No one remembered who first carved it. But everyone remembered why. After dusk, the mist came crawling from the Blackwood—not fog, not vapor, but something older. Something that breathed without lungs and watched without eyes. If you breathed it in, you didn’t die. Worse: you forgot how to wake up.
She hadn’t. She couldn’t have. She checked every night. Twice.
The rattling stopped.
The door rattled. Not a slam. Just a soft, patient testing of the lock. Then the voice again, clearer now, almost gentle.
“Fear the night, little one.”
“See what?” The words escaped before she could stop them.
Now she was fifteen, and the locks were iron. She kept a hammer by her bed. Not to fight—she knew you couldn’t fight the mist. The hammer was for the windows. To board them up tighter if she heard footsteps on the porch. Fear the Night
“You left the window open, sweetheart. Downstairs. The little one, by the herb shelf.”
They called the lost ones the Hollow . By day, they looked like neighbors. They walked, they spoke, they smiled. But their eyes were wrong—milky and distant, like moonlit puddles. And at night, they didn’t sleep. They just stood in the dark, facing the woods, whispering words no one could translate. Waiting. No one remembered who first carved it
“What you are when the sun lies.”
She’d locked the door behind him. She was twelve. Something that breathed without lungs and watched without