The Fate of Feyn Crossing

The town of Feyn Crossing lay wedged between forest and river, isolated enough to be out of the way, but bustling enough to be self-sufficient. It was the kind of place where everyone knew everyone else’s secrets — or at least, they thought they did. Hidden beneath the centuries-old cobblestone streets and winding alleyways was a force few were aware of, though some of the old folks occasionally whispered about it. There was a reason, after all, why they avoided the river after sundown.

No one really knew where she’d come from, but one day a woman arrived at the only inn in town. She didn’t stay long; her hair and dress were soaked as if she'd dragged herself out of the river, and her gaze was sharp with a hunger that made the innkeeper uneasy. Before dawn, she slipped away, leaving behind a single message scrawled on the table in spilled ink-

“Fate is resourceful.”

The town took little notice of her after she vanished, except for a few who found the phrase haunting in its simplicity. To most, it became a strange little mystery and nothing more. But there was one young woman, Emily, who found herself unable to shake the words from her mind.

Emily had always sensed something different about the town, something elusive that lay just outside her grasp. She would often wander the woods along the river’s edge, where mist gathered so thick that even sunlight seemed reluctant to break through. She’d seen things others hadn’t, odd happenings that seemed half-formed or half-real. Once, she’d caught sight of a bird with no wings perched on the branch of an old oak, its eyes so dark they seemed to swallow the light around it.

But it was her friend, Melissa, who had given her reason to truly doubt reality.

÷?÷?÷?÷?

Melissa had been Emily’s childhood friend, a wild, bright spirit who always seemed two steps ahead of fate. Where others saw obstacles, Melissa saw opportunities. She lived as if time itself were her possession, something she could shape and bend. When Emily’s mind grew heavy with duty and routine, Melissa was her escape, showing her paths through the forest where no one else had dared tread.

Then Melissa disappeared.

It happened in early autumn, just as the leaves turned to fire and gold. She’d gone to the river to wash linens, something she’d done a hundred times, and simply hadn’t returned. Her mother had combed the banks, townsfolk had combed the forests, but Melissa was nowhere to be found. And yet, the river had seemed different after that day, as if something foreign had seeped into its waters. No one dared speak it aloud, but many sensed that whatever had taken Melissa had left a piece of itself behind.

For weeks, Emily grieved. She’d wake in the middle of the night to the echo of Melissa's laughter, so vivid it was as if her friend were right there. Yet each time she rushed to the window or opened her door to the night, there was nothing but the silence and a lingering, metallic scent in the air. It became harder and harder to remember Melissa's face, her laughter, even her touch. Melissa, it seemed, was slipping away from her memory as well as from reality.

One night, a feverish urge took hold of Emily, a need she could barely understand, let alone articulate. She grabbed her shawl and a lantern, and in the dead of night, made her way to the riverbank where Melissa had last been seen. As the mist rose around her, Emily felt the air grow cold, heavier than it should have been, as if something ancient watched her from beyond the trees.

And then she saw her.

Just across the river, barely visible through the mist, was Melissa. Her friend’s eyes were strange, an unearthly gleam reflected in them as she looked straight at Emily. But the Melissa before her was both familiar and unfamiliar, as if time and memory had warped her into something... else.

“Melissa!” Emily called out, her voice trembling. “Is it you?”

Melissa didn’t answer. She simply watched, the look in her eyes neither cold nor warm, but distant. Slowly, as if sensing Emily’s plea, Melissa raised her hand and pointed at a spot just behind her friend, along the river’s edge.

It was there Emily saw something glinting in the moonlight- an ancient iron ring embedded in the ground. She felt an inexplicable urge to reach for it, to pull it free, as if this simple act might bring Melissa back to her.

But as her fingers grazed the ring, Melissa's eyes changed. The gleam faded, replaced by a look of fear. She shook her head sharply, her mouth forming the words “Don’t.”

Emily hesitated, her hand still resting on the cold iron. Fate is resourceful, she thought, the phrase repeating in her mind like a chant. And for the first time, she understood it to be a warning.

Just as her hand pulled away, she heard something stir in the forest behind her — a faint, chilling whisper that seemed to slither through the mist. She turned, but nothing was there. When she looked back to the other side of the river, Melissa had vanished, leaving only a ripple in the water, as if she had never been there.

÷?÷?÷?÷?

Emily went home that night, but sleep evaded her. In the weeks that followed, she found herself haunted by glimpses of Melissa — on the street corner, in the shadows of the marketplace, in the faint reflection on a windowpane. The sightings felt both real and unreal, as if Melissa existed in a liminal space, slipping between worlds. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Melissa was trapped somewhere, watching, waiting.

She returned to the river often, never venturing beyond the boundary of the iron ring, yet always feeling drawn to it, as if Melissa's fate rested upon its threshold. Then, one evening just before dusk, Emily found a small, leather-bound book waiting on her doorstep. It had no title, and the pages seemed to be filled with scrawled, half-finished phrases — except for one, written in a delicate hand she recognized as Melissa's-

"To change fate, you must lose something of yourself.”

