She had been young—too young to understand—the first time she crossed the garden. The first time she strayed past the treeline they’d warned her about. What was the worst she could discover? Another couple of trees? She wouldn’t get lost. She was a brave adventurer. Brave adventurers never got lost.

But then, as she’d been busy twirling her stick around like a great sword, the mist had crept in. She hadn’t noticed it at first, not until it was already too late. Like a thick wool blanket swept over her head, it had closed around her, smothering the world in silence. The late summer day had turned dark and cold in a matter of moments. The sun above, the garden behind, even the familiar sounds of the estate—all swallowed whole by the swirling, featureless gray.

It was like a nightmare, except she was awake. A place where nothing made sense anymore.

At first, she had stood there, startled but defiant. She had taken a step backward, expecting to find the trees, the garden, the safety of home she’d just left behind. But the trees were gone. The warmth of summer had vanished along with the shapes of everything she knew.

She had cried out then, uncertain, calling for her father—her dad, who was always nearby, always there. No answer. She’d called again, louder this time, tears welling in her eyes and choking the edges of her voice. She didn’t like this place. Not one bit.

The mist was cold. Damp. Heavy. And worse than that, something lived in it. She couldn’t see it, not clearly, but she felt it moving, a shadow upon shadows, shifting just beyond the edges of her vision. Hungry.

When her tears finally spilled over and she began to sob, a warmth enveloped her. Strong arms had swept her up, clutching her close, pulling her back from the mist and into the world she had almost lost.

Her father had carried her home that day. She’d wept into his shirt, clinging to him through the long hours of the night as the memory of the Mistlands carved itself into her mind. And though she eventually drifted into restless sleep, she had learned her lesson that day. The Mistlands were not to be trifled with.

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Emberlyth ran at first, the damp grass cool beneath her bare feet, the sound of her breathing sharp in the still night. Then she slowed to a jog, her eyes straining in the dark as the trees closed in around him, swallowing him whole. And now, as she neared the edge of the garden herself, she walked. Slow. Hesitant. Uncertain.

The first wisps of fog coiled like ghostly fingers across the ground, crawling forward as if to meet her. It pooled thick and gray, devouring the space where a forest should have begun. She squeezed the sack tighter in her arms, her knuckles white against the rough burlap. It suddenly felt heavy, though she hadn’t carried it far.

Two trees loomed ahead, their twisted shapes unmistakable. They marked the spot where Penta had disappeared, vanishing as if the mist itself had swallowed him whole. Was that the secret, she wondered? A hidden path through the Mistlands?

Or was he a fool, just another lost soul swallowed whole by the Mistlands’ hunger?

The thought lingered like an ache, but another followed swiftly behind it, sharper, like the edge of a knife: Am I foolish enough to follow?

“It’s alright, my sweet little Ember,” her father’s voice echoed in her mind, warm and certain. “The things living in there, forever stuck between worlds, can’t reach us here. As long as you stay here, at the estate, everything will be fine…”

He’d been right. She had been safe here. For eighteen long years, she hadn’t gone hungry a single day. She hadn’t feared for her life, not even once. They’d told her life was a fortunate one. A blessed and a good life. But was it? She couldn’t say. It was the only life she’d ever known.

Her toes brushed the edge of the mist, and she stopped, staring into the swirling gray ahead. Should I go back? she wondered. If nothing else, for the rucksack hidden under her bed, packed for this very moment. And then there was her father’s sword—Silent Kiss—left behind somewhere in the library.

The thought of it pained her. But she knew. If she turned back, even for a moment, the mist would rise again, closing around the world like a fist. Whatever path Penta had found would be gone.

Her whole life, Emberlyth had waited for this day—a way out of her cage. But now that it was here, she felt woefully unprepared.

She took a deep breath, the weight of her father’s voice still pressing at the edges of her mind as another memory sparked: one that had once led a young girl to bravely try even the most strangely shaped broccoli and bean sprouts upon her plate. A Journal of the Abyss, Entry 4-14: “To delve into the Abyss is to delve into danger. Every day is a new uncertainty, but it is the life we have chosen. The path of change. Of progression, calculated risks, and improvement. For he who ventures nothing, nothing will be gained.”

If not now, when?

With that simple question to guide her, a sack of food clutched to her chest and no shoes to speak of, Emberlyth took her first step forward. She didn’t look back. Even as the mist coiled around her legs, she didn’t look. Another step, and she crossed the threshold. Beyond the garden. Beyond the estate. Beyond the veil of the world she had always known.

For the first time in her life, Emberlyth Dreakart stepped into the unknown.

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It was a strange thing. She couldn’t have been more than six that first time she stumbled into the mists, yet what now lay before her was exactly as she remembered it—the way it had been described through a hundred cautioning tales.

