Chapter 1

Lyssa

The forest’s edge is a wound that never heals. I stand where the last of the town’s trampled grass gives way to ancient pines, listening to the wind whisper through their boughs. Five years to the day. Five years since the trees swallowed my mother whole, leaving nothing behind but a void in the shape of her laughter.

The townsfolk watch me from their windows, their pity a physical weight on my shoulders. 

There goes the cursed girl, their gazes say, still chasing ghosts. They buried an empty casket a month after she vanished, their faces a mask of solemn acceptance that I could never bring myself to wear. Most believe she died, but I refuse to accept it. Grief is a language I’ve become fluent in, but acceptance is a dialect I cannot speak.

Tonight, the wind is colder, carrying the first bite of a winter that promises to be cruel. The anniversary always feels like this—as if the world itself mourns with me, turning the air sharp and the sky the color of bruises. I wrap my arms around myself, the rough wool of my shawl doing little to ward off the chill that seeps deeper than bone. It’s a chill that started in my heart five years ago and has been spreading ever since.

Later, locked in the suffocating silence of my small room, the voice comes again.

Lyssa.

It drifts through the glass of my windowpane, soft and maternal, a melody I thought I’d lost forever. . Every night for the past year, it has called to me from the woods. At first, I was certain my mind was breaking, the threads of my sanity finally snapping under the strain of hope. I told myself it was just the wind playing tricks, my grief given a voice by the lonely sigh of the pines.

But it’s not the wind. It’s her.

I press my ear against the cold glass, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. The whispers are always gentle, always just beyond the treeline, a comforting echo of bedtime stories and lullabies sung in a language only we shared.

Lyssa.

The sound of my own name, spoken with such familiar tenderness, breaks something inside me all over again. A sob escapes my lips, thick and ragged. Five years of stoic silence, of refusing to let the town see my tears, and it’s a phantom whisper that finally undoes me.

My sister, Clara, tells me I’m clinging to a ghost. “She’s gone, Lyssa,” she’d said last week, her voice laced with the kind of weary practicality that has defined her since our mother disappeared. “You have to let her go. For your own sake.”

But how can I let go of something that still calls my name in the dark?

The voice is a poison and a balm all at once. It keeps the wound of her absence fresh, raw, impossible to ignore. But it’s also the only proof I have that she existed at all, that the warmth of her smile wasn’t just a dream I invented to survive the coldness of this town. Here, I am invisible, a monument to a tragedy they’d all rather forget. But out there, in the darkness of the forest, something remembers my name.

My hands tremble as I trace the condensation my breath leaves on the glass. The woods are a place of Grimm tales in our small settlement. Stories of monstrous batlaz with teeth like daggers and of dark elves who steal children from their beds are used to keep us huddled close to our hearths. My mother knew those woods better than anyone; she was a healer, skilled in the ways of herbs and remedies that grew only in the forest’s deepest shadows. The town’s official story was that she’d slipped and fallen during a foraging trip, her body lost to one of the Ridge’s countless ravines.

I never believed it. She was too careful, too respectful of the mountain’s dangers. Something took her. Something that left no tracks, no witnesses, nothing but the ghost of her voice on the wind.

Lyssa, my darling.

The endearment, one she hadn’t used since I was a child, shatters the last of my resolve. For five years, I have only listened, a passive audience to my own haunting. I’ve huddled in this room, letting the whispers wash over me, too terrified to engage with what might be my own unraveling mind.

But tonight, the grief is  a clawing emptiness that demands more than passive listening. It demands an answer.

My heart breaks all over again, a clean, sharp fracture that seems to echo in the stillness of the room. I look out at the dark silhouette of the trees, at the place where my world ended five years ago. This time, I won’t just listen. This time, I’ll speak back to the ghost that refuses to let me go.

I take a shuddering breath, the air tasting of dust and unshed tears. My voice is a stranger in my throat, rough with disuse and the weight of everything I’ve kept locked inside.

“Mother?” I whisper, the word barely more than a breath against the cold glass. “I’m here”.

Outside, the wind stills. The forest waits, holding its breath. And after five years, the silence that answers feels like a reply.