Chapter 2

I met her on a summer afternoon, forty years before all this.

I was foraging for ginseng deep in the forest when I found her, collapsed by a stream, her clothes torn and her body bruised. She looked lost, not like anyone from the small communities in these mountains.

I carried her back to my small cabin in Hollow Creek.

For weeks, she didn't speak. She just watched me with wide, frightened eyes. I brought her broth and herbal teas, I changed her bandages, and I talked to her, telling her about the plants, about the creek, about the quiet life we lived here.

One day, she spoke her name.

"Elara."

That was the beginning.

Hollow Creek accepted her. She was beautiful and mysterious, but she was kind. She learned my work, her hands gentle as she helped me grind herbs and tend to the sick. We fell in love slowly, naturally, like a vine growing up an old tree.

We married a year later, a simple ceremony by the creek where I found her. Our lives were woven together. We had over forty years. Forty years of shared meals, of waking up together, of growing old. I saw the first silver in her hair, and I loved it. I saw the lines deepen around her eyes when she smiled, and I loved them.

I thought our life was a blessing. I thought our love was destiny.

On her sixtieth birthday, she grew ill. It happened fast. I used every herb I knew, but nothing worked. She lay in our bed, frail and fading. I held her hand, preparing for the end.

Then the light came.

It filled our small cabin, brilliant and overwhelming. I shielded my eyes, and when I could see again, she was standing. Not my Elara, not the sixty-year-old woman I loved.

She was young again, maybe twenty, radiating a power that made the air hum. Her eyes were not the warm brown I knew, they were a piercing, otherworldly blue. Cold. Distant.

Other figures appeared in the light, tall and beautiful like her. The Aethelings.

"Sister," one of them said. "Your trial is complete. Welcome home."

She looked at me, and there was no recognition in her eyes, no love. Just a faint, detached pity.

"What is this?" I asked, my voice trembling.

"A life well lived, Liam," she said, her voice a strange melody. "Thank you for your part in it."

As she turned to leave with them, she paused. She flicked her wrist, and a shimmering dust settled over me.

"A gift," she said. "So you will not forget me."

The gift was unnaturally long life. And a magical barrier, invisible but unbreakable, that trapped me within the borders of Hollow Creek. I couldn't leave. I watched my friends, the children I' d helped birth, grow old and pass away. I remained the same, a ghost in my own life.

Elara visited sometimes, in the beginning. Her visits grew shorter, more infrequent. She told me about her real life, her real world. She told me about Caelus. Her true love. Her intended.

My forty years were a footnote. My love was a tool. My life was a cage. My only friend was Old Man Hemlock, a quiet spirit of the forest who saw my pain.

The hope I held onto for years slowly curdled into a quiet, simmering despair. I was a prisoner of her memory, waiting for nothing.