Little Ella did not enjoy living in Windle Rock.

It was a cold, grim place. It frequently rained. It wasn’t green like Scotland was. This little corner of Ireland was mostly gray with hard, sharp stone, and though there was a small forest and a few patches of grass between the village houses, it was nowhere near enough to put Ella’s mind at ease. Things weren’t right, in Windle Rock.

Because her friends weren’t with her anymore. They were back home.

Back in Campbelltown, which also overlooked the sea, there had been a large forest behind her coastside house. Sometimes, if she was careful, she could sneak out and see them, in the forest. Her friends. It had started one night as curiosity. She awoke, and spied through her window pink and yellow lights, winking dimly between the trees. It had interested her greatly.

To get out of the house at the time, she’d had to climb out of her window. The back door, furthest from her parent’s room, was facing the west—and thus, they kept it locked with several different kinds of locks. She hadn’t the key to any of them, but luckily she slept on the first floor. Little Ella climbed from her bed and trekked across the green to the forest, and it was there she met the sprites of the wood. They led her deeper into their home, and flew around her head whilst singing lovely songs.

They slept in a clearing of many pink flowers. The moonlight illuminated this clearing, giving it a soft glow. Even Ella, scarcely eight years of age, had thought it looked amazing. And though the grass was damp and cold on her bare feet, her friends insisted she stay and sing. They danced around her head. She danced with them, tumbling around with her arms out, spinning in the field of pink flowers. An old stone fountain and a rock-formation shrine sat quietly atop a short hill, as did overturned logs with which to sit. They were mystical. Ella truly loved the woods behind her house.

For many nights thereafter, Ella brought her friends salt crackers, honey, and milk as an offering. They took it happily, and as they danced, the pink flowers in the field would glow.

At times, it seemed like the rock-shrine, which had a kind of archway in the center of the stones, would be whispering. She paid attention to some of these whispers. Whispers of a man of shadow that comes at night. A man of bones, and curses. But also, there were whispers of eight sacred knights, and eight sacred blades… blades to be wielded by such knights in their fight to beat back the man of shadow. These whispers promised one thing; that this was a world of magic. A world like hers, but filled with sorcery, battles, fairies, and stories.

She wanted to go to it. She wanted to live in a better place.

But whenever she got closer to the archway, her friends would tug on her nightgown, her fingers, her hair—and tell her no. Do not go toward the Hedgein, little one.

“Why not?”

Because it leads to a world of woe. Stay here with us, and dance.

So she did. But ever since that night, she wondered what was past that archway. What world lie beyond, veiled by such whispers?

But that was done now. She was no longer living in Campbelltown. Haste ye back, they’d said. Her friends. But Ella had no haste in which to show. Why? She knew not, for she lived as only a small girl at the whim of her parents. And the whim of her parents was to come to Windle Rock. It was a dreary place. The lighthouse never produced any light. Apparently it had been abandoned for forty years. And though she could see the sea at her old home, this coast was darker. Colder. There was land across the water in Campbelltown. Not so, in Windle Rock. Instead, it seemed liked the world stretched on endlessly, dropping off like a great waterfall past the horizon

She could easily sneak from her house, though. The village was old and uncrowded, and precious few watchmen patrolled at night—her parents had also left their locks back home, west door unguarded.

The one time she went to the coast, so early in the morning it was still dark, she saw a man huddling on the sand, sobbing. In time, he stood and ran away, dropping pages from some kind of manuscript in his wake. Ella was not yet the greatest at reading, especially not English. She could not tell what these pages said, when she’d gone to pick one up. But she backed away from the coast and left the crest of the hill, for she was disturbed by the fright of the man.

Fright of what?

She did not know. She’d spied many webbed footsteps in the sand, though…

Letting go of the pages, she walked back down to the village, and strode past many cottages. Smoke rose from none of them, nor did she see any lights in the windows. She was more interested in other lights, anyway, and made for the small wood down the crescent hill. Would her friends be there? She hoped.

But as she got close, she realized a westward wind had gotten stronger with her descent. And the trees, they looked not like the lovely green trees of Campbelltown. These were old and haggard, with many spindly branches that twisted into the night like stiff, crusted rope.

And as soon as she noticed the deathly fog of this forest, she was standing within it.

