A young boy around the age seven went to the beach with his mother and father.

Jasper was his name he looked like he would have been found in a family of hobos.

And a young girl who found herself playing with Jasper, Katie was her name.

Katie was five going on six.

She went to kindergarten and Jaspar was just a year ahead of her.

She loved playing with him, in fact the two of them played at the beach every day.

But one day Jaspar didn't show up.

Amelie’s first instinct was to call the police. She had always wanted to raise the alarm, that boy never had looked well cared for, with his matt of dark brown hair and dirtied clothes. But, on this occasion, her daughter seemed to have more sense than her.

”Maybe he’s gone home,” Katie had said sadly, small hands wrapped tightly around a stuffed bear.

Amelie had stilled then. Home. Yes, that made sense. Living in Cornwall, she was sure Katie had made many a friend over the summer, a child on the beach making sandcastles, a holidaying family that left as fast as they came. Of course Jasper was on holiday, gone home to start school in summer.

So why did this feel different?

The beach was almost empty now, the tide dragging long fingers of foam across the sand. The sky had bruised into twilight, that strange hour where the world felt thinner, as though something else pressed close on the other side.

She walked toward the rocks at the far end of the cove, the place Jasper always seemed to drift toward when he wasn’t building sandcastles with Katie. She’d never thought much of it before. Children liked hiding places. Children liked secrets.

But tonight, the air felt wrong.

A low mist curled around the rocks, clinging to her ankles like pollen. Amelie hesitated, then stepped forward.

A child’s laugh rang out across the coastline.

“Jasper?” she whispered, though she didn’t know why. She had never heard him laugh like that.

The mist parted.

It shouldn’t have been there.

She’d lived here for years. Yet now, a narrow opening yawned between the stones, breathing out cold air that smelled of salt and something metallic, like rusted chains.

But she stepped inside.

Amelia squeezed herself through the narrow passageway, the rocks pulling at her clothes and hair with stinging fingers that left marks along her limbs. She hoped her husband Evan had stayed back to watch over Katie, and thought of the strange child her daughter had spent many an evening tossing sand at and splashing around in the shallows with. The entrance to... wherever she was going, had become tighter, and she imagined the walls moving in closer to squish her into a messy painting of flesh and bones in one final embrace. Her breath came out in ragged pants as she tried to wiggle faster and it felt like she was stuck in place, though she couldn't possibly be, right? She mashed her eyes closed when she thought it was almost over for her...

And then she popped out of the passageway at last, tripping over her feet and falling face forward. Amelia opened her eyes, realising that the texture beneath her cheek was not sand, nor was it rock. It was grass. She pushed herself up by her arms, kneeling on the softest bed of greenery in what must've been all of Cornwall. Was she still even home? She turned, and in a panic noticed that the crack in the wall she entered from had disappeared. With a desperate cry, she flung herself at the rocky barrier, scrabbling for the slightest bit of a splinter that would signify there was a way out. Nothing.

Amelia sunk to the ground, fat drops of salty tears sliding over her cheeks and chin, making small splatters of circles on her denim shorts. Her knees had become dark with dirt from the grass. Where had that come from? She leaned her forehead against the jagged surface, the harsh spikes of rock likely cutting her skin. She couldn't find herself to care. Until she thought of her husband and her daughter. Her family. This was more about finding Jasper. It was now about finding a way home.

“OK,” Amelie told herself, “I definitely am not going home that way again.”

After wiping off her tears with her hand, she picked herself up and looked around.

She was here. She had just lost her only way home known to her. She shrugged in accepting the fact that the only way was forward.

But where or what is … Here …

After her, a mountainous rock-side rose. She wouldn’t be going in that direction any time soon. All she could see before her was grass. Or to be more precise, she stood on a hill overlooking a valley with rolling plains of grass.

On the far side of the plains, she noticed something that looked like structures, man-made structures. At least she assumed that that was what they were. Because that would mean people and maybe some answers. She could only hope and sighed, putting one foot before the other.

The walk across the valley took longer than Amelie expected. The grass soft, green, the colour of something that had never suffered a drought or a frost, and it seemed to grow taller the further she walked, rising past her knees until she was wading rather than walking.

