I was sitting in the great living room, a grand fireplace, staircase and towering windows sat inanimate and opulent.

"Do you know who she is?" Gabriel's voice asked me about Serene Sinclair, who we could both see outside, was praying to her personal god.

"I've worked with her for years." I told the old groundskeeper.

"The Hitchins called her Rose, treating her as their own daughter." Gabriel seemed to be correcting me. "She escaped from Dellfriar once before."

"So did Clide Brown. He brought her back, they both came back." I finished the story.

"The beast is not as wild as our friend Clide wants us to believe." Gabriel mentioned. "Why does he insist he is so dangerous?"

"When I first met him, he had killed someone he dearly loved. It was an accident. He sees himself as a monster. He refuses to accept that he can control the beast."

"My Wolf is unlike the others. He is both a man and a monster, but not at the same time." Cory spoke up.

"It's true." We all heard his voice from the hallway. "I will not unleash such a thing. It was a singular moment, I had to protect her and then I had to bring her home."

"We have work to do." I interrupted our conversation. I should have let Clide Brown speak. If my wife were in the room, that morning, she would have insisted we let Clide speak. My leadership skills were not hers.

"My Lord means the hour when Faerie aligns best with ours is near." Cory sounded excited. My crow actually likes magic, while it makes me shudder in dread.

"We should try the apple tree. It has always made me feel something. I believe that it would be our best chance at opening a door." Gabriel surmised.

"A tree is a good place to start." Cory agreed. We all began gathering. The first rays of sunlight were starting to paint the sky in colors no artist would choose, for it would look ridiculously colorful.

"No world remains, but this one." Serene Sinclair told us as we walked past her.

We then met up with Dr. Leidenfrost, the girls and Silver Bell. They were all out in the gardens already.

"You have the key?" I looked at Penelope. She nodded and showed it.

"Dad, if fairies can't touch metal, why are their keys made of gold?" Penelope asked.

"I don't know." I said.

"It is because it is the only material that can conduct the magical forces that part the veils between worlds, ours and theirs. Every world is surrounded by different forces. There are many examples of other worlds and how they are entered. Dream must be descended into, counting down. Dawn can only be remembered by those who feel the ache of desire in their hearts. The world of the Fen And The Fell can only be transcended by gateways that are passing through shadows. It is the removal of light that parts that veil." Cory spoke, imitating Dini Ghanat's accent and pedantic tone-of-voice. Then he made a noise that sounded like a coffee grinder full of marbles, his laughter that he made when he found himself to be very hilarious.

"We can touch our golden keys." Silver Bell told the girl. "They belong to us."

My daughter handed the key to the fairy. Despite the golden key outweighing the fairy and being larger than her, it fit neatly into her hand, distorted, as though the size and weight were an illusion. "See? I may hold my own key. It matters not that it was originally made of gold. It is now made of magic. Understand?"

My daughter's grin of delight said that she understood and loved it.

We all assembled a crude formation around the side of the apple tree that Silver Bell had chosen. She was hovering in the air, holding her key, and she said to Gabriel:

"You have chosen an ideal place for a door to Faerie. There is definitely magic in the roots of this old tree." And with those words she flew to the tree and inserted her key, as though a keyhole had always existed there. "I'm going home." Her tiny voice trembled.

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We watched as the morning light bathed the garden and the door to Faerie slowly opened. It was a magic portal in the shape of a rounded doorway, the door was of the bark of the tree and swung open without hinges.

Then the moment turned suddenly to horror.

We all gasped in terror at the sight of Faerie. It was not a beautiful glade, but a dead and cobwebbed forest. There were strange, bipedal creatures with the faces of spiders and limbs terminating in spinnerets, pinchers or hardened, scythe-like spider legs. The creatures occupied Faerie, standing and shuffling around both near and far from the door we had made. They all looked at us through the open door, flinching at the light with their mismatched sizes and numbers of eyes on their mutated faces. They had cocooned fairies and all the fay creatures in their webs. They had laid waste to the eternal realm of Faerie. The creatures began to shuffle towards us.

"Shut it." Silver Bell flew to hide in Dr. Leidenfrost's hair.