How did she get here? She didn’t remember walking all this way…

She looked around in a panic. Mist was everywhere, low to the ground and wafting up the trunks of ancient, hateful trees. The ground was crunchy. Why was it so crunchy? She nearly tripped with each step.

She heard an owl screech, and whipped in a circle, trying to see where it had come from. Fear unknowable took hold of her little heart—this was not the lovely wood of Scotland. This was Windle Rock. This was no home to her friends of the fae. This was home to something far worse.

Because emerging from the foggy western wind… she saw it.

Hovering between the mangled trees, obscured by many twisting branches, was a single gray figure. It traveled motionless in the mists. Hunched and emaciated, it had two hollow-white eyes, sunken into twisted skin that hung loose off its skull. It bore two leathery wings, which protruded from the thing’s back as if torn from a bat, and a gnarled pair of lips, twisting grotesquely into a birdlike beak. Not a true beak—still fully lips. Like a puppet. Like a corpse, mouth pulled and stretched away from its two rows of teeth, pinched into a cone-like shape.

Ella stumbled back on a root, and fell to the muddy woodland ground. It approached her, bringing with it a cold and bitter chill on the howling gale. Horrible in all ways, a terror to gaze upon. It trained its eyes on her and got faster, drifting over—

She saw it now. Why the ground was so crunchy. She looked down, and whimpered.

Ella began to hyperventilate. Her breathing came faster and faster, and her head went light. This grisly form said nothing, but approached with its hand outstretched, as if to grab.

Then… everything went black.

…

Ella awoke.

The sky was a bright white, and it was raining.

She stood from the ground, thinking everything had just been a bad dream. She was still in the woods back home, wasn’t she? And her friends would be dancing around her, singing and cheering, giving her flowers and showing her the friendly foxes, mice, and ladybirds of the forest.

She was covered in mud. And felt light, for some reason. Although to be quite honest, she couldn’t feel much at all…

Afraid to leave at first, she eventually gathered her wits and made for the house. But when she returned she saw something she didn’t understand.

Mist had formed inside of it, fogging the windows. She walked around the perimeter; worried her parents were looking for her.

“Mummy?” she said. “Daddy?”

She knocked on the front door. She knocked on the windows. It was hard to do, for some reason. Almost as if she was in a dream.

She went around the back… and realized her mistake.

For when she left, she’d gone through the west exit. And she’d left it open the whole night.

…

“Ye’r callin’ em, hmm?”

“I am, gitwit, shush.”

The brothers had awful reception in Windle Rock. But this was something they couldn’t ignore. Strolling through the woods was inadvisable from the folk that lived there, but how could they not do anything? The little girl, dead as she was, still deserved a proper place to rest. And her family deserved closure, too.

Ryan, the brother who wasn’t attempting to call 112, looked around the body. She’d been dead for a few days, and forest vermin had already started making a meal of her. It was a horrible sad thing to see. The poor girl would’ve been starting school in the fall.

“D’you think it’s foul play, Ash?”

“Hmm?” Ash looked up from his phone, frustrated and a little shaken. Ryan didn’t blame him. He was quite disturbed himself.

“I said d’you think it’s foul play?”

Ash was about to shake his head, and stepped forward when he did—but beneath the swirling woodland mists, he stepped wrong, and fell. Ryan, any other day, would have laughed at his fool brother, but it was too downer a time to do so. Instead he made to help him up.

And while his brother was unharmed, his fall had pushed away much of the mists.

Ryan spied it. He stumbled back in shock.

When Ash saw it, he scrambled to his feet, eyes peeled in a wide look of distress. He’d dropped his phone, even though the call had finally gone through and the two could hear the operator speaking on the other end.

For the floor of the forest was littered with bones. Skulls, teeth. Spines and pelvic angles… arms and cracked craniums…

Then Ryan went running. For he’d heard it stalking behind him. Not his brother.

But the thing waiting in the mists.

…

Ella watched the boys go.

The smartphone the boy had dropped was still lying in the dirt. Ella walked to it, but couldn’t pick it up. Still, she slumped down beside it. It was soothing, in some way, to listen to the woman on the other line. Despite its one-sidedness, it gave a least a little bit of the feeling that she had someone to talk to.

Ella cried. She missed her parents, and she missed her friends.

But it seemed like this forest would be her home now, as all of Windle Rock. It was agony, waiting for someone to come find her. Waiting for someone to make everything right, and put her back where she’d started.

But none ever came.