to hear him. That made sense, so he decided to continue forward.
The shadow grew close faster than his steps could explain, and before long it loomed over him. A ruined, jet-black castle with its towers snapped off against the sky.
The gate was only a gap where the stone had fallen in. Here, he felt the hum deeper, all the way inside his chest, his heart beat against its grip.
"Pekay?" he whispered. "Are you in there?"
The walls of the castle tossed his whisper back to him, thin and wrong, as though someone else had said it.
She wasn't here. His gut was telling him to run away as fast and as far as he could, but something else held him in place.
Somehow, this strange place was starting to feel familiar. It made no sense, but Neto's curiosity was stolen. He had to see what was inside. Fighting against every instinct, he let the shadow cast by the tall structure swallow him one step at a time.
The walls rose up around him and simply stopped, ragged at the top, and moonlight came down into the hall in pale sheets with bands of black between them. Ravens sat in the broken stone all along the walls, dozens of them, and not one of them called. As they shifted about, their feathers drifted slowly in the pale air, settling into a carpet which he walked along. He felt their eyes on the back of his neck.
Atonal and ever-present, the hum came from all around him. It rose through his boots and out of the stones, and seemed to crescendo around the dark antechamber at the end of the hall, around the stump of a dead tree, which sat square in its center.
Its bark was gray and peeling, and it was broken off flat at the height of a table. Neto crossed toward it as quietly as he'd gone out his window, with his arms wrapped around his chest.
As he came around the stump, starlight caught around two points, side by side, where the edge of a pale sheet met the dark, a little above the stump's flat top.
It didn't take long for him to realize what they were.