For as long as humans have existed, people have disappeared without explanation. Some attribute these cases to aliens. Others say they have been spirited away by wrathful gods. The Finns blame gnomes for hiding folks in the woods. For the Celts, the culprits are assumed to be Fey. Perhaps in some cases, those explanations even ring true.
But for most, they are taken by the mist.
None of this meant anything to the woman hammering a nail into a fence in one backyard, but it soon would. The morning was humid but cool, the sun just peaking over the horizon. Visibility was good, but a slight haze hung in the air, a morning mist that no one would question at this time of year.
Thud.
As the claw hammer in her hand rose into the air, the woman focused on her task to the exclusion of all else. She didn’t notice as the air became thick and visibility declined, as she was preoccupied with work that required only a few feet of visibility to begin with. Even if she had noticed, it would have seemed normal; just the rising sun catching vapor in the air and illuminating what was already there.
Thud.
For an outside observer, however, something would clearly be wrong. Across the neighborhood, the mist was thin and clear, hardly affecting one’s vision at all. In just one backyard, though, it was increasingly opaque. At first it was hardly noticeable, but as seconds passed, the woman’s figure would have been obscured more by the second.
Thud.
As the nail she was on became flush with the plank, she placed the next, lifting her hammer once more. This time, though, it would never make contact with steel nor wood. As the hammer descended, the mist thickened, until one might almost call it fog were its extent not a few feet around. For a brief moment, the outside world was entirely cut off, and she could not see out any more than another person might see in.
Whoosh.
The wind blew, scattering the mist to reveal an empty yard. Nothing remained but a scattering of wooden blank, abandoned in the grass, and a half finished fence.
----------------------------------------
In another world, a hammer fell, striking nothing but air. Startled, Sera nearly dropped it as her other hand fell away from where it had been grasping wood just moments ago. Her head whipped around as she registered her surroundings, finding herself in a forest she had never seen before. Although, she thought, it’s not like she would recognize it if she had.
The air felt charged somehow as her breathing intensified. This wasn’t, or shouldn’t, be possible. Was it a gap in her memory? Some sort of psychotic break? Her attention dropped to the hammer in her hand, confirming no time had passed without her knowing. Her clothes were the same, as well. Unless she had somehow lost only a few minutes while wandering god-knew-how-far into the nearest forest, her new circumstances were as sudden as they appeared.
Her first instinct was to panic, admittedly, but she was adult enough to push that down. Still, no matter where she looked, all she saw was trees and bushes. Something seemed slightly off about them, but it was hard to pinpoint what- the shape of the leaves, or perhaps colors? Sera set that aside and looked into the distance, insomuch as she could past the foliage, but could find nothing but more plants.
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Traditional advice said not to move too much when lost in the wilderness, to make it easier for rescuers to find oneself, but that assumed anyone knew to look for you in the first place, so Sera picked a direction and walked in it instead. She tried to reframe her situation as a mere walk in the woods, but the sounds of unfamiliar insects and animals made that difficult. One group of calls in particular had a strange monotone to them, as if they were trying to communicate in Morse code, and she found it unbearably unsettling.
As minutes passed, Sera’s grip on her hammer tightened. She picked her way around brambly bushes and through gnarled surface roots while watching her surroundings closely, expecting every shake of the brush to reveal a bobcat or worse. She was nonetheless thankful to have begun the day wearing jeans, which protected her legs whenever she stepped too closely to a hostile shrub and was raked by thorns.
One might reasonably conclude she was not accustomed to traipsing through the woods.
The passage of time was impossible to measure with her phone left behind at her worksite, but Sera knew a fair amount of time had passed when she began to grow thirsty, and it was at this moment her fears finally came true. A blur shot from the underbrush with nary a sound and collided with her flank, sending them both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. Adrenaline surged through her veins as she flailed wildly, and she felt the claw side of her hammer catch something fleshy moments before the weight pressing down on her tumbled away.
Rolling to her feet, Sera caught sight of her assailant for the first time. It was built like a bulldog: short, squat, and muscular, with a flat and bony face that was distinctly not doglike. Its head was built like a shield, ringed with bony protrusions and mounted directly onto the torso with no neck to speak of. Some small, analytical part of her brain noted it was probably built for ramming, while the larger, terrified part instead took note of its razor sharp teeth, just waiting for meat to shred.
The beast came up only to her knees, but as a threatening warble bubbled forth from its throat, Sera found herself backing up until a tree blocked her retreat. Fight and flight warred inside her for just a moment before fight won out, flight no longer feeling like an option, and when her would-be predator leapt at her again, she swung her hammer reflexively. This time the hammer head connected, a loud cracking sound ringing out as a chunk of frilly bone broke free.
Sera was pretty sure she yelped as loudly as the creature despite being uninjured.
It came at her again, undeterred, and was met with a steel-toed boot to the face. Instead of bouncing away, though, it clamped down on her foot, its stubby teeth sinking through leather easily but halting when they met steel toe guard.
“Off, off, off!” Sera shouted, speaking for the first time since this whole affair began as she tried to shake her foot loose from its maw. The beast shook back, its thick muscles more than capable of taking her along for the ride despite weighing all of fifty pounds. She lost her balance almost immediately and fell forward, inadvertently putting the entirety of her weight on her stuck foot, which descended right to the ground along with the head it was gripped by.
A brief moment of embarrassment flashed by hardly noticed when her weight proved enough to both shove the hell beast’s head to forest floor and shatter its bottom teeth at the same time, but she was too busy following up with the hammer to think about it. She swung, and swung, and swung, sending first shards of bone and then blood and gore into the air with each swing, until her arm tired long after the creature had ceased moving entirely.
The smell of blood hung heavily in the air as the strength lost Sera’s body, and she slumped against the tree at her back, panting in exhaustion. She was too tired to remove her foot from its mouth, even, so she just tried not to look at the corpse as she caught her breath.
So tired was she that she didn’t notice another figure approaching until it spoke.
“I came as soon as I heard you yell, but it seems you had things well enough in hand. I’m impressed, actually- mistwalkers are usually much more helpless when they first arrive from what I’ve heard.”
Sera replied to that by losing her lunch.