When you find her, she is tearing her dress free from a branch, tears streaming down her face as she runs from fear itself.
The woods are alive with sound. You recognize them as animals and insects, wind and falling leaves, but to a petrified girl whose parents have told her she is damned, they could be anything.
She falls, picks herself back up. She looks behind her, and for an instant you are certain she sees you. But no, she is looking right past you, seeing something that isn't there.
She looks up at the trees, then down at their trunks. There's one with branches low enough to climb, and she pulls herself up with skill but also frenzied haste. A shoe drops as she slips, but she lets it go and keeps climbing.
It's a tall tree. She looks small in its long upper branches.
An owl screeches and takes flight, and you hold your breath as Tabitha screams and falls through the tree's limbs, each one hitting her but none of them catching her.
The dead leaves muffle the sound of her body against the ground.
You stare at her body, though it's mercifully hard to see in the dark.
That lightness you felt in the fog earlier grows heavier. The dread feeling returns, and the mist no longer smells of the natural world, but like grief. It tastes like tears as you breathe it in and stings your throat as badly as smoke. Worst of all, it's cold against your skin, a bad cold, like sheets on a bed that will never be slept in again.
Your heart sinks as you realize you have just witnessed the birth of the Fog Beast.
A light appears in the distance, and none too soon. When you try to run towards it, however, you can't get any closer. The faster and longer you run, the further away the source of the light seems.
Sticky white mist swirls around you. It grabs you by the torso and spins you around to stare into so many faces that say your name with one voice.
Tabitha's voice.
Next Chapter