The memory came unbidden, vivid and painful, summoned by the stranger's naive hope. It didn't arrive as a gentle recollection, but as a sudden, violent tide that pulled me under, drowning the present in the absolute, suffocating past. The smoky scent of the tavern, the stranger's crimson eyes, the weight of the glass in my hand—it all dissolved, replaced by the ghost of a life I once knew.
Seventeen years ago, the Ashen Tavern wasn't just a refuge for the lost; it was a home. It hummed with a different energy. The fire in the hearth wasn't just for warmth against the creeping chill of Lostgrove; it was for baking bread, for telling stories, for casting dancing shadows on the walls as Leonard played his worn-out fiddle. Leonard, my husband. The memory of him was so sharp it was a physical ache. He had big, calloused hands, strong from a lifetime of carpentry and hauling kegs, yet they were impossibly gentle when they held mine. And his laugh Gods, his laugh a rich, booming sound that could shake the rafters and seemed to push back the perpetual twilight for a few precious seconds. He had built this place, log by log, dreaming of a makeshift home. Instead, it became a cage, but for a while, we made it our nest.
Our son, Ethan, was eight then. A boy with a thatch of my dark, unruly hair and his father's boundless, bright curiosity. He saw the weirdness of Lostgrove not just with fear, but with a scholar's interest. He'd collect strangely shaped stones and bits of petrified wood, asking endless questions about the Estuary Eye that I could never answer. "Does it blink, Mama? What does it see?"
We had been in Lostgrove for three years by then. The initial, screaming terror of our arrival had subsided, worn down into a low-grade, constant dread, a hum in the background of every thought. It was the silence of the Greyones, the wrongness of the sky, the sheer impossibility of it all. But Leonard never accepted it. Where others learned to bend, he remained an unyielding oak.
"This is not a life, Rachel," he'd say, his broad shoulders framed by the grimy window, his gaze fixed on the oppressive horizon. "This is waiting to die. We have to get Ethan out. He deserves to see a real sun, to feel a warm rain."
He had a theory, born from long nights staring at charts that were now useless and longer days observing the unnatural rhythms of this place. The Estuary Eye, that monstrous, weeping scar in the sky, was a breach, he reasoned. A door. But it was a door that only opened one way in. His idea was not the suicidal folly of trying to go back through the Eye, but to go around it. He'd spent months on the cliffs, risking the attention of sky-beasts, studying the violent, chaotic currents of the Blood Sea. He became convinced of a pattern, a single, cyclical flow a tide of escape that occurred only once every few years. He believed a small, fast, lightweight boat, built for speed over comfort, could catch that current and be carried away from the shore, past the reach of the Eye, perhaps to another landmass, another reality entirely. It was a madman's plan, a fantasy spun from desperation. But it was a plan. It was a thread of hope, and we clung to it because it was all we had.
In a hidden cove, a fissure in the black cliffs reachable only by a treacherous path known to us alone, he began building his boat. This was our secret rebellion. After the last drunkard was thrown out and the tavern was closed, he'd kiss my cheek, a spark of the old fire in his eyes, and whisper, "For Ethan." Then he and our son would disappear into the night. I can still see them, their faces lit by the soft, golden glow of a single lantern, their breaths pluming in the cold air. Ethan, so small and serious, would be his father's shadow, handing him tools with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics. "We're going to see real stars, Mama," he'd whisper to me later, curled up in his cot, his voice thick with sleep and wonder. "Papa says the ones here are fake. He says the real ones sing."
I was terrified. A constant, gnawing fear lived in my gut during those months. Every splinter of driftwood Leonard dragged to the cove, every nail he quietly pilfered from the town's decaying ruins, every soft thump of his mallet echoing up from the shore felt like a blasphemy, a direct challenge to the silent, grey gods of this place. The Greyones were always watching. We didn't know what they were tall, shifting shapes of smoke and ash, their forms never quite solid, drifting through the town like tides of sentient fog. They had no discernible faces, just a faint, pulsing, sickly green light where a heart might be. They never spoke. They never interacted. They just... observed. A silent, patient jury. And sometimes, without warning or reason, they took. A person, an animal, sometimes just an object. Their motives were as inscrutable as their nature.
The night they found the boat was the night the hope died. Leonard and Ethan were late returning. A storm had been brewing for days, a different kind of storm, one that felt personal, angry. When it finally broke, it was a furious, shrieking gale worse than any I'd seen, the wind howling with a voice that sounded almost human. The dread that had been my constant companion solidified into pure ice in my veins. I left Nada, then just a quiet, wide-eyed girl I'd taken in, to mind the empty tavern. "Bar the door after me," I told her, and I ran.
I ran towards the cove, my cloak whipping around me, the rain lashing my face like needles. My heart wasn't just hammering against my ribs; it felt like a wild bird trying to escape a cage. The path was slick and dark, but fear lit my way.
I heard it before I saw it. Not a scream I would have almost preferred a scream. It was a sound like the air itself being torn, a low, resonant thrum that vibrated in my teeth and bones. And with it came a light, a cold, grey light that spilled over the ridge. It didn't illuminate; it bleached. It sucked the colour and the warmth from the world, turning everything into a monochrome nightmare.
I crested the rise, my lungs burning, and froze. The scene below is etched into me, a permanent scar on my soul. The boat, Leonard's beautiful, desperate creation—the product of so much hope and stolen time wasn't just broken. It was obliterated. Shattered into a thousand white splinters, scattered across the cove like broken bones.
And in the centre of the wreckage stood three Greyones.
They were more solid than I had ever seen them. They shimmered with a malevolent energy, and their long, thin limbs you couldn't call them arms seemed to phase in and out of existence, trailing tendrils of mist. One of them had a limb extended towards Leonard, who was standing protectively in front of Ethan, his arms spread wide as if he could shield our son from the impossible.
There was no fight. There was no struggle. How do you fight a mist? How do you reason with a silence? The Greyone's limb simply passed through Leonard's chest. There was no blood. No wound. His body didn't fall. It... crumbled. The colour drained from him in an instant, turning his skin grey, then a blinding, porcelain white. Then, like a statue of salt, he collapsed in on himself, collapsing into a neat pile of fine, white ash. The wind and rain immediately caught the powder, scattering my husband, the love of my life, across the stones and into the churning Blood Sea.
Ethan screamed. It was a small, choked sound, a mouse squeak in the face of an avalanche. The Greyone turned its featureless head, that pulsing green light fixating on my boy. I tried to run. I tried to scream. I tried to throw myself down the slope, but my feet were rooted to the ground, held fast by a terror so absolute it was paralyzing. I was a silent, horrified spectator to the end of my world.
The same silent, efficient fate befell my boy. One moment he was there, my beautiful, curious son, his small body rigid with fear. The next, the Greyone's limb touched him, and he too turned to grey, to white, to dust. A smaller mound, right beside the place where his father had stood.
The Greyones didn't look at me. They didn't acknowledge my presence in any way. They simply turned, their forms already beginning to dissipate, and drifted away, merging back into the storm and the shadows from which they came, their work complete.
I was left alone on the cliff. The storm raged on, indifferent. The rain washed what little remained of my husband and son two faint, grey smears on the wet rock into the sea. I had not even ashes to bury. I had nothing but the memory of their dissolution, and the crushing, absolute knowledge that in Lostgrove, hope was not just futile; it was a death sentence.