Chapter 1: Prologue
The rain in Sussex did not fall; it threw itself against the canvas awnings like handfuls of wet gravel.
Sonia MacFarlane stood behind the perimeter rope of the dance pavilion, her breath misting white in the unnatural, mid-July gloom. She rotated her right ankle in a slow, precise circle, feeling the satisfying pop of the joint beneath her leggings. It was an old reflex—a dancer’s nervous tic beaten into her by twelve years of Russian ballet mistresses, three bruised metatarsals, and a lifetime of being told she was too tall, too dark, or too sharp for the classical corps.
“Oi! MacFarlane!”
Nigel, the festival coordinator—a man whose natural habitat was a clip-board and a fluorescent high-vis vest two sizes too small—poked his head around the dripping tent flap. His hair was plastered to his forehead like oily seaweed.
“The afternoon contemporary showcase is washed out. South lawn is an absolute paddling pool. Take your break now, but don’t wander off. If the squall clears by five, we’re shoving the Scottish ceilidh demonstration onto the dry boards.”
“Understood,” Sonia said. Her voice was quiet, even, and wrapped in the soft, low cadence of the West of Scotland—a flat, unhurried contrast to Nigel’s manic Sussex squawk.
“And put a mac on!” Nigel barked over his shoulder as he splashed toward the burger vans. “You look like you’re about to catch pneumonia, girl!”
Sonia didn’t reach for a plastic poncho. She zipped her black fleece jacket up to her chin, shoved her long hands into her pockets, and looked up at the sky.
It was foul. An ugly, bruised shade of aubergine, hanging so low over the ancient oaks that the canopy seemed to scrape against the cloud belly.
Cold. She had always hated the cold.
It dragged up memories she kept locked behind a dancer’s rigid posture: the grey, pebble-dashed council block in Maryhill; the perpetual damp that smelled of boiled potatoes and stale roll-ups in the stairwell; the sound of her father’s heavy work boots dragging across linoleum after closing time at the pub.
And her mother.
God, her mother.
Sonia could still see her—a woman of delicate bones, fierce pride, and bitter, poisonous sorrow. She remembered standing on freezing suburban doorsteps in Newton Mearns when she was barely seven years old, dressed in a stiff velvet frock that scratched her neck, holding her mother’s trembling, ice-cold hand. She remembered the sound of her mother’s knuckles hammering against the frosted glass of her grandparents’ front door—weeping, pleading, speaking in a frantic flood of Punjabi that Sonia could only half-understand, begging her own parents to open the latch. Begging them to look at their grandchild. Begging for forgiveness for marrying a white shipyard worker from Govan.
The door had never opened.
Only the twitch of a lace curtain. The silent, suffocating judgement of a diaspora that had excised her mother like a gangrenous limb.
In the end, that bitterness had turned inward, rotting the air inside their flat until it curdled into a cold, unbroken silence. Her mother had died slowly and cruelly of breast cancer when Sonia was fourteen, her final words—dosed to the eyeballs on hospital morphine—lashing out at her daughter’s Scottish features, cursing the very blue in her eyes. After that, her father had retreated entirely into the bottom of a bottle of grouse, becoming a ghost who paid the electricity bill but never met her gaze.
Sonia had left at sixteen.
No tears. No grand dramatic scenes. Just a duffel bag, a pair of worn split-sole slippers, and a scholarship to the modern dance academy. Movement had been the only thing that kept her sane. On the floor, she wasn’t an outcast; she wasn’t a half white girl with too much pride and no family. She was kinetic energy. She was balance, line, and iron will.
A crack of thunder detonated directly overhead, rattling the marrow in her shins.
The heavens simply gave way. The rain turned from a steady downpour into a roaring, blinding waterfall that flattened the festival bunting in seconds. Down on the tournament field, day-trippers shrieked, skidding through wood-chip soup toward the beer marquees.
“Bloody marvellous,” Sonia muttered under her breath, turning her collar up against the deluge.
The main pavilion was already a churning mass of sodden anoraks and dripping umbrellas. She had no interest in being trapped in a hot, wet crush of bodies. Her sharp blue eyes scanned the tree line, catching the dark, crooked silhouette of a timber wagon tucked deep beneath the sprawling, black-needled canopy of an ancient yew tree.
It was built of heavy, weather-beaten timber, painted with peeling gilt scroll work and faded vermilion that looked decades older than the mock-Tudor festival stalls. An iron lantern hung beneath the eaves, glowing with a steady, amber clarity that seemed entirely unaffected by the horizontal squall.
Sonia sprinted across the mud, her trainers barely making a sound as she took the wooden steps two at a time, ducking beneath the heavy velvet drop-cloth at the door.
The roar of the storm vanished instantly.
The silence inside was unnerving. The air was dry, dense, and smelled rich with dried lavender, melted beeswax, bitter wormwood, and an odd, ozone tang that prickled the fine hairs on her arms—like the static charge before an electrical blackout.
Another girl was already inside.
She wore cargo trousers and thick, black-rimmed glasses, clutching a waterproof tablet sleeve against her chest as if it contained nuclear launch codes. Before either could say anything, in walked a third.
This one was younger and looked like she had been dragged through a duck pond, wearing a waterlogged, absurdly elaborate French Renaissance court gown of silver damask and soaking lace.
