The Drawing

A mysterious drawing of a golden doorway begins calling a girl home. Chapter 1 Book 1

Chapter One - The Drawing
Auralin sat at the wooden table tucked into the corner of the kitchen, legs folded beneath her and one woollen sock slowly slipping down her ankle. She tried to ignore the coolness, brushing lightly against her bare skin as if the house itself were breathing. The cottage always held the chill a little longer than the outdoors did, as though it preferred the memory of cold to the comfort of warmth.
Her pencil moved steadily across the page with the quiet assurance of someone tracing lines she had already seen.
The air carried the sweet scent of peat smoke from the hearth, subtle but heavy enough to settle into fabric and hair. Beneath it lingered something fainter, a trace of dried herbs. Rosemary. Sage. And something more bitter, echoing the memory of small bundles once tied and hung from the dark beams years ago.
As the fire shifted, that herbal scent would stir and drift downward in the softest sigh.
She always began with the tree. The motion of the pencil stirred a small warmth beneath her ribs. A shiver followed, sudden and uninvited.
Across the room, Mavora stood near the mantel trimming the wick of a candle that did not yet need trimming. She held the brass scissors delicately between her fingers, snipping away the blackened curl and brushing it into her palm, just as she did yesterday and every day before that. Auralin had never asked why. She wasn't even sure when she had first begun to notice. She just understood, in the way children understand unspoken things, that the ritual mattered more than the necessity. Afterward, Mavora would straighten the candles, so they stood perfectly upright, even if they had not leaned.
Auralin returned her focus to the table, aligning her pencils in a neat row, each one parallel to the next. Their sharpened tips positioned precisely, facing the same direction. The shortest one always went to the left.
They did not speak about these habits. They did not need to. The small order of them was its own quiet conversation.
Auralin drew the trunk in a slow curve, her hand steady, her breathing even.
It leaned more than it had yesterday.



Outside, the forest still dripped from the earlier rain, and the sound of water slipping from leaf to leaf and tapping faintly against the windowpane filled the spaces where words might have gone. The sky hung low and grey, pressing close to the cottage roof, and now and then a breeze moved through the trees in a way that made them seem less like wood and more like watchers.
She paused and frowned at the page. She hadn't meant to change it, hadn't decided to make it bow further, and yet there it was, the tree bending deeper, as though listening harder, as though straining toward something beyond the edge of the paper.
She drew the stream next, and it, too, had altered without her permission. It ran wider now, cutting a broader path across the page, its banks softer, as if the water had begun claiming more ground for itself. She shaded along the edges and gave it depth, and as she did, she could almost hear it the way it sounded in her dreams: louder than the real stream behind the cottage, fuller, as though it carried something important within it.
Then came the door.
It had once been only a suggestion, a brightness half-formed behind the tree. But not today.
Something, a shadow, a shift, a feeling she couldn't name, drew her gaze toward the window. Outside, the forest still dripped from the earlier rain, the sound of water slipping from leaf to leaf, tapping faintly against the windowpane. The sky hung low and grey, pressing close to the cottage roof, and now and then a breeze moved through the trees in a way that made them seem less like wood and more like watchers.
Was somebody watching her? Or something?
The thought settled into her like a stone dropped into water: something was watching.
Auralin shook off the uneasy feeling and bent over the page again. The cottage was safe. It always had been.
The lines arrived beneath her pencil with increasing clarity, thin and deliberate, crossing over one another like woven threads of gold. It was not shaped like any door she had ever seen, not wood and not stone, and yet it felt unmistakably like an entrance.
Today, as she darkened the lines, her pencil dipped lower than usual and curved into a shape she did not recognize. Three strokes, one straight and two angled inward, meeting in a way that suggested wings folded close.
She stilled.
She had not meant to draw that.
She touched the pencil to it again, tracing the lines carefully, and the more she looked at it, the less accidental it seemed.
"You're at it again," Mavora said from the stove, her voice rough but not unkind.
Auralin did not look up. "Just drawing."
"It's always the same tree," murmured Mavora.
It wasn't, but Auralin let the words pass.
"It's just what comes," she said softly.
Mavora made a quiet sound in her throat and stood at the sink, a moment longer than necessary, her hand resting against the windowsill as she stared into the mist. From behind, she looked almost carved from the house itself straight-backed, silver-streaked hair twisted low, dark skirts falling in clean lines as though time had shaped her into something sturdy and unyielding.
Auralin glanced down again at the unfamiliar symbol and felt a question rise to her lips.
Do you know what this means?
The words hovered, delicate in the air, but when she noticed the faint tightening in Mavora's shoulders, she swallowed them back down.
Instead, she drew a small figure beneath the tree.
She had never done that before.
The girl was slight, her hair swept to one side by an unseen wind, her hand stretched toward the door but not touching it. The space between the fingertips and the light was narrow now, narrower than it had ever been.
"Show me," Mavora said suddenly.
The request startled her. She turned the page around carefully.
The peat smoke thickened as a log shifted in the hearth, sending a small rush of warmth across the room.
Mavora's gaze settled first on the tree.
"It leans more," she said quietly.
"I didn't mean to," Auralin replied.
"And the stream is wider."
"It's louder in my dreams," Auralin admitted before she could stop herself.
Mavora's fingers tightened slightly around her teacup.
"You're dreaming of it again."
Auralin nodded.
She hesitated, and the air between them felt fragile, as though one wrong word might crack it open.
"Mavora... did Mumma ever..."
The name hovered there, almost spoken, almost breathed into the room where it had not been spoken aloud in years.
Mavora's hand stilled completely.
Auralin felt it, that shift, and changed course.
"...ever draw?" she finished instead, her voice small but steady.
For a moment, something unreadable passed across Mavora's face, relief and sorrow woven so tightly together they could not be separated.
Mavora's fingers hovered over the paper, not quite touching.
"Yes," she said at last. "She did."
A long, careful pause followed.
"She drew things that weren't there."
Auralin's heart beat harder against her ribs.
"Like this?"
Mavora's eyes lowered to the page again, to the door and the symbol and the reaching girl.
Her lips parted slightly, and Auralin was certain, certain that this time she would say it, that she would say Zephora's name aloud and let it settle into the room like dust finally allowed to land.
Instead, she lifted her tea and took a measured sip.
"Some things," she said evenly, "are better left as drawings."
The space between them returned then, not sharp and not cruel, but present in the way a closed door is present, solid and felt, even when unspoken.
Auralin nodded and looked back down at the base of the doorway.
The symbol was still there, clear and deliberate.
Outside, the wind moved softly through the trees, and near the bend of the stream an ash that had leaned for years seemed to bow a fraction deeper, as though listening more closely than before.
Inside the cottage, Mavora reached across the table and gently nudged one of Auralin's pencils so that it lay perfectly straight beside the others, her fingers lingering for just a heartbeat longer than necessary.
It was a small gesture, almost nothing.
But it was love, spoken in the only language they both seemed able to bear.