I’ve always known I could walk on water.
You must’ve tried it. Sat on the edge of a dock, jeans rolled up. Reached out and pressed your sole against the surface. Felt it push back.
Then a wave broke over your toes and you pretended you never really thought the water would hold you.
But secretly you wondered. Maybe this time, you’d stand up and walk along the hidden paths to one of those magical places over the rainbow or past the second star to the right or through the wardrobe.
And that’s another thing I’ve always been able to do: see the paths.
But over and over again they refused to carry me away. Then I got too old and stopped looking. Mostly.
Cornwall. Twenty years old and on the hunt for magic before the adult world finally claimed me, I made the trek out to Tintagel. The last bus had gone, but one straggler remained on that tumbledown kings’ seat on the edge of the world.
A path of golden light rippled across the waves, bright and dancing and utterly magnetic. The air tingled, the presence of the unseen, echoes of the unheard, touch of the intangible but a breath and one impossible step away.
Perched on the cliff’s edge, uncaring of ancient stones that might give way at any moment, I had only to reach for it. If I shifted forward the slightest bit—but, too cautious, too fearful, I lingered, praying for a sudden gust of wind to take the choice from me and sweep me onto the hidden way before it disappeared.
A guide called out, breaking the spell. Regret crashed down as I realized my mistake. But I would not surrender to the mundane world so easily.
Caernarvon, Wales. I hunted through narrow, dark castle passageways and paced the sunken remains of Roman forts, finding nothing in those crumbling works of human hands but broken glass and noisy tourists. Following an irrational compulsion to gaze across open water toward home, I set off down an unexpected seawall. An hour in, it veered deep inland around a shallow bay. Undeterred, I followed the irresistible summons right into the water.
Wet sand sucked at the soles of my boots. Waves lapped the laces, dribbled over the tongue, and had surged past my knees by the center of the bay. Neither as shallow as it looked, nor as quick to dart across as I’d imagined it—and the tide was coming in.
For all the fairy stories I’d read, I couldn’t have told you which creature was calling, nor resisted the urge to follow. But I knew enough to panic.
Weeds snagged my ankles. Sludge sucked harder at my heels. My breath grew ragged; my eyes burned with salt.
But buzzing swelled around me—aircraft, burning through the sky overhead. And, interrupted, the ocean’s grasp loosened.
Shaking, I squelched onto a private shore to find the distant point I’d been chasing an illusion all along.
Even after that fearful escape, I couldn’t give up. One final chance before adulthood closed over my head: Ireland—a tiny island off the west coast. The mountain seemed friendly, downy with low grasses and dotted with sheep. The summit was a gentle, boulder-dotted curve, and always within view.
But the sinister path beckoned, a winding clamber past still pools ringed by flowers and prickly bushes. It turned steeper and more treacherous. Pebbles slid underfoot, slick mud under a bright green covering threatening to send me onto the rocks, the soft-looking ridge now ringed by boulders on the approach.
There would be no going back. This was the known homeland of the faeries and I would—I must!—follow the path to its end.
I gained the mountaintop. And remained. Ten minutes. Twenty. An hour. Wandering its dips and ridges, I scrambled across boulders, hunted for rings of flowers, mushrooms, stones. Mystical pools. Anything.
I’d taken a wrong turn, somehow veered from the path, neglected a proper offering, or worn too much metal, or . . . did I have a sock turned inside out? Was it the distance from the water, in the end?
I’d started on a hidden path—I knew I had—but the world from the top of the mountain looked no different. No more special than the one I knew. When I finally descended, the old farmhouse turned hostel was familiar, the Guinness in the pub leaning against it just as bitter.
And so I returned home and surrendered to a future of cents-on-the-dollar raises and endless, mind-numbing overtime. And vacuuming. How can a tool that makes things vanish be so utterly unmagical?
But that’s not the end of the story.
Look back to the old tales of fairyland. Look back to legends of monsters and magic.
Our stories have changed, but the world behind the world never does. We tell tales about boy wizards and children stepping through cracks between the worlds, but in the old days it wasn’t just children who walked out of their lives and never returned.
It was a decade later, rebelling against a life not lived but endured, when that mundane world spat me out into the kind of freedom we all fear and crave.
And, once more, I looked out across the water. A small town on the edge of the Highlands. A stone-lined harbour: fishing trawlers, pleasure-craft, and island ferries. A tall seawall to turn back the storm-swell from a narrow highway. Gruelling long days turning over beds and scrubbing pots and clinging to existence at the edge of the adult world.
And hidden paths.
Some nights after the midges gave way to the stillness of full dark and the day-trippers had all returned home, I walked the seawall and sang to the waves and waited for the sea to sing back.
Other nights, I stood at the edge of the harbour and watched the pier’s lights streak its mirror-dark surface—and felt a hidden gaze in return.
How can I describe the delicious tension of that quiet bay? Streaks of azure, amber, and crimson painting the night. The liquid dark surrounding all that light, raising it aloft as a brilliant cloak to hide . . . something. Or someone.
For all was not quiet below the surface.
I could feel it—or them—there, waiting. Watching. Calling.
I returned over and over again, creeping through the shadows down from the manor-like hotel on the hill, skirting the clamour and unexplored danger of the fisherman’s tavern.
It was a hidden way, that much I knew. But did it lead to a place of beauty, like that golden bridge across the waters in Cornwall? Or a nightmare of choking murk, like that treacherous bay in Wales?
There are two types of stories about fairyland. There are the ones where the traveller returns, with fantastic—or terrible—tales of their sojourn. And there are the other kind. The ones where someone goes missing: an infant, a child, a drunk, a genius, a husband or a wife.
I was none of those. And of course there is a rule about stories: the storyteller must always survive, in order to tell their tale.
So you will want to stop here, where your world remains as it should be. Because this is the sort of story that cannot be told.
It was late in the season. The tourists had all gone, and even the second wave of summer labourers on their off-season holidays had slowed to a trickle. Too cold already at dusk for anyone to be out, yet a broken radiator drove me out from under a mound of blankets and spare clothes to seek other warmth—or at least a distraction from the ice creeping in the edges.
The lights in the harbour were all the more beautiful for their crystalline stillness. The water seemed heavy with frost. I left the harbour walk to descend the broad stone-paved steps to the water’s edge.
From below, the sea seemed vast, ink-dark, the light a gossamer sheen floating like a mist above it. Or an oil slick.
Musty damp exhaled from the shadows under the piers, a note of rotting fish-guts and decaying wood creeping into the sharper scent of the waves. Pebbles shifted underfoot, the slippery give of seaweed crisp with a rime of ice. The sea burned at my touch.
The beauty was indescribable.
Fascination warred with horror. I trembled as I put my foot out over the water. And shook all the harder as it met resistance.
You will say I did not tread the path to the Otherworld that night. That I could not have. That I must have turned back, in order to tell the tale.
To that I say, you do not understand the Folk if you think nothing is left behind when a traveller goes to them.
[This story is a reprint. About the author: K.A. Wiggins is a Canadian speculative fiction author whose work explores society, environmental crises, and identity through intricate, dreamlike tales. Known for ‘climate change + monsters’ YA dystopian dark fantasy series Threads of Dreams, her short fiction has also appeared in Enchanted Conversation Magazine and Fiction-Atlas Press anthology Unknown Worlds.]