“Crowded out there,” Sonia said softly, shaking the rain from her dark, long raven hair and offering a faint, sympathetic smile.
“Understatement of the century,” the girl with the glasses pushed her frames up her nose. “The drainage system on the south lawn just completely failed. The whole tournament ring is currently an open estuary.”
“I think I saw an inflatable bouncy castle take flight near the car park,” the girl in the court gown offered, shuddering as an icy drop trickled down her neck. “I’m Selena, by the way.”
The girl with the tablet introduced herself as Chloe.
“Sonia,” she replied, keeping her voice level, her dancer’s instincts already assessing the perimeter of the cramped wagon.
“Fools rush in.”
The low, dry rasp came from behind the low counter at the back of the wagon.
Sonia didn’t jump—her reflexes were too disciplined for that—but her chin lifted, her gaze locking onto the figure seated on a high, velvet-cushioned stool.
She was the oldest woman Sonia had ever seen. Her face was a topographical map of deep, parchment creases, her hair a wild, silver briar, and her eyes—pale, milky, and frighteningly clear—pinned the three of them like specimens on a board. She wore a faded green wool shawl pinned at the shoulder by a serpent brooch.
On the dark mahogany table before her sat an object that completely defied the tacky, commercial spirit of the festival.
It was an astronomical mechanism of breathtaking complexity—an astrolabe of interlocking, nested rings of tarnished bronze, black iron, and bright silver, etched with Latin celestial maps and angular runes. Three large, uncut gemstones were set into the outer tracks: a velvety sapphire, an ice-pale aquamarine, and a smouldering, fiery crimson carnelian.
It was ticking.
Not like a clock, but with an irregular, syncopated rhythm—thump-thump... thump—that Sonia felt vibrating through the soles of her trainers. It felt like a heartbeat.
“Incredible,” Chloe murmured, leaning forward with clinical fascination. “The differential gearing on that... is that an Antikythera reproduction? The ratios look entirely non-standard.”
“Do not touch,” the old woman said. The words fell like lead weights into cold water. Her ink-stained hands rested flat on the cloth. “It is not an amusement. It is not for the eyes of sheep. And it is most certainly not for hire or sale.”
“Right,” Selena said quickly, her face turning pink as she took an awkward, apologetic step backward. “Understood. Absolutely. Looking with our eyes, not with our hands. Very museum-appropriate.”
Sonia saw the disaster before it happened.
Her trained eye, used to calculating spatial clearances and stage lines, caught the trailing hem of Selena’s heavy damask gown snagging on the hemp loop of an iron deck-ring bolted to the floorboards.
“Selena—wait—” Sonia reached out, her fingers lunging to catch the girl’s shoulder.
It was too late.
Selena’s oversized leather heel caught the loop. Her balance broke completely. Arms windmilling frantically in a flurry of wet lace, the blonde girl pitched sideways, slamming hard into the corner of the low mahogany table.
The heavy astrolabe slid.
The old woman’s head snapped up, her pale eyes blazing with absolute fury. “You blundering little—”
The mechanism struck the heavy, charcoal-filled iron brazier in the centre of the floorboards.
The sound wasn’t the clatter of metal. It was a deafening, concussive CRACK that sounded like the keel of a wooden frigate snapping in two upon a reef.
The air tore open.
Blinding, violent rings of light—deep sapphire, pale aquamarine, and blistering, blood-red crimson—detonated outward in an expanding sphere. The timber walls of the wagon didn’t splinter; they simply dissolved into a rushing, black abyss of howling, negative space. The floor dropped out beneath their feet.
Falling backward through an icy void that smelled of sulphur, old stars, and frozen mud, Sonia saw the astronomical rings tearing apart into three blazing arcs.
Instinct took over. A dancer lives by reflex, by the instantaneous calculation of mass, trajectory, and momentum.
As she plummeted into the roaring dark, Sonia twisted her body mid-air, her arm extending in a sharp, flawless line. Her fingers closed with fierce, unyielding grip around a heavy crescent of jagged, cold bronze, the smouldering crimson carnelian biting sharp and hot into the meat of her palm.
Across the screaming light, she saw Selena clutching the blue sapphire ring to her chest, while Chloe vanished into a pale teal glare.
And rising above the roar of tearing centuries, falling backward through the freezing vortex, the very last thing Sonia heard was the old crone’s voice, echoing with magnificent, tea-ruined disgust:
“Oh, bloody hell. Not again!”
Welcome to Sonia's story, this one is special to me. The heroine is different from others I have written about in her own unique way. I worked hard on the backstory in this one and it tackles some heavy topics like alienation, loneliness and Racism. but in the end Sonia is a character steeped in resilience and gentle strength. she teaches us to not let bad experiences ingrain bitterness in our souls. True strength is to not only learn from one's experiences but to let them make you better and stronger, true grit is to always remain kind and hopeful in the face of insurmountable odds. Sonia was such a character to me, and it was a pleasure writing her romance. the hero is also fun btw, spoiled brat energy, brash and uncontrollable haha. I truly hope people can read this story and judge it by the intention it was written with, please vote, like and give me as much feedback as you can on all my stories including this one. Happy reading!!
