Vesper came at the tenth hour to prepare her for bed.
Zolani was sitting at the desk with the map open — the one with Liss's notations, the one she had borrowed from the library two days ago and had not returned. She closed it when Vesper entered but not quickly enough.
Vesper looked at the map. At her. At the map again. Her gaze widening.
Oh dear..
"My lady," she said, aware of that interested look on the woman before her which spelled trouble. Her grip on her dress tightening. The tone of her voice perplexed. Looking for words to convince this crazy woman in front of her to stay put. But as she opened her mouth whatever she saw on Zolani's face made her say otherwise.
"The maids say there's something at the lake," Pausing. "Near the eastern forest."
Her words only increased the stretch of her grin. Which Vesper found creepy at the moment.
"I'm listening. Tell me every information you got."
'What have I landed myself into' Vesper thought, bewildered by her actions. Either way Vesper continued.
"There are always stories about the forest," The brush moving through Zolani's curls with the practiced efficiency of the nights she since started. "This time of year the Fog is thick. The light does things."
"My grandmother called them Remnants,"
Vesper's hands paused.
One breath.
Then continued.
"My grandmother," Vesper said carefully, "grew up in a village where the Fog was very close. She had — particular beliefs. About the Fog. About what was in it." Another careful pause. "Not everything she believed was—"
"You believe it," Zolani noted, their eyes meeting from the reflection of the mirror, Zolani sat as Vesper brushed her curls.
Silence.
"Yes," Vesper replied in thought. Quiet. The quiet of someone saying a thing they had decided to stop pretending they didn't believe. "I believe it." She said again, this time with more conviction.
"But you said it was fine." Her lips couldn't help but tip in amusement. Watching people, understanding them was a fun pasttime, she could ever ask for.
"I said it was probably nothing." Vesper's hands moving again, the pins going in one by one. "Those are different sentences, my lady."
Zolani looked at herself in the vanity mirror. At Vesper's careful hands. At the dark green eyes that were watching her reflection with the quality they had always had — careful, attentive, never quite revealing the conclusions they were drawing.
"Please go to sleep tonight, milady" Vesper begged. Quietly. Not a suggestion. "You leave tomorrow. The road is long. Sleep."
"Yes," Zolani lied.
She went to bed.
She lay in the dark and listened to the manor settle into its night sounds and thought about Liss's notation at the eastern boundary and the thing that watches here has not moved in forty years and the maids' voices in the corridor and the Count's speech about appropriate precautions and the thread in her chest which had been doing something specific since the dinner table.
Not pulling. Pointing.
East.
[⚠ QUEST INITIATED]
[FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE FOG:
Find out whether the rumors are true. This action will have consequences. Bringing you closer to the Calling.]
[DIFFICULTY LEVEL: ???]
[REWARD: ???]
[FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT TO DEATH.]
Zolani gulped, looks like 'Fate' had made a decision for her already.
She lay in the dark for one hour.
Then she got up, put on her cloak, took the knife from under the mattress, and headed to the lake, as stealthily as she can.
The fog came first.
She had learned that much about the estate's forest in the seven days she had been watching it — the mist arrived before nightfall like a herald, rolling in low along the ground and swallowing the roots of the black-barked trees, climbing their trunks until the forest looked like a painting of itself. Familiar shapes. All their edges dissolved.
She should not have come out this late.
She went anyway.
The thread was not gentle about it. It had been pointing east since the dinner table even though she ignored it and it was pointing east now with the specific insistence of something that had been patient long enough.
She followed it with the flat practicality of someone who had learned that the thread did not pull her toward comfortable things and had decided this was information worth having regardless. The grip on her knife tightened.
The lake announced itself before she saw it.
The smell first — cold water and something underneath it that was not water, a place where the boundary between what was solid and what was not had been under negotiation for a long time. Then the sound of nothing. The absolute nothing of water that was not moving in a place where water should have been moving.
She stepped through the last of the tree line and the lake was there.
It had no business being so still.
She stood at its edge and looked at her own reflection — the pale smear of her face, the dark column of her cloak, the Crimson of her eyes returned to her in black water — and felt the particular silence of a place that was listening. Not the absence of sound. The presence of a held thing. The silence of a room full of people who had stopped breathing the moment she opened the door.
