Maxfield Willow

Tag: low fantasy

  • Chapter 8 – The Soldier Who Wouldn’t Come Home

    Chapter 8 – The Soldier Who Wouldn’t Come Home

    The war had ended three months ago.

    That was what the posters said, anyway—peeling on brick walls, flapping on lamp posts, fluttering over the market like tired flags.

    Teren ran his fingers over one of them, tracing the bold letters announcing Peace Declared as if they belonged to someone else’s story.

    Behind him, the town breathed like a single vast creature. Laughter spilled from taverns and doorways, thin music threaded through the streets, and somewhere a drum beat slow and steady, calling people to celebration.

    Teren’s heart answered with a different rhythm entirely: too fast, then too slow. Like a soldier out of step with the rest of the line.

    He turned away from the poster and the noise. Away from the smell of roasting meat and spilled ale. Away from the steady, inevitable drum that reminded him of marching—of boots in mud, of shouted orders, of the hollow thump of bodies hitting the ground.

    He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and walked until cobblestones gave way to packed earth, and the lamps thinned and then vanished.

    He didn’t bother watching where he was going.

    He had already been lost for a very long time.

    The night at the edge of town was cold, and honest about it. No music, no laughter—just the rasp of dry grass, the creak of bare branches, the hiss of the river dragging itself over stones.

    Teren followed the sound of water. It had always helped, once. Long before the uniform. Long before the weight in his chest.

    He came to the old stone bridge, the one that arched over the Blackwater like a crooked spine. Moss grew between its blocks, and lichen shaved years from its surface.

    He leaned against the rough stone, listening to the river and to the faint drumbeat of celebration carried faintly from behind him.

    You should be there, he told himself. Your name’s on the wall. You came back. You’re one of the lucky ones.

    His jaw clenched until his teeth ached.

    “Lucky ones,” he whispered into the dark, the words bitter and small. “Tell that to Jorran.”

    The name landed between him and the river like a stone.

    Jorran’s laugh, Jorran’s hand on his shoulder, Jorran’s eyes turning surprised and then empty. Teren squeezed his eyes shut, but the images were etched on the inside of his eyelids. He could see them whether he wanted to or not.

    He had pulled so many men back behind the line. He had dragged bodies, living and dead, through mud and smoke. That was what he had been good at: hauling, carrying, enduring.

    Except that one time. The one that mattered.

    He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until colors sparked against the darkness.

    When he pulled his hands away, something else was there.

    A light—a small one—hung in the air a short distance down the riverbank. Not high like a lantern on a pole. Low, close to the ground, as if someone had dropped a candle and forgotten it.

    It flickered once, twice.

    Then it moved.

    Teren straightened, frowning. The light bobbed along the edge of the reeds, weaving between stones with a peculiar deliberate grace. It did not sway like something carried by a person. It glided, bright and steady, at the height of a child’s eyes.

    “…Hello?” he called, because habit and training had taught him to announce himself, even when he wanted to vanish.

    The light paused.

    Then it turned toward him.

    For a second, nothing else existed. Just the river’s hiss, the distant thud of celebratory drums, and that small, unwavering glow.

    It brightened, just a little, as if answering.

    Teren swallowed. He had seen strange things on the field—flares, tracer fire, the red bloom of artillery across the horizon—but none of them had ever made the air feel like this: sharp and thin, like a breath held too long.

    “Right,” he muttered to himself. “Either I’m tired enough to be seeing lights… or someone actually needs help.”

    The second thing hurt less than the first, so he chose it.

    He slid down the slope from the bridge, boots skidding on damp earth. The light retreated a pace, just enough to stay out of reach, then waited like a patient guide.

    “Fine,” Teren said under his breath. “Lead on, then.”

    The light bobbed once, as though it understood.

    And moved.

    At first he thought it was a lantern, suspended by some trick of wire. But as he drew nearer, he saw the shape behind it.