The structures she had seen from the hillside resolved slowly, the way things do in dreams, each step revealing a little more and yet making the whole seem no clearer. Cottages, she eventually decided. Small ones. Impossibly small, in fact, as though someone had built a village to roughly two-thirds scale. The rooftops were thatched in something that was not quite straw, shot through with what looked like dried sea lavender and the silvery stems of glasswort, a salt-marsh plant she recognised from the Camel Estuary. The walls were built from dark local stone, but pressed into the mortar between each block were small things: shells, smooth sea-glass, the tiny bones of fish, old coins so worn their faces had gone entirely. Amelie stopped before the nearest cottage and looked more closely. A spiral had been carved above the lintel, three curving arms turning inward, and a bundle of dried furze was nailed beneath it, blackened as though it had been burned and then kept anyway, for reasons only the burner understood.

There were people here.

She realised this only gradually, the way you realise a painting is watching you. They were short and still, standing in doorways or at the edges of the lane. Their skin held a quality she could not immediately name: not dark, not pale, but weathered in all directions at once, like exposed cliff-face. Their eyes, when she caught one pair and then another, were the flat greyish-green of the sea before a gale.

“Jasper?” she called, voice trembling.

The laughter stopped.

A small figure stepped out from behind one of the huts, hair a wild tangle of dark curls. Clothes that looked like they’d been sewn from seaweed and scraps of sailcloth hung from his small frame. His eyes shimmered like wet slate, and his skin had a faint dusting of something like glittering sand, and when he moved, the air around him seemed to ripple.

“Amelie,” he said softly.

She took a step toward him. “Sweetheart, we’ve been looking for you. Katie’s been--”

“You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered.

A shadow passed behind him, small shapes peering from doorways, perched on rooftops, crouched in the grass. Dozens of them.

Amelie swallowed hard. “Jasper… what is this place?”

He hesitated, then lifted his chin with a strange, ancient pride. “This is home.”

“No,” she said gently. “Your home is in Cornwall. With your parents.”

Jasper sat cross-legged on the ground before her. It was such a childlike thing to do that it made her chest ache. "Pobel vean," he said, and then, when her face showed no recognition: "It means small folk. You call us piskies, mostly. Though some say pixie. We've been here longer than the name."

The word hit her like a stone.

Piskies. The mischievous spirits from the folk-stories of her childhood, lost children of the moors stolen by the fae, luring sailors astray.

She stared at him. “Jasper… you’re a child. A real child.”

“I was,” he said. “Once. Before they found me.”

He gestured to the others. They stepped closer, their movements too light, like birds hopping across branches.

“They took me in when I wandered too far. When no one came looking.”

Amelie’s stomach twisted. She remembered the boy on the beach: thin, neglected, always alone. A child who looked like he belonged to no one.

"We come out in summer," Jasper said. "We like to play where the children are. It's..." He paused, searching for the word. "It's good for us to be near children for a while. They haven't decided yet what's real."

“Jasper,” she whispered, “your parents--”

“They won’t miss me,” he said simply. The other piskie children murmured in agreement, their voices like wind through reeds.

Amelie reached out a trembling hand. “But Katie will.”

That stopped him. His strange, shimmering eyes softened. “Katie…”

“You played with her every day,” Amelie said. “She adores you. She cried when you didn’t come back.”

Jasper looked down at his bare feet. “I didn’t mean to leave her. But the path opened, and they called me home. Can I see her?” he asked.

Amelie’s breath caught. “Yes. Yes, of course. Come with me. We’ll go back together.”

The piskie children hissed softly, shrinking back. Jasper flinched as though struck. “I can’t,” he whispered. “Once you cross over, you don’t get to leave. Not unless…” He trailed off.

“Unless what?” Amelie pressed.

He didn't answer. He picked up a stone from the ground, a small, smooth piece of serpentinite, the same dark greenish rock she'd seen worked into the cottage walls, and held it out to her on his palm. "For finding me," he said. "And for coming through the door."

She took it and, as if on cue, a voice answered from behind her: a small man sat behind her on a rocking chair, sucking on a pipe that puffed out dark, choking smoke. “Jasper doesn't leave. Unless a mortal bargains for him.”

Amelie turned. Jasper stepped back toward the creature instinctively, like a child returning to a parent.

“What kind of bargain?” she asked.

The creature smiled. “Your way home,” it said, “for the boy.”