The village of Elderby stood on the edge of the forest like a breath held too long.
It was small — no more than thirty households — wrapped in a lazy bend of the river Riln, with cottages clustered along a cobbled spine of a road that narrowed as it led toward the woods. Moss grew thick on stone walls. Weathered shingles curled like old parchment. Ivy slithered up chimneys. The village had always lived in the forest's shadow, but for generations it had been more a neighbor than a threat — dark, yes, but ancient and respected. Children were warned not to wander too far. Not because it was dangerous, they were told, but because the forest was sacred. It had its own rules. Its own silence.
And yet, lately, the silence had changed.
After Lina disappeared, it was no longer quiet — it was expectant.
The villagers stirred from their homes slowly the next morning. A pale sun pushed feebly through low fog. The usual creak of wooden doors and clatter of water buckets rang thinner than usual. A heaviness hung in the air — not just worry, but something deeper, more ancestral. Something old.
Mara, the baker's wife, stood at her door with her apron still flour-dusted from the night's work. Her hands trembled as she kneaded them together. She had braided Lina's hair only two days ago, and now the girl was gone like morning mist.
"Have you seen her?" she asked the passing stable hand, a wiry man named Thom, whose boyish grin had been gone since his wife disappeared two years prior. Lina had always reminded him of her. He paused, hat in hand, and shook his head.
"She went walking," he murmured. "And she didn't walk back."
They spoke as if trying not to wake something slumbering in the trees.
By midday, the search had begun. Men and women combed the edge of the forest with lanterns and hounds, calling her name with voices that felt too small. The woods were denser than they remembered. Paths once familiar seemed to fold in on themselves, swallowed by brambles or overgrown root. The trees leaned in, listening.
Elric, Lina's husband, was the last to leave the edge of the trees.
He stood there as dusk bled into evening, his boots sunk into loam, the echo of her laughter still fresh in his memory. The hounds had refused to follow her trail more than twenty paces in. One had whimpered and bolted. Another pissed itself and would not be moved.
"She's not in there," Thom had said. "She's… gone in."
Elric didn't reply. But he heard it too.
The whisper.
It came as the wind shifted — not words exactly, but breath, soft and coaxing. And then… a sound that hollowed his chest with grief and made his knees nearly buckle.
Lina's moan.
Carried on the wind, not quite human anymore — drawn-out, pleasure-laced, as though she were still being touched by something that had claimed her completely.
The forest kept her voice, and played it back like a lullaby.
By the third day, the search parties stopped venturing in.
The forest had taken her, they said — but no one would speak of it directly. Not of how. Not of what they heard. Elric refused to leave the edge of the woods, sleeping in a makeshift tent just beyond the treeline. His face, once young and open, aged in days. His eyes took on that faraway look of men who had seen something their minds refused to grasp.
He told Mara once — in a whisper, as she brought him bread he barely touched — that he had heard her. Felt her. As though she were just beyond the trees, caught in the arms of something not quite real, her moans threaded with ecstasy and grief alike.
"She's happy," he said, his voice cracking. "She's not alone. But it's not her anymore."
Mara didn't ask what he meant.
But he wasn't the only one who heard them.
In the days that followed, several women reported dreams that left them breathless and damp. Dreams of men who came to them in perfect form — soft-eyed lovers with voices like wine, rough-handed strangers with promises burned into their lips, youthful boys with playful mouths and endless hunger. Each dream was tailored to the woman who dreamed it. But each ended the same:
With the forest.
They stood naked in the dark between the trees, held by shadows that kissed and devoured. Sometimes they screamed. Sometimes they moaned. Sometimes they awoke with tears and trembling thighs, ashamed but hollow with longing.
"I felt him," whispered Jora, a widow in her fifties who hadn't known touch in years. "Not a man, not truly… but close. He smelled like rain and smoke. And his voice… gods, it was mine. He spoke my thoughts as if he'd lived them."
Others, like the butcher's wife Hena, kept quiet for longer. Until she, too, began walking alone near the woods. And when her husband forbade her, she began to cry — not with anger, but hunger.
"I miss him," she said, days before she vanished. "I don't know who he is, but I miss him."