    A fox, no larger than any that skulked on the edge of fields—except for the way its fur caught the night, ember-bright along its back and cheeks, and the way its tail curved upward like a hook.

    From the tip of that tail, a lantern hung. Not iron and glass, but a globe of soft golden flame, contained and impossible, suspended without chain or handle.

    The creature watched him with eyes like polished amber. Its paws were silent on the earth. The lantern’s glow warmed his face, cutting the chill.

    Teren stopped, breath caught halfway.

    The fox tilted its head, studying him the way a scout studies a stranger at the edge of camp.

    “I’m… I’m not drunk,” Teren said to it, mostly to convince himself. “And I’m not asleep.”

    The fox blinked once, very slowly.

    Then it turned and trotted along the riverbank, pausing only when it realized he wasn’t yet moving.

    It looked back, lantern swaying gently. The light caught the deep lines etched into his face, the few silver threads starting at his temples, the tiredness pulling down his shoulders.

    “This is ridiculous,” he muttered.

    He followed.

    The river narrowed and deepened to his right, a black ribbon in the night. To his left, the land rose in uneven humps and tangled bushes, dotted with the skeletal remains of summer’s trees.

    The fox led him along a path he would have sworn wasn’t there whenever he’d walked this way by day. The ground underfoot was too smooth, the turns too natural, like worn stone in the threshold of an old doorway.

    The lantern’s glow chased the worst of the shadows away, but Teren’s mind filled them in easily enough.

    A figure slumped against a broken wall. The faint shape of a rifle. The echo of someone calling his name through smoke.

    He dragged in a breath. The air here smelled of damp earth and fallen leaves, tinged with something else—oak smoke, maybe, and the ghost of spilled ale. It prickled at the back of his memory in a way that made him more uneasy than comforted.

    “Where are you taking me?” he asked the fox, knowing he wouldn’t get an answer.

    He was right. No voice answered. The fox just kept moving, tail-lantern swaying side to side in a calm, patient arc, the light laying down a narrow line for him to walk.

    He realized after a while that he could no longer hear the town.

    No drums. No laughter. No music.

    Just the river, and the sound of his own breath, and the faint, soft click of the fox’s paws on stone.

    They crested a low rise, and the world spilled open.

    The clearing below them should not have been there.

    Teren knew this stretch of land. Or thought he did. By day it was nothing more than scrub and a few gnarled trees, good for nothing but giving children a place to dare each other to climb.

    Now, though—

    Now the clearing held ghosts.

    Not the translucent, whispering kind. These were made of memory and shape.

    He saw a field churned to mud, pitted with craters. He saw torn banners whipping in a wind he could not feel. He saw the silhouettes of men and women in armor and in patched jackets, some kneeling, some standing, all watching something near the center of the space.

    His own breath fogged in front of him. He could smell cordite, and blood, and wet wool. His stomach lurched.

    “No,” he said. “No. We don’t come back here. I did my time.”

    The fox’s lantern brightened, its glow widening until it brushed the edge of the vision below. The shapes sharpened. One of them moved in a way that hit Teren like a fist to the chest.

    Wide shoulders. Lopsided gait. The way the man pushed his hair back with two fingers when he was trying to think.

    Jorran.

    Teren’s throat closed.

    He stood frozen on the edge of the rise, watching his younger self—mud-streaked, eyes too wide—running toward the sound of gunfire, shouting Jorran’s name. Watching Jorran turn, relief breaking across his face.

    Then the sharp, bitter crack of a shot. The way Jorran’s body jerked, then folded like someone had cut his strings.

    Teren staggered back a step, fingers digging into his hair. It felt like the first time all over again. Weightless, stunned, unable to move fast enough as his memory-self dove for Jorran, hands pressing uselessly against the spreading red.

    “I know how this ends,” he rasped.

    The fox padded to his side, close enough that its fur brushed his trousers. The lantern swung forward, spilling warm light over the scene below, softening the edges of the worst of it.

