McGuire, Seanan - Where the Drowned Girls Go / Макгвайр, Шеннон - Куда попадают утопленницы [2022, EPUB, ENG]

CHILDREN HAVE ALWAYS BEEN drawn to the doors. Scholars have recorded the adventures of the travelers, those whose lost and lonely yearnings were strong enough to attract the attention of something greater than themselves, for centuries. Those stories can be seen in myth and legend, in fairy tale and folk song, from across the world. The boy who spent a night in a mushroom ring and woke to find his baby sister’s grandchildren occupying the family farm; the girl who tumbled down a well and lived for a century in the halls of a Dragon King before touching the wrong trinket and finding herself cast back into the mud, rendered an exile in her own homeland. It can be difficult to find the places where fiction ends and fact begins, but perhaps that’s simply a part of the process of traveling, of visiting places where the customs and cultures and laws of physical reality are different than they are here. Not all children who find their door come back. Some are so sure of the rightness of their journeys, are so bone-deep and unshakable in their convictions, that they never go through the trials of being forced to choose where they’ll grow up. Others fall prey to the myriad dangers that lurk in worlds built on foundations of stone and story. Their graves are forgotten, or tended with the reverence afforded to heroes, or shunned with the fear and suspicion afforded to monsters, but they all have one thing in common: they’re graves. The bodies they conceal have found their endings. Their stories are over....