After a healing, safe year at Caer Dallben, a new adventure presents a chance to forge her identity in a wider world. She's not always ready for it. But neither is it, for her. /Chronicles of Prydain: The Black Cauldron, retold from Eilonwy's perspective. Sequel to my fic, Sunrise.

"Taran's heart was suddenly and strangely heavy." As usual, I take understatement and run with it into the edges of the galaxy. A literary adaptation of my comic Spring, Fallen, which details the Apple Tree Incident we get to hear about only peripherally. Because there just cannot be too many versions of this scene. :P

A chance meeting, a twist of fate, a golden thread added to the loom...and the first rays of daylight fall on one who has lived in darkness. Eilonwy's own story, during the events of The Book of Three.

They are bound for the Summer Country on the morrow. How does one spend one's last hours in Prydain? Multiple character POV. Bittersweetness, joy, humor, and melancholy. Dedicated to my friends at the Bards of Prydain Forum and to Lloyd Alexander, whose own voyage Westward happened in its own time and yet, all too soon.