Gabriel and myself both moved at once to close the door. Something pushed it from the other side, trying to force its arthropods through the crack. I held the door, feeling the strength of Clide Brown as he slammed his weight into it alongside me. The creature shrieked as its limbs were pinched, but it didn't stop, instead it got help too. More of the creatures were pushing. We started to grunt and sweat as we pushed on the roots of the tree for support, feeling our strength being challenged by the monsters and losing.

"The key! Gabriel, the key!" Dr. Leidenfrost ordered. Gabriel's strength had faded quickly and he took the key out instead. As he held it, gold dust trickled from between his clutching fingers. The key was ruined.

When the door was gone and we were safe from the monsters in Faerie, everyone stood reacting. The girls were crying and hugging their moms. Clide and I were panting for breath. Cory was flapping around and cursing the creatures, calling them "Bastard sons of Arakna!"

"I'm so sorry." Gabriel looked defeated. I was ashamed to see him break, but there was nothing I could do. He had finally gotten to see fairies and magic and only in time to see it all destroyed.

"I'm sorry too. I should have known better." I apologized, barely having caught my breath.

"What were those things?" Clide Brown asked.

"They were all extinct. They were a legend, I wasn't even sure I believed in them." Silver Bell sounded shocked. She was hiding in Dr. Leidenfrost's hair, parting it to peek out.

We left the garden and went back inside. There we sat in a quiet and contemplative moment in the grand dining hall.

When a fairy cries, it sounds like glass breaking, as an echo, from a distance, with a musical quality to it. It is truly a heartbreaking sound. We all apologized to her, forgetting that our own world was the next and the last to be destroyed.

She stopped crying and said: "Please stop apologizing. I don't like it, it doesn't make me feel better. You all will know soon enough what it means to look upon your home in ruins. You will know soon enough what it feels like to know that all of your people are dead." Silver Bell told us in her tiny voice.

There was a silence then. Until Serene Sinclair found us all sitting there.

"Those who seek it, find it." She said cryptically. "Yet it eludes those who look upon it every day."

We all looked at her. Something about her strange words made sense, in that moment. I should have asked her to explain. I should have tried harder to understand.

Instead I did nothing. I wasn't sure who she was, anymore. She had changed since our escape. Instead of her normal insightfulness and creepiness, she had become elusive and nuanced. She was referring to her "Great Symbol." her personal deity. I had thought she had forgotten it, left it behind at Dellfriar. I had misunderstood. She wanted to go and find it. Her quest had resumed.

That night I heard a scream of terror from downstairs. I rushed to the front door of the manor and found it wide open to the night. Serene Sinclair was out there, under the full moon's light. A distant howl corresponded from the beast that had once protected her and retrieved her. Serene Sinclair saw herself as our prisoner, still.

She was making her final escape.

Samual Monica and Gabriel were both gone, with Clide Brown. It was up to the rest of us to bear witness to her transformation.

"I am free, and I find the Great Symbol!" Serene Sinclair cried out.

The buzzing noise of millions of hyper insects, responding to her abilities came from every direction and began to swirl around her in a vast cloudy swarm.

"Stay back!" I told everyone.

"She is the Great Symbol. That's it, it's a cloud of bugs under her control! How cool is that?" Cory observed. I stared and saw he was right. The insects formed a pattern, a nine-pointed star with her at the center, lifted into the air by the force of millions of insect wings.

"Holy God!" Father Dublin had to shout as the buzzing intensified to a loud noise.

"I am God!" Serene Sinclair looked at him. For a moment I feared she would turn the swarm on us and we would all be killed. It was all my fault; I had underestimated how dangerous she was.

"Forgive us!" I called to her. She stared at me for a few seconds and it felt like a very long time. Then she smiled weirdly and vanished into the swarm. The whole thing began to slowly travel away from us, heading to some unknown promised land.

When we could no longer see or hear them, I collapsed, having stared into the eyes of destruction and looked upon by its forces. My family was with me, everyone I took responsibility for was there. We all could have died horribly, had she felt compelled to kill us all.

I began to tremble and cry, realizing how close we had come to becoming victims of the Great Symbol. Dr. Leidenfrost sent everyone back in and put her hands on my back.

"Don't blame yourself. She caused no harm to us."

I realized my wife was right. There was still one more thing. Cory was still there and mentioned what it would mean to anyone who met her in the world of tomorrow:

"Death is unleashed."