The Mother's Grief
The knights took Liora on a night when the wind howled through the pines of Frosthold like a mourning beast, a sound that would forever be the soundtrack of Elaine's ruin. As the last glint of silver armor vanished into the tree line, the fight that had animated her the screaming, the clawing, the desperate, animalistic struggle evaporated. She did not curse their retreating backs. She did not collapse in a dramatic swoon. She simply folded in on herself, right there on the muddy threshold, as if her soul had been cleanly carved out with a dull knife, leaving only a hollow, aching shell.
Her husband, Sir Aldric, was gone, vanished into the night or into death the result was the same. Now, the house was a tomb of silenced laughter and murdered futures. For days, she sat on the floor beside the empty cradle in the master bedroom, a sentinel to a stolen life. She clutched the tiny, soft blue blanket Liora had been swaddled in, bringing it to her face, searching for a fading scent of milk and newborn skin beneath the overwhelming stench of her own tears. The room still smelled of lavender and fresh-cut pine from the preparations for the baby's arrival. The carved oak cradle stood empty, it's rocking motion stilled forever.
The village healer, a woman named Morwen, came with draughts of dreamless sleep in clay vials, her own face heavy with a shared, unspoken shame. "It will numb the pain, Elaine," she urged softly, pressing a clay vial into her cold, unresponsive hand. "Just for a little while. You need to rest."
Elaine's head, which had been bowed, slowly lifted. Her eyes, red-raw and impossibly ancient, met Morwen's. There was no hysteria in them, only a terrifying, absolute clarity.
"I will not forget her," she whispered, her voice raspy from disuse but firm as iron. She let the vial drop to the floor, where it rolled away, unheeded, into a shadowed corner.
On the fourth morning, when winter's first true frost painted the world in crystalline white like a shroud, she was gone. The door swung open on its hinges, letting in the cold. They found her trail easily enough, leading away from Blackvale toward the brooding line of the Blackened Woods. At the forest's edge, where the shadows deepened and the air grew still, they found her.
Elaine's bare feet were shredded and caked with frozen blood. Her fine woolen dress, once envy of every merchant's wife in Frosthold was torn, hung in tatters about her thin frame, and her hands were a raw, bloody ruin, caked with dark soil and torn fingernails. Before her, in the hard, unforgiving earth, she had dug a shallow, pathetic grave. It was a heartbreaking testament to sheer, maddened will. But there was no tiny body nestled within its confines. The grave was empty.
Instead, a single word had been carved into the dirt at the head of the barren pit, the letters jagged and deep, etched with her very fingernails
"WAITING."
She offered no explanation, her gaze fixed on the distant, brooding silhouette of the Order's fortress, a stark peak against the grey sky. They tried to lead her back, to coax her with promises of warmth and food, but she was immovable, a statue of grief planted at the edge of oblivion. She had dug her vigil, and there she would keep it.
The Village's Guilt
In Blackvale, a silence thicker than winter snow fell over the village. The settlement nestled in the valley had always been a place of hardy loggers and stoic farmers, their wooden houses with steeply pitched roofs clustering along the single muddy street that ran from the river to the woods. Now, the merchant's abandoned two-story house with its carved eaves and glass windows stood as a cursed monument at the village's heart. Villagers crossed the street to avoid walking past it, and children dared each other to touch its gate before running away in terrified glee.
The guilt began to poison everything. Old Man Hemlock, who ran the mill, found his waterwheel frozen solid despite the river's steady flow. The catch at the weir dwindled to nothing, and strange whispers seemed to rise from the water after dark.
The midwife Eliara, who had first screamed at the sight of Liora's violet eyes, drowned herself in the River Sorrow three days after the taking. They found her body caught in the reeds, her grey hair floating around her face like a silver halo. She left no note, but the empty vial of poppy tears clutched in her hand spoke volumes.
Then came the phantoms. The baker's son, a sturdy boy of twelve with flour always dusting his trousers, swore he heard a child's laughter echoing across the frost-laden fields at twilight. When he investigated, he found nothing but a perfect set of tiny, bare footprints pressed into the hoarfrost - leading toward the woods before vanishing inexplicably.
The dreams began soon after - a shared affliction haunting every soul who had stood in silent complicity. Each night, they would close their eyes and find themselves in familiar darkness, only to feel a presence. They would turn, and there they would be: luminous violet eyes, swirling like captured storm clouds, watching from the shadows. The blacksmith dreamed of the eyes glowing in his forge's embers. The weaver saw them in her loom's patterns. The farmer found them staring from his rain barrel.
Some woke with pillows soaked in tears they didn't remember shedding. Others rose to find their household mirrors mysteriously cracked, fractures radiating from the center as if struck by an unseen force.
Father Aldous, the village priest with his stooped shoulders and kind eyes, tried to stem the tide of fear. He went from house to house, his hands trembling as he anointed thresholds with holy water from the sacred spring. But at every door, the same blasphemy occurred. The moment the blessed water touched the wood or stone, it would sizzle and turn black, dripping down like oily, unholy tears.
The tension finally broke in the blacksmith's home - a sturdy stone building that always smelled of coal and hot metal. The blacksmith's daughter, a girl of sixteen with her father's strong features but her mother's gentle heart, looked across the supper table and gave voice to the thought festering in every heart. "They should have fought," she whispered, her voice small but clear in the firelit room. "They should have all fought for her."
The blacksmith, a bear of a man named Gregor whose massive arms were tattooed with protective runes, reacted with shameful rage. His calloused hand lashed out and backhanded her into stunned silence. The act didn't quell the fear - it only made the guilt fester more deeply.
And on the wind that now constantly whined through the village, they could sometimes hear it - a whisper carrying from the direction of the Blackened Woods, faint but unmistakable
"Waiting..."
The Land's Affliction
The corruption spread beyond dreams and whispers. The village well began yielding water that tasted of salt and sorrow. Cattle born that spring emerged with milky white eyes, lowing piteously until they had to be put down. The harvest festival saw the great bonfire sputter and die despite dry wood, as if the very air rejected celebration.
Worst of all were the violet fungi that began appearing around the village - delicate mushroom rings with caps the exact shade of Liora's eyes. They sprouted overnight on thresholds, in hearths, even between floorboards. When removed, they regrew by morning, always in the same perfect circles.
The village council met in the drafty meeting hall, their faces haggard in the candlelight. Arguments broke out about whether to abandon Blackvale entirely or seek purification from the High Mages - the very architects of their misery. No decision was reached, for all knew in their hearts that some curses could not be outrun.
One evening, as the Violent Moon rose like a diseased fruit in the sky, every villager simultaneously turned toward the woods. There, silhouetted against the trees, stood Elaine or what remained of her. Her hair had gone snow-white, and her tattered dress fluttered about her like grave-clothes. Though too far to see clearly, all knew her eyes were fixed on the village she had once called home.
And from the forest behind her, pairs of violet lights began to appear in the darkness - dozens of them, swirling like captured storms, watching, waiting.
The wind carried a new whisper now, one that settled deep in the bones of every villager
"She remembers. And she is not alone."