The Miller's Son
The mist came first, before the light, the way it always did along the edge of the Gloomwood. Elara had learned to read that mist the way other girls read scripture — its thickness, its color, the way it pooled in the hollows or crept up the trunks like something reaching. This morning it lay low and pale as milk, and it did not move.
She noticed that before anything else. No breath of wind stirred it. No breeze combed through the bracken to send it curling away in ribbons. It simply sat there, thick around her ankles, swallowing the roots of the birches and the black-slick stones that marked the border between the village fields and the forest proper. She had walked this treeline a thousand mornings since she was old enough to carry a basket, and she had never once seen the mist hold so still.
She adjusted the strap of her satchel and told herself it meant nothing. Mist was only mist. The Gloomwood had its moods — some mornings it steamed and sighed with the damp of the night before, other mornings it lay dry and watchful under a sky the color of an old bruise — and she had learned long ago not to invent meaning where none existed. Her grandmother had taught her that lesson…