Aannii

Mila & Milana loved nothing more than to scare the crap out of hotel guests, lingering in the long hallways for hours, waiting for one unsuspecting innocent after another to come around a corner and spot them…

The first time Millie was suddenly cornered by several black SUVs, hooded and herded into one of them by burly men wearing suits, sunglasses and earpieces, she'd reacted as you might imagine anyone would…

Inka, aware of the Minders for several years now and long past cycling through self-doubt (am I dreaming? high? crazy?), had simply accepted their presence, and the fact that no one else seemed to be able to see them, as a novel fact of her life. For the most part, they just floated around, though it was clear from the get-go that they gravitated toward populated areas…

Samara was charged with protection of the sacred forest. Since early childhood, she had been trained by the Coven in the ancient ways of her peoples' magic. The Dozen Mothers took turns guiding her through the dark woods, each imparting her own share of esoteric knowledge, gradually imbuing her with the power required to hear the breathing of the trees, to communicate in birdsong, to summon lightning from the clouds. Eventually, she began to feel the forest as an extension of herself, or rather, that she herself was an extension of the forest…

Lucia preferred the tranquility of the underwater world to the hectic, more populated surface. She'd worked with the Ocean Reef Group, helping to maintain Nemo's Garden, an agricultural experiment off the coast of the Italian Riviera that grew samples of land-based crops in underwater greenhouses called biospheres. But after storms & the pandemic cut off access to the project for months, the team was pared back to a skeleton crew, & she was cut loose. Not long into her hunt for a new job, she was contacted by a company called Reprion & recruited to work on their research submarine, the Thalassa. Eager to get back underwater, she didn't ask as many questions as she probably should have…

For as long as she could remember, Yarine had been able to lucid dream. Growing up with this inherent ability, for her, dreaming seemed like just another series of realities, and likewise, waking life often felt like merely her most persistent (and most obstinate) dream…

Zubaida, glowing and feeling at home on the playa…

Rhea, in the garden, alone…

The few seconds between bungling her over-practiced landing and actually slipping the black ring onto her finger were the most precarious of Hodja's entire life…

Tiziana knew by now that she was not really in a magical forest, but she still couldn't help frequently forgetting that fact, because the forest was very good at pretending to be a forest, and even better at pretending to be magical…