The village council met twice — both times in the chapel, lit only by candlelight. The priest, old Father Corin, said little. His hands trembled during prayers. When asked directly, he merely muttered, "Something sleeps there. Has slept for a long time. Desire wakes it."
No one asked for clarification.
Superstitions old and buried rose like weeds in the silence. Salt was thrown across thresholds. Children were kept from the woods. Lovers stopped touching each other at night. Wives wore iron pins above their hearts and tied red ribbons around their necks. The tailor's daughter began to draw pictures of the trees — but in her sketches, the trunks were eyes, and the branches claws. She never smiled.
One man, angry and frightened, burned an offering at the treeline — a slaughtered lamb and a jug of cider. When nothing happened, he spat and declared the forest cursed.
He was found days later, naked and weeping, face down in the ferns with scratches across his thighs and back. He refused to speak afterward, only rocking silently, eyes wide as if someone or something were still watching.
And perhaps it was.
Because the wind still carried sounds no wind should.
Not just voices… but pleasure. Not just names… but gasps. The sound of thighs parting, of breath caught on the edge of climax. Whispered promises, laughter too sensual to be innocent, and moans that didn't belong to any known woman.
The forest had become an echo chamber of desire.
And it was always calling.
---
There was one house in Veilmoor that the children whispered about.
It sat on the farthest edge of the village, beyond the cobbler's path and just before the hill sloped down toward the mist-ringed forest. Ivy ran like veins up its stone walls, wild and thick. The shutters were always closed. The windows never glowed with firelight, not even in the deepest winter. And yet, smoke curled from the chimney every evening — pale and sweet, smelling not of firewood, but of herbs and memory.
No one ever saw her arrive. No one remembered when she'd come back.
But Elira had always been there.
Some swore she had lived in Veilmoor before any of them were born. Old Marta, the midwife, once claimed she'd delivered Elira as a child when she herself was barely a girl — yet the Elira who now walked the dirt paths looked no older than thirty. Perhaps less. Skin like porcelain brushed with honey. Hair dark and soft, falling in curls that defied the years. Eyes too pale to be natural — an almost silver-green that shimmered when the wind picked up.
"Witch," the baker's wife muttered once, crossing herself.
"Guardian," countered Father Corin, though his voice trembled when he said it.
Most simply said nothing. Elira kept to herself. She bought what she needed at the market in soft murmurs, always polite, always calm. She walked the edges of the village at dusk, barefoot in the grass, her skirts trailing like whispers behind her. Dogs did not bark at her. Children stopped playing when she passed. Some mothers pulled their daughters close, as if her presence made them suddenly too visible to things that watched.
But the men… some stared.
Not with lust, exactly — not in the same way they might leer at the innkeeper's daughter or the honey-haired milkmaid. Elira was something else entirely. Untouchable. Like a figure in a story you remember from a fever dream. They'd forget the color of her dress moments after she passed, but they'd feel her in their bones for hours after.
She was not of them. Not anymore.
And yet, in the strange days that followed Lina's disappearance, her name began to rise in quiet corners.
It started with the older women.
"She was here before my own mother bore me," said Ida, an ancient seamstress with half her teeth and more sense than most. "I remember hiding in my cupboard when she came to speak to Father Corin. She looked the same then. Same eyes. Same hands. Like they were carved from silence."
"But that was nearly seventy years ago," someone whispered.
Ida only shrugged. "You asked. I answered."
Others, too, remembered fragments. A girl seen at the edge of the woods during a storm, staring into the trees with bare feet in the mud. A woman helping to carry a sick child from the river, moving through the crowd like a shadow. A name scratched into the back of a chapel bench — E.L.R. — always traced over, never faded.
"She keeps her gardens wild," someone else said. "Nothing grows in rows. Not even the herbs. They bend toward her when she walks."
By the sixth day after Lina vanished, the forest grew louder.
Whispers crept in during market hours. Women stopped mid-pour at the well, their ears pricked. Young girls clutched at their bellies without knowing why. The trees seemed closer now — the mists clung to them as if they exhaled from the roots of the earth itself.
And Elira was seen at the edge.
Twilight, pale as a ghost. Her fingers brushed the bark of an old pine. Her mouth moved — not a prayer, not quite. Perhaps a greeting. Perhaps something more.
She did not look afraid.
She looked like someone who had once known the forest intimately… and had left something behind.