//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: Detective Rarity: Coyote's Ridge 
// by MaxKodan 
//------------------------------//

Paella crested the dust-worn hill and shielded her face from a gust of wind. When she lowered her arms, she could just make out the old well — a shadow against the rusty sunrise. She followed the tamped suggestion of a path, traced by a century of footprints. When she thought to look, she could swear she could make out individual strides. But no, she thought, that was all in her head.

Everything was in her head.

No one really knew how long the well had been there. Forever, it seemed. Certainly a hundred years. Probably longer. Some stories said it had been demolished and rebuilt a hundred and fifty years ago. Children believed their grandparents’ tales of the time before time, when the well was dug from the bottom up by some mythological creature or another: A dragon, an eldritch worm, a magical unicorn...it changed by the storyteller.

Paella mostly didn’t believe the bedtime stories. She had never shared the wonder of her classmates and cousins at the old pile of rocks. She had never tossed a coin in. Fairy stories and garbage, she’d said. But she’d never tossed a coin in.

She stood in front of it now, and reached a hand out to touch the too-cool stone. An altar to childhood wonder and gullibility. She looked over her shoulder, towards her small, small town. Her home was back there. And her old school, and the drug store on the corner. The two gas stations and the library built into someone’s house. The public gym, kept clean by meticulous janitors and sparse usage.

The diner.

She looked back at the well and pulled out a quarter. It was time to test her own mettle. She flipped the coin and watched it drop into the shadow below. She waited for it to hit the water with a resonant plop.

“I wish…”

A pang in her heart gave her pause, and she raised her hand to her chest.

“I wish I were…”

She’d said it a thousand times before. She’d muttered it beneath her breath throughout every day in the kitchens. She’d spoken it, muffled, into her pillow nearly every night. She’d thought it countless times over the last five years, since her place had become clear. Since her future had been handed to her. She stared at the well—an old, mossy pile of rocks and poorly painted wood—and for once, she hesitated.

Was that her answer? The idea that there was something, improbable as it was, that could fulfill her desire right then, right there with no questions asked...She’d thought if she could wish it here, she’d know how true her convictions were. And she couldn’t.

In a way, she felt lighter. Relieved, in fact, that she didn’t really feel that way. She opened her mouth to let half a decade of stress out in one long sigh. Tears wiped some of the dust from her cheeks.

She laughed at herself, just a little. She was standing at a wishing well, for crying out loud. Fairy stories and garbage. One last time, then. For old time’s sake. One last time before she accepted her life.

“I wish I were dead.”