The Real World

The night Cherry L/N finally runs, the sky betrays her.

Twenty years old, backpack on one shoulder and everything she owns in the other, she slips out the front door, away from the man who decided where she could go and what she could wear, and she laughs until she has to lean on a mailbox. Then she looks up. The stars are washing out like ink in water. The moon turns a deep, bruised violet, the horizon pulls away, and the street tilts out from under her feet.

She wakes in grass soft as carpet, under trees wide as houses, in a world that is gorgeous and carnivorous. Elves with knife-point ears. Faeries with empty eyes. Dragons, merfolk, a talking rose who claims to be a thousand years old. And rules that run backwards from everything she knows: here the females are the apex predators, the males are scattered outcasts who flinch at raised voices, and no one has ever met a human woman who could bear children. Until Cherry. To half this world she is a miracle. To the other half she is a prize, a weapon, or a meal.

Within days she has a cottage full of males who would kill for her and die for her and cannot decide which comes first: a gentle elf whose enchanted pendant turns his language into hers, and who is keeping one secret back; a silver-haired, horned giant who cooks for her and worries himself grey; a bored faerie who swears he is not interested; twin brothers who have never wanted anything the way they want her; a merman who follows her out of the sea on brand-new legs; and a fox-eared boy more frightened of the world than it is of him.

Because Cherry did not fall through by accident. Something old lives under this forest, a darkness that does not hunt with teeth. It hunts with wanting. It finds the hungriest soul in reach and makes a home inside it, and it has been starving for a thousand years, ever since it swallowed a man from her world and kept his name. It brought her here on purpose. Every bond she gathers, it counts. Every heart that turns toward her, it weighs. It means to hollow her out and walk through her as a door.

There is one road home: a dragon old enough to cross between worlds, hidden where no one has ever found him. To reach him, Cherry must climb a mountain that kills everything that tries, beside males the world has never allowed to matter, while the red-haired woman in the woods watches from the open sky and collects her future, one love at a time.

But the door only closes from the inside. When Cherry finally stands in the clearing where she first fell, holding the name the darkness stole, she will have to decide what home means: the world that taught her to be afraid, or this one, where everyone wants to own her, and the ones who love her are learning to let her walk on her own two feet.