The echoes of aisling wood

---

The Echoes of Aisling Wood

by Emmanuel Oregbesan

Word count: 1,812

---

It took a few seconds to realise I was utterly and completely lost.

The forest had a way of doing that to you — of folding you into its green, breathing mass and then quietly moving the paths behind your back. One moment you were chasing a shaft of light between the leaves, and the next, the world you knew had been swallowed whole by the dense thicket.

Aisling Wood was a place whispered about in town. Old farmers swore by the ancient spirits of the trees, speaking of ghostly figures seen through the mist at dawn. Children dared each other to cross its threshold on Samhain’s Eve, and the rest of us — sensible, modern people — treated it like a local oddity, the kind of place you took an Instagram photo from a safe distance.

I had no intention of coming here. Not really.

I was meant to follow the trail along the ridge, snap a few pictures of the mossy ruins, and head back before sunset. But my phone’s battery died hours ago, and every marker I passed looked like the last. The forest hummed with an ancient, steady quiet. No birdsong. No wind. Just the pulse of my heartbeat and the distant memory of a direction I no longer knew.

I ran a hand through my hair, damp with sweat despite the cool air. A brittle panic scratched at my throat, but I swallowed it down.

“Okay, okay,” I murmured to myself, voice thin and small in the endless green. “Retrace your steps.”

But which steps? Every way looked the same.

I was contemplating whether to keep moving or stay put when a sound — soft, deliberate — reached me. The faintest strains of humming.

It came from deeper in the wood, somewhere to my left. High and light, a woman’s voice, the tune simple and ancient, as if it had no beginning and no end.

A reasonable person would have turned the other way.

But reason was already unraveling by the minute, and something in that melody tugged at a part of me long dormant, like a half-remembered lullaby from childhood.

I moved towards it.

---

The air thickened the deeper I went, the light waning though the sun had not yet set. A low mist clung to the ground, coiling around my boots. Tree trunks twisted impossibly high, their branches lacing together like the fingers of sleeping giants.

The humming grew clearer, punctuated by soft footsteps, and then — without quite realizing how — I stepped into a clearing.

At its center stood a woman.

She was turned away from me, her hair long and dark as spilled ink, falling in loose waves down her back. A white gown clung to her frame, the fabric so fine it seemed spun from mist itself. She moved in a slow circle, bare feet brushing the earth, her hands raised as if conducting unseen strings.

For a moment, all fear fled.

I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound came. She turned then.

Her face was impossibly pale, her features delicate, but her eyes — her eyes were the deep green of the forest after rain, ancient and unreadable.

I took a step forward.

“Excuse me,” I managed, voice cracked and hoarse. “I… I think I’m lost.”

She regarded me without surprise, her head tilting slightly.

“They always are,” she said softly, her voice like the hush of wind in leaves.

I frowned, a chill feathering over my skin. “Who… who are you?”

Instead of answering, she turned and gestured for me to follow.

And like a fool — or perhaps like every soul who’d ever found themselves in Aisling Wood — I did.

---

We walked in silence, though the path she took seemed clear now, as though the trees themselves parted for her. The mist lifted slightly, and an otherworldly light filtered down through the branches.

I tried to mark the way: the twisted yew by the hollow stone, the pool ringed with violet flowers. But each turn felt like stepping into a dream layered atop another, and soon I gave up.

Finally, she stopped beside a fallen tree whose roots jutted into the air like frozen claws.

“This is where it happened,” she murmured, her hand brushing the bark.

I hesitated. “Where what happened?”

She looked up at me then, and for the first time, I saw the grief in her eyes.

“My name was Aisling,” she said.

And it was then I understood.

The old stories spoke of a girl, centuries past, who vanished into the wood on the eve of her wedding, leaving behind a single white ribbon caught on a bramble. Some said she’d run from an unwanted marriage. Others whispered of fae folk luring her away.

No one ever found her body.

The townsfolk named the forest after her, the missing girl who became a legend.

But standing there in the hush of twilight, she was no legend.

“I was to marry a man I did not love,” she said, her voice a soft confession. “I fled here, thinking to escape, but the wood… it has a way of keeping what it wants.”

I felt a prickle of cold run down my spine.

“And now it’s taken me too?”

Aisling reached out, her fingers brushing mine. They were cool, but not cold.

“No,” she said. “Not if you wish to leave. But you must choose.”

I stared at her, heart pounding. “Choose what?”

She gestured to the path ahead. In the half-light, I saw two faint trails diverging.

“One leads you back to the world you knew. You will wake tomorrow in your bed, and this will be a story you tell yourself in the moments between sleep and waking.”

“And the other?”

Her gaze held mine.

“The other you walk with me.”

The forest seemed to lean closer, waiting.

I thought of my life beyond the trees: a small apartment filled with second-hand books, coffee rings on the table, deadlines unmet. A city where no one knew my name. The ache of loneliness I carried like a second skin.

And here, a story unended. A girl forever wandering. A place untouched by time.

It should have been easy.

It wasn’t.

“I don’t know the way,” I whispered.

Aisling’s lips curved in the barest of smiles.

“You’ve always known.”

I closed my eyes.

And stepped toward the path that led home.

---

I woke at dawn, lying in a field of clover just beyond the edge of Aisling Wood. The town was a speck in the distance, the church bell tolling faintly.

I made my way back, feet blistered and spirit forever altered.

I never spoke of what happened.

But sometimes, when the mist rolls in and the air tastes of rain, I hear a humming beyond the trees.

And I remember.

The choice.

The girl.

The forest that never forgets.

---

End

---