Emily couldn’t help but read the words over and over. Lose something of herself? She’d already lost so much in the wake of Melissa's disappearance, hadn’t she? And yet, the book’s words haunted her, making her wonder if perhaps, she hadn’t lost enough. Perhaps, the choice before her required something greater, something beyond personal cost.

In a fevered state, she decided to return to the river. There, just as the mist began to rise, she found herself once again at the edge, the iron ring glinting in the waning light. And Melissa was there, as though she’d been waiting all along.

With a deep breath, Emily crossed the boundary of the ring. She felt a strange warmth envelop her, as though a hand had reached out from within the mist to welcome her. Melissa's gaze softened, and for a brief moment, Emily thought she saw her friend smile.

Then, everything went dark.

÷?÷?÷?÷?

When Emily awoke, she was no longer by the river, nor in Feyn Crossing. She stood alone in a space where the mist had thickened, solidifying into strange, translucent walls that pulsed with a life of their own. The air around her was cold, dense, as though she’d been wrapped in damp wool that refused to let warmth in. Every breath felt thick and slow, each heartbeat dull and heavy, echoing against the oppressive silence.

There was no sky above, no ground beneath her feet — just an endless gray haze shifting in shapes she couldn’t quite decipher. The world felt flat, hollow, as if it had been carved from a memory too faint to hold form. Her voice trembled in her throat as she tried to call out, but the sound emerged muffled, swallowed by the mist before it could travel beyond her lips.

Then, she felt it — a presence looming in the stillness. At first, it looked like Melissa, hovering just on the edge of her vision, but as she tried to focus, the shape flickered, morphing between familiar faces she thought she’d forgotten. Faces she had known in half-glimpses, faces that bore expressions of endless yearning, twisted in silent screams that seemed to resonate without sound. They appeared, dissolved, and reappeared closer, always hovering just beyond her reach.

Emily’s footsteps, though silent, felt like they stretched on forever, the ground beneath her growing heavier with each step. She tried to turn, tried to find a direction, but the mist thickened, as if responding to her movements, tightening around her in layers that obscured everything beyond her outstretched hand. She spun and turned, yet each movement seemed to pull her deeper, drawing her further from anything real.

The air itself seemed alive, trembling with faint whispers that brushed past her ears only to vanish when she tried to catch them. They twisted in nonsensical murmurs, fragments of voices she almost recognized, warping in tones that sounded half-human, half something else — a chorus of forsaken souls whose words held neither comfort nor answer. Occasionally, one voice would ring clear, sharp with sorrow or anger, only to melt back into the haze before she could understand.

Shadowy forms drifted beside her, moving in odd, jerking motions, like marionettes strung on invisible wires. They were incomplete — fractured bodies without limbs, floating torsos whose faces were featureless or whose eyes had been erased. Each time she reached out, they recoiled, scattering like smoke, fading back into the mist before she could fully make sense of them. They seemed to observe her, trapped in a limbo of silent despair, but the moment she tried to focus, they dissolved into shapeless darkness.

She tried to walk, to find some end, but every path folded in on itself, leaving her in a closed circle of fog. And then she began to notice things — the way time stretched, each second elongating until the silence between her breaths felt infinite, until her body moved in the languid slowness of a forgotten memory. A strange sensation clawed at her mind, as if she were fading, dissolving into the gray. Every attempt to focus felt like it cost a part of herself, pieces of her thoughts scattered into the haze, lost and impossible to retrieve.

“Melissa?” she whispered, hoping her friend was still somewhere in this place. But her voice came out warped, stretching like a fading echo, as though she were hearing herself from far away. The mist absorbed her voice, carrying it into the silence that stretched like a void, endless and uncaring.

Her own shadow appeared, looming larger and darker, cast by no light source she could discern. She moved, and the shadow followed, but not in sync — it lagged behind, turning when she wasn’t, lingering even after she had stopped, like some memory of herself that refused to let go. It grew fainter the longer she stared, disintegrating until she could see nothing but the faintest outline of herself, distorted and fading, as though the world were erasing her one fragment at a time.

And then, in a final, flickering instant, she thought she saw Melissa once more, her face twisted in sorrow, mouthing words Emily couldn’t hear but felt as an ache in her chest- “I’m sorry.” The image blinked, splitting in a flash of light that left Emily blinded. When her vision cleared, Melissa was gone, replaced by a figure with no face, its body coiling and twisting in the mist, something no longer human.

“Fate is resourceful,” the figure whispered, its voice an echo within her own mind, spoken in her own voice, as if her thoughts were no longer her own.

And as the mist closed in around her, Emily felt herself unravel, her form dissolving, piece by piece, into the dense, consuming fog. Memories slid away, her name vanished from her mind, until all that remained was a vague awareness, floating in an endless, indifferent void. Somewhere, she could still sense the river, its waters flowing with an unbroken rhythm. She realized, distantly, that she had become part of it, another soul bound to Feyn Crossing’s hidden current, as silent and unseen as the stories no one would ever tell.

End