Fear trickled in, her senses heightened. Screaming to go back, run. She almost did..
Then the thread pulled.
Toward the water.
She looked at the lake.
The lake looked back.
Stillness.
Then she saw them. Momentarily. Her eyes probably deceiving her she hoped.
Hands.
Not a fish. Not a branch. Hands — dark as the water, rising slowly from beneath the surface the way things rose that had been waiting long enough to stop hurrying about it. Five. Six. More. Fingers long and wrong, the joints bending in directions that fingers did not bend, reaching upward through the black water with the patience of things that had been waiting for a very, very long time.
Zolani bit back a scream.
Luckily they did not break the surface.
They pressed against it from beneath — the water's skin stretching like glass, the way it yielded at the edges and held at the center — and her reflection distorted around those reaching shapes, her face pulled apart by the geometry of palms and fingers stretching upward. They were reaching for her. And the part that lodged itself worst, the part that her body understood before her mind caught up, was how gentle it looked. Not grasping. Not violent.
Like supplication.
Like something that had been trying to reach her for a long time and had finally found the right moment.
She stepped back. One step then again.
Her heel found a root and she stumbled — caught herself against a tree trunk, the bark cold and wet against her palm — and when she righted herself and looked up into the fog-thick dark of the forest she saw it.
It stood between two trees.
No — it occupied the space between them the way a wound occupied flesh — naturally, inevitably, as though the forest had grown around it rather than the other way. In the murk she had taken it for a deadfall at first, some collapsed trunk draped with vine, but then it moved — the slow terrible shifting of weight — and she understood it was not a tree.
Bone.
Or rather, it wore bone the way a man wore a coat — the ribcage exposed, the limbs too many and too long, folding and unfolding as it moved through the fog with a gait that had no name in the language of living things. Its spine curved like a question mark. Its skull drooped forward on a neck that seemed barely sufficient to hold it. Where arms should have ended, they did not — they continued, branching, a second set of limbs emerging from the first like something halfway through becoming something else. The fog curled around its legs and rose toward its torso as though the forest itself was trying to swallow it back.
It then stopped.
The fog stopped with it.
Zolani forgot how to breathe.
In that absolute silence it turned.
She did not know how she knew it was looking at her. She could not see eyes — only the hollow architecture of a skull tipped toward her in the dark. But she felt it. The weight of its attention settling onto her the way a hand settled onto a shoulder, and the cold that moved through her had nothing to do with the night air.
She ran.
Her body made the decision before her mind did, the way a body did when the mind was still trying to be rational. Her feet found the path — barely, blindly, the mud cold through her slipper — and she ran with the fog at her shins and the dark pressing close on all sides. Behind her the creature moved. Not footsteps. Nothing so orderly as footsteps. The sound of something moving through undergrowth with too many points of contact — a scuttling, a folding, a wet crack of weight distributed wrong — and it was faster than it had looked standing still.
She did not look back. It felt like it was breathing down her neck and if she made a mistake and looked back even once. It would be her demise.
What the f*ck, did I land myself into? Oh my God!!
Every instinct she had ever carried, in this life and the last, agreed on that.
She ran as fast as her legs could carry her. Her lungs and sides burning but she didn't stop.
She couldn't.
The branches tore at her cloak then the side of her cheek, she felt blood trickling down but her brain was unable to register the pain. She lost a slipper somewhere in the mud and did not stop. The fog thickened between the trees until she could see no more than three feet ahead and had to trust the path by feel, by memory, by the sheer unreasonable will to not die here, in a forest belonging to a family that had already tried to bury her once.
Behind her — closer. The wet crack. The folding. The patient quality of a thing that did not hurry because hurrying implied uncertainty about the outcome.
And then through the trees she saw it.
Light.
A single warm point of amber in the grey — a lamp — and below the lamp the dark silhouette of a figure, a woman in a maid's cap and apron, standing at the edge of the formal grounds where the forest surrendered to clipped hedgerow and gravel path. Standing with her back turned. Holding the lamp at her side. Motionless.
She ran toward it.
"Help!!!"