Damp, gloomy, and unwelcoming, the boundary between worlds lay before her. Merely entering, it was as if a sticky film had been dragged across her skin, leaving her raw and exposed. The night she’d left behind gave way not to darkness but to an endless expanse of dull grays and smudged whites, as if someone had rubbed out the edges of the world with a careless thumb.

“The Mistlands are not a place so much as they were the absence of place, the refusal of form,” her uncle had once told her, long ago. “It’s a horrid place I hope you never have to face again.”

Even now, as her eyes couldn’t see more than fifty feet in any one direction, Emberlyth wasn’t hard pressed to believe they stretched endlessly in every direction, mocking the very idea of boundaries. “It’s a chaotic no-man’s-land where reality itself has grown thin, unraveling into nothingness,” — A Journal of the Abyss, 4th Appendix: Tales from Beyond.

She drew a breath only for her lungs to shudder. The air was heavy—not just with mist, but with something deeper, more fundamental. The haze seemed alive, shivering and folding in on itself, as if caught in an eternal struggle to decide what it wanted to be.

Then there were the shadows, lurking just beyond her sight. Some loomed like silent watchers, vague shapes resembling trees or stones, gone the moment she tried to approach. Others moved—drifting in the distance, shifting at the edges of her vision, or passing overhead like great, slow-moving clouds. Perhaps they were lost souls, like herself, searching for a way back to whatever world they’d come from. The thought was unsettling.

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Glancing over her shoulder, Ember’s stomach tightened. The treeline was gone. Barely seconds had passed, yet the world she’d known was already slipping away. There was no sign of where she had come from, no thread to follow back. She had entered the Mistlands of her own accord, and now, there was no one to pull her out.

Swallowing whatever nerves held her throat in an iron grip, Emberlyth straightened her shoulders. Fortunately, she hadn’t come here just to back out. She was here to find Penta. To get answers.

And as if the Mistlands themselves were offering her a begrudging welcome, her path was laid out before her. It cut through the haze like a faint scar in freshly fallen snow. The trail was fragile, uncertain, its edges already blurring and filling in like smoke curling into nothingness.

Penta had passed through here. He must have.

And now, before the path could disappear, Ember followed.

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It didn’t take long for the forest floor to disappear from underneath her feet. Snapping branches and leaves turned into something jagged and uneven, cutting into her soles. A patchwork of crumbling stone, soon replaced by loose sands, and then brittle, desiccated earth that cracked and hissed as she walked. None any more pleasant than the last. Here and there, strange flora jutted out from the mist: skeletal branches crowned with blossoms that bled pale, flickering light; vines that pulsed faintly, as if carrying some unseen lifeblood.

At one point, pools of liquid—if it was liquid—glimmered like molten jewels across her surroundings, their surfaces unnaturally still. They reflected not the formless sky above but something else entirely: broken fragments of memory, shards of time, whispers of something forgotten. Emberlyth’s breath hitched.

A child with copper hair, giggling madly as she fled through the garden, screaming with excitement each time her father tried to catch her and failed. At the very last moment, his feet would always seem to stumble over themselves, making him fall in the most joyous ways…

She pressed on, refusing to look again.

The Mistlands were not a place for dwelling. Not unless you wanted them to devour you whole.

She didn’t need that cry, the first of many, to learn that.

It was a sharp, piercing shriek that tore through the mist like a razor, jerking Ember’s gaze upward, expecting to see some great bird of pray. But there was no sky above her. Even less so any silhouette of something living. Only a swirling, tumultuous veil of gray and white, streaked with sickly green and the occasional burst of violet, like distant lightning caught in an eternal storm.

What… was that? Ember wasn’t sure she wished to know

Sound behaved strangely here. That much she soon learned. Voices carried too far or vanished too soon. The crunch of her footsteps echoed oddly, as if some phantom version of herself walked just a step behind. Sometimes the echoes came back too late. Other times, they didn’t come back at all.

And then there were the whispers.

Not words, not quite. But something like them—soft, fragmented murmurs that clawed at the edge of hearing, too faint to understand yet loud enough to twist her thoughts. They made her doubt the things she had seen, the things she had heard, the things she had just felt.

With every restless step deeper into the Mistlands, the stories she’d once heard about this place crept through the back of her mind. Time itself was treacherous here. Or so she’d heard. Days did not dawn; nights did not fall. Hours stretched and snapped like broken threads. One could walk for what felt like an eternity only to realize the landscape had not changed, or worse, that they had somehow circled back to where they had begun.

“Do not lose the trail,” she murmured to herself, as if only to have something to hold on. “For all that’s good and holy, do not lose the trail, Emberlyth.”

And always, there was the sense of being watched. Not by eyes, but seemingly by the Mistlands themselves. They felt alive—alive and hateful, as though resenting her intrusion. Resenting the fact she was what it could never be. Complete.

Legends claimed the Mistlands were once part of something greater, whole and hale. But something had broken them—some ancient catastrophe, a war of gods, or perhaps the hubris of humanity reaching beyond what was meant to be touched. The stories never agreed, and perhaps that was for the best. Some truths, they said, were sharper than any blade.

Whatever the cause, the Mistlands stood as a reminder—or perhaps a warning. They were not a place to pass through. They were a boundary, a wound torn open between worlds, festering with its own strange life and hungers. And hunger it did.

It was in the whispers, in the shifting paths that closed behind her. It was in the sudden stillness that fell too often, heavy as a held breath.

And yet, she pressed on, her steps growing quicker as the faint traces of Penta’s path began to fade. For all the Mistlands’ horrors, she feared him slipping beyond her reach more than anything this place could do.

Or did she? Those eyes on her neck, the mist, like clammy fingers, coiling around her ankles, were certainly enough to tie her stomach into a knot. If she were to loose focus, if she were to stumble, would she be forever trapped in this place?

The thought was unnerving, leaving her with one answer, repeatedly yelled in the back of her mind: Don’t lose the path!

Without realizing it, Emberlyth had broken into a sprint. The sack of food clutched to her chest felt less like a burden and more like lifeline—something solid to press against the strange unreality around her. Her breath came in quick, shallow gasps as she charged forward, her steps frantic and unmeasured, as though speed could outrun the whispers curling around her thoughts.

The mist thickened with every step, tendrils of it curling at her feet, her arms. It clung to her skin, cool and damp, yet somehow feeling heavier than water. The whispers grew louder, more insistent, though still just beyond comprehension. They swirled together, a chorus of almost-words, maddening in their closeness.

She ran faster. Faster still, until there was nowhere left to run.

When she finally stopped, panting and wheezing, her heart hammering in her chest like a frantic drumbeat, she realized her mistake. The trail was gone. The faint path she’d been following had dissolved into the mist. Even when she turned back, there were no signs of her own footprints.

She was well and truly lost.

The feeling of being observed, which had gnawed at the edge of her awareness, now sank its teeth deeper. It was not the sensation of eyes watching from a distance—it was closer, more intimate. A presence brushing against her skin, breathing against the back of her neck.

"Hello?" she croaked before she could stop herself.

Her voice rippled out into the mist, louder than it should have been. It echoed in ways sound wasn’t meant to echo, bouncing back from directions it hadn’t traveled.

She regretted it immediately.

If something was out there—and something was—it had heard her now.

Standing in a sea of mist that thickened with each passing breath, Ember’s frantic eyes darted in every direction, desperate to anchor themselves to something—anything—but finding nothing. It was like being adrift in an endless ocean, the horizon swallowed by dark, shifting waters, with no sign of land or safe harbor. She was at the mercy of this place, and its mercy felt slim indeed.

Then, her heart leapt, hope flashing like a struck match. Ahead, one of the shadows—a formless blot in the swirling haze—began to coalesce. It sharpened into something almost solid, almost human, standing just twenty paces away.

"Penta?" she called, her voice trembling with hope, with fear, with the last shards of belief she hadn’t entirely lost him.

The thing turned.

The face that snapped her way wasn’t Penta’s. It wasn’t anyone’s. It was a blank, grotesque mask, with only two hollow sockets where eyes should have been. From them spilled a dark vapor, curling and bleeding into the pale mist surrounding it.

Ember's stomach sank as she watched the rest of its form unravel. The vague resemblance to a human melted away like wax in a fire, its limbs stretching, twisting, coiling grotesquely into something spider-like. Spindly arms that moved as if through water began to lurch toward her with unsteady, sickening precision.

It wasn’t Penta.

Her hands clenched tighter around the burlap sack she carried—potatoes, apples, cheese, and a single piece of salami. A fine bounty for a midnight kitchen raid. A pitiful arsenal against whatever this thing was.

Still, as her pulse thundered in her ears, some strange, reckless part of her brain whispered, This is what an adventure is meant to feel like.

It might’ve been exhilaration. It might’ve been terror dressed up as bravery. It didn’t matter.

Her hand closed around a particularly large potato, its weight solid and reassuring in her palm. She raised it like a stone.

And then the creature screamed.

It wasn’t a sound. Not truly. It bypassed her ears entirely, ripping straight into her bones. It was cold and hollow, the wail of something long-dead but not yet gone. The world around her seemed to vibrate with the force of it, her strength and sanity bleeding out into the mist like water from a cracked jar. Her knees buckled, and she fell to one hand, gasping for air that now felt thick as tar.

She had never known what it felt like to know you were about to die. Not until now.