What’s the difference between a legend, a myth and a fairy tale?

It’s fairly obvious when you think about it properly. A legend feels like a fantastic story that could happen in our lifetime, a tale that jumps from the lips of speakers to the ears of anyone willing to listen as quick as the wind racing to the ends of the earth. Myths are all about old gods and monsters and heroes and these grandiose stories about the creation and destruction of the world around us. A fairy tale is something for children, to captivate or creep into the minds of the young. They teach us as much as they entertain us and scare us.

When I think about it like that, my question sounds like a silly one. Which means maybe I’m asking the wrong question. But why am I asking it?

I ask because the story that brought me to a small corner of Hallow feels a bit like all of them and none of them.

In this small corner of Hallow, an island kingdom off the coast of the United Republic of Perilheim, there was an abandoned estate. An enormous mansion lay within acres of dense forest. The estate was called Morrowfeld and was first owned by a long procession of nobility of the kingdom. For most of a millennium since being built the estate saw a procession of nobility, decadence, familial love, debaucherous love, wonder, hedonism and pure human horror as the residents lived their lives and history sang of their sins. The people who lived in this house could very well have legends of their own, and they did for a time. But none outlived Morrowfield and so neither did their stories.

Morrowfeld was like that for a time, until the year of 342 of the Godkings calendar. Winter had set in for the season and night had stolen through the forest like a sneak thief stealing the light of day. The forest was silent that night as snow settled delicately on the boughs of the trees and in a thick layer on the cold earth.

Silent but for the steady, crunching steps of a workmans boots.

The man was poor. His clothes were tattered and frayed, his boots were almost falling apart and the large axe tied to his belt had a chip and a scant few spots of rust on the blade. His brown hair and beard were short and clearly not groomed often.

This man was approaching Morrowfield and any man who knew of nobles who didn’t have their charges in their heart could see he would not be due a warm welcome on this chilly night.

But he had no choice. He was desperate. In his arms was an unconscious young girl. She was direly wounded.

When he caught sight of the lights in the window of the mansion he caught his breath in a sudden second wind and forged forward. He came to their door and knocked, hard. Once. Twice. Three times. Four times. It was only on the fifth, just as the poor man was about to start screaming for help, that the door opened.

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The man standing in the warmth was a rich man. He was fat, a glutton, and the way he looked at the poor man was full of irritation one spark away from becoming anger. His clothes were extravagantly coloured and sewn to fit the man perfectly despite his size.

“Help, please help.” The poor man sputtered out. He showed the rich man the girl. “I found this girl not half an hour ago, alone on the forest floor.”

“Does she yet breath?” The rich man demanded. His eyes were suddenly alight with interest.

The poor man nodded, half shivering as much as moving of his own volition.

The rich man moved aside and waved the poor man in. The lord himself led the poor man through his home by a winding route that kept him away from the eyes of the lords guests and was given a room to spend the night. He was given blankets and some gauze to treat the girl.

It was as the man was about to succumb to sleep himself the the girl awoke. She sniffed and cried and told the poor man she didn’t know what happened, nor why she had been in the forest. Puzzled but content that the girl was safe and healthy, they settled in for the night.

Unfortunately, no good deed goes unpunished and the poor man had a taste of steel that night, a ruthless final kiss along his throat from the blade of the Lord of Morrowfeld.

You see, whilst there had been good and bad men and women to live in the halls of Morrowfeld none were so atrocious as this man. He considered himself a connoisseur of the carnal pleasures and that night his palate suited only the poor girl, an innocent plucked from the village nearby.

Through ingenuity and daring, the young girl had made an escape. However, through fate's cruel choices misfortune saw to it that she would take a fall and be found by the poor man, only to unwittingly be taken to her abductors for aid.

And so it looked like the Lord would continue his evening with his accomplices in sin. The girl was prepared by servants numb to their masters inclinations and that night presented to the foul coven of nobles not worth the name.

Here perhaps I would like to say that a paladin of the Godking arrived with blazing retribution in hand to smite the Lord and his cronies. Or better yet that the young girl herself had managed to engineer another escape against the odds.

But she was powerless to stop them, she had escaped once before. They wouldn’t allow her to do it again. And if there is a higher power, they didn’t see fit to send any agents there that evening.

No, it was as the foul rituals of the Lord reached their peak and the moment was most dire that a cosmic being far lower than the Godking reached out to the girl.

They say that the Mother of the Abyss, the being that makes Hell her abode, she reaches out to us with promises of great riches and power, she’s a temptress that leads us astray onto a path to meet her in that same Hell.

She didn’t have to offer much to that little girl, so scared and vulnerable.

A bargain was struck and that night, a pitch black hand reached up from the depths of the earth and took Morrowfeld in its grasp. Mists of madness were visited upon the Lord’s fellows of horrid design. Pustules grew on their hands, skin sloughed off their faces, every word they spoke became a piercing wail in the ears of the others. Shadows morphed into monsters that drove them from their home. Then, in the darkness of the night, the true beasts began their hunt as they isolated the nobles, one by one, dragging them by fang and claw to the Mother to be punished.

A hard fate fell upon the Lord that day. The girl did not escape though. They say that that night she aged five decades, molded by the Mother into a witch to serve her in a new, earthly seat of power. She had been bound that day to the Mother’s service and to this day she resided in Morrowfeld, performing rituals to expand the Mothers influence in our world and laying with hellbeasts to spawn new soldiers that would visit fear and violence upon the world.

Bit grim isn’t it?

It definitely has the otherworldly in it, so that makes it seem like a myth. It apparently happened recently, though I’ve not nailed down when this legend apparently took place. And it inspires fear and a lesson in most; Don’t go to the Morrowfeld estate. Feels a bit like all three kinds of stories.

I crested a hill as I trudged along a muddy road. I was greeted first by a sign that read “Sterfeld Village”.

In the distance I could see the Morrowfeld forest and Sterfeld itself.