    The vision did not stop. It played on—his frantic hands, the medics arriving too late, the wild, pointless scream he never remembered making until someone told him later.

    And then, as abruptly as a curtain falling, the sound dropped away.

    The figures in the clearing froze. Jorran lay still on the ground, eyes half-open, expression caught midway between surprise and something else.

    Teren realized he was breathing like he’d run a mile. His fingers hurt where nails dug into palms.

    The fox stepped forward.

    It did not speak. It did not explain.

    It simply walked down the slope, light steady, until it reached the still form of Jorran in the frozen memory. It circled once, twice, then looked up at Teren, lantern casting long shadows across the ground.

    Come, the gesture said. Not in words, but in the way its body angled, the way the light pooled in a path between them.

    He didn’t want to.

    He wanted to turn around, to walk back to the bridge, to pretend he had never seen any of this.

    But he had been running from this exact moment for so long that his legs knew the path without him. They remembered the feel of mud and blood and the weight of his friend’s body.

    He walked down into the clearing.

    With every step, the ghosts grew less solid, like they were made of mist. The sounds did not come back. Only the soft chime of the lantern flame and the whisper of dry grass against his boots.

    He reached Jorran’s side and dropped to his knees. His fingers hovered over the same place they had pressed once, long ago, trying to keep a heart beating that had already decided to stop.

    The body beneath his hand was not real. His palm passed through fog and left it unruffled.

    Teren’s chest hurt anyway.

    “I tried,” he said, voice cracking. “I tried. I swear to you, I—”

    He had said those words in his head so often that they had become a rhythm, a litany. They had never escaped his mouth before now.

    “I should have been faster. I should’ve pulled you back sooner. I should’ve seen the sniper. I should have—”

    The words tangled, choked. His shoulders shook.

    The fox sat, folding its legs neatly beneath it. The lantern swayed gently, casting a circle of gold that pushed the worst shadows further back.

    It watched him without judgment. Without pity. Just presence.

    Somewhere in the silence, the drumbeat from town tried to intrude, but it sounded very far away.

    After a long time, Teren scrubbed his face with the heel of his hand. His eyes felt raw. His ribs ached like he’d been in a fight.

    “I don’t know how to do this part,” he admitted, not sure who he was talking to. The fox. Jorran. The river. Himself. “They told us how to march. How to shoot. How to stitch a man up and send him back out. Nobody ever told us how to come home.”

    The fox’s lantern flared, then narrowed, as if breathing.

    Jorran’s frozen face softened very slightly, the rigid lines easing. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. Perhaps not.

    Teren reached out, hand shaking, and set his fingers lightly against the outline of his friend’s shoulder. The fog of the memory rippled under his touch.

    “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You shouldn’t be here in my head like this, stuck on the worst day. You deserved better.”

    The words felt strange and heavy. As they left his mouth, the clearing seemed to exhale.

    The ghosts in the distance blurred further, dissolving into shadows that looked more like trees than soldiers. The churned mud smoothed into earth, dotted with hardy grass. The smell of smoke thinned, replaced by damp leaves and distant rain.

    Jorran’s outline shimmered.

    “Rest,” Teren said. His voice was steadier now. “You did your part. You can… you can stand down, all right? I’ll carry the rest.”

    Something loosened beneath his sternum, a knot he hadn’t known had a beginning.

    The figure at his feet dissolved like breath on a mirror.

    The clearing was just a clearing again.

    Teren sank back on his heels, chest rising and falling. The fox came to his side, brushing lightly against his arm. The lantern’s glow settled, no longer flaring bright, just a steady, warm presence at the edge of his vision.

    “Is this what you do?” he asked it quietly. “You drag people back through their nightmares and… sit with them until it hurts less?”

    The fox’s ears flicked. It tilted its head as if considering his question, then turned away, tail swinging.

    There was more to see.

    The path out of the clearing led upward, through thinner trees. The fox took a different route than the one they had used to enter; Teren was almost sure of it. The land didn’t match any map in his mind.

    They crested another hill, higher than the last. Here, the night sky opened fully above them, pierced by hard white stars. The river’s voice was faint now, distant but still loyal.

    At the top of the hill stood a single stone.

    It was not a grave marker, not exactly. No name had been carved into it. Moss clung to its base, and lichen painted pale sigils across its face. But there was a hollow in the earth before it, as if people had stood there before and wept, and their tears had worn a small depression into the ground.

    The fox padded to the stone and sat, lantern shining against its weathered surface. It looked back at Teren.

    He understood.

    “I don’t even have his tags,” he said, throat thick again. “They sent them to his family. I don’t… I don’t have anything of his.”

    Except memory, and guilt, and the way Jorran had made terrible jokes when everyone needed them most.

    He reached into his coat pocket anyway, more out of habit than hope. His fingers brushed something metal.

    He frowned, pulling it out.

    It wasn’t Jorran’s tags, no. But it was a small disc of dull steel, stamped with Teren’s own number and name. A spare he’d kept without thinking, because that was what soldiers did.

    He weighed it in his palm, the metal slick and cold with sweat.

    “You want me to leave this?” he asked the fox.

    The lantern’s glow brightened fractionally, catching the stamped letters, turning them momentarily gold.

    He snorted softly. “You’re very free with other people’s belongings, you know that?”

    Still, his feet carried him forward. He knelt before the stone. The earth there was softer than it should have been, welcoming.

    He turned the disc over once, thumb brushing his own name.

    Then he pressed it into the moss at the base of the stone.

    “For Jorran,” he said. “And for everyone else who stayed, when I didn’t.”

    It felt like confession. Like surrender. Like laying down a rifle he’d been carrying far too long.

    The fox rose and circled the stone, tail lantern tracing a slow ring of light around it. For a heartbeat, Teren saw other shapes at the stone’s base: bits of ribbon, a button, a feather, a child’s carved toy horse. Offerings from other people, on other nights.

    Then the image was gone, as if it had never been.

    The wind shifted.

    On that wind came music—not the rough tavern songs from town, but something lower and warmer. A fiddle, maybe, and the murmur of voices, and the clink of mugs on wood.

    Teren turned, heart stuttering.

    Far below the hill, where there should have been only trees and the far edge of town, a glow pulsed.

    It was not the sharp yellow of gas lamps or the thin blue of electric light. It was a deep, steady amber, like the heart of a fire that had been burning for a very long time.

    He could see the suggestion of a roofline, the faint outline of door and windows. Smoke rose from a chimney that faded into the stars. For a moment, he swore he saw a sign swinging above the doorway, catching the light in a way that suggested painted metal and old wood.

    He leaned forward, squinting.

    The details refused to resolve. Every time he thought he caught hold of them, they slid out of focus, like a half-remembered dream.

    He could hear laughter, though. Not the raucous, brittle kind. The rich, quiet sort people make when they are finally safe.

    His chest ached with a surprising, almost painful desire to be inside that light. To feel warmth at his back and a solid mug in his hands, and to sit with others who understood what it cost to keep standing.

    He took a step down the hill.

    The fox stepped gracefully in front of him, blocking the path.

    It didn’t growl. Didn’t bare its teeth.

    It simply looked up at him, lantern reflecting in its eyes, and shook its head—just once.

    Not yet.

    Teren swallowed.

    “Not for me, then?” he asked, voice rough.

    The fox blinked slowly. The distant glow pulsed, just for a heartbeat, as if in answer. The music curled around his ears, a promise more than a presence.

    Then, like a candle snuffed under a cupped hand, it vanished.

    The hillside below was only dark again. Trees and shadows. Ordinary night.

    Teren stood very still.

    The fox touched its nose lightly to his knuckles. The lantern’s warmth soaked into his skin, sinking up his arm, settling somewhere beneath his ribs.

    The place that had been all stone and ache was… not empty now. But different. Like a room where the furniture had been rearranged, and you weren’t entirely sure where everything stood, only that there was breathing space again.

    “Right,” he said after a moment, scrubbing at his face. “Right. I hear you.”

    He looked down at the stone one last time, at the disc half-hidden in the moss.

    “I’ll go home,” he promised Jorran, and the stone, and the quiet fox, and himself. “Properly, this time.”

    The fox’s lantern dipped in a small, solemn bow.

    The path back to the bridge felt shorter.

    They walked in silence. The night seemed to have softened—still cold, still wide, but less like a set of teeth waiting to close and more like a cloak settled around his shoulders.

    By the time the murmur of the town reached his ears again, the drumbeat no longer sounded like marching. It sounded like dancing. Like hearts finding a common rhythm, instead of grinding against each other.

    They reached the slope below the bridge. The stones were slick with river mist. Teren climbed up first, then turned back.

    The fox stood at the bottom, golden lantern reflected in the dark water.

    “Will I remember this?” Teren asked.

    He already knew the answer. He had heard stories, growing up—half-remembered tales told in winter about lights that led the lost through snowstorms and fog, about a fox with a lantern on its tail that guided people where they needed to go.

    Sometimes people said they dreamed it all later. Sometimes they swore they had simply walked, and walked, and walked, and found themselves exactly where they needed to be, with no memory of the in-between.

    The fox’s lantern dimmed slightly, its edges softening. The air around it shimmered.

    “Yeah,” he said. “All right. Maybe that’s for the best.”

    He hesitated, then added, “Thank you. For… sitting with me. For not making me do it alone.”

    The fox’s ears flicked. For an instant, the lantern brightened again, so bright it threw his shadow long across the bridge stones.

    Then the glow collapsed inward, like fire curling around itself.

    When his eyes cleared, the fox was gone.

    Only the ordinary night remained. The river. The bridge. The faint call of someone laughing, carried from town.

    Teren looked at his hand.

    His knuckles were warm, as if a small coal had been pressed there and then removed. When he closed his fist, the warmth settled deeper, a quiet ember inside his chest.

    He turned toward the town.

    The posters would still be on the walls. His name would still be on the plaque. The taverns would still be loud. People would clap him on the back and tell him he was a hero, and some part of him would still flinch.

    But for the first time since he’d stepped off the transport, he felt like the road ahead led somewhere other than back to that moment in the mud.

    He walked toward the lights.

    Behind him, unnoticed, a tiny glimmer flickered once at the edge of the trees—like a fox’s lantern, watching, waiting, ready for the next broken heart that needed help finding its way home.

  • Chapter 5 – The Child at the Edge of the World

    Chapter 5 – The Child at the Edge of the World

    (The Lost Path)

    By the time anyone realized Eli was missing, the fairground had already become another world.

    Daylight drained out of the sky in streaks of pink and copper, and all the coloured lights along the booths seemed too bright, too loud, as if someone had turned the whole evening up a notch. Voices blurred into a single rolling roar. Music from three different rides tangled into something that wasn’t quite a song.

    Eli stood in the middle of it, small and alone, clutching the crumpled corner of a map he’d been so proud to carry.

    “Stay by us,” Mum had said.

    “Don’t wander off,” Dad had added.

    And he hadn’t meant to. He’d only stepped aside to see the wooden dragon on the carousel up close, just for a second, because its emerald eye had seemed to be looking right at him. Then the crowd surged, somebody bumped his shoulder, and when he turned around his parents were gone.

    Not “a few steps away, scanning the crowd.”
    Not “right there if he just pushed through.”

    Gone.

    He tried to do what they’d told him. Go back to where you last saw us. Stay put and we’ll come find you.

    Except “where he’d last seen them” no longer existed.

    The booth with the stuffed bears was now selling glass stars. The truck with the hot chocolate had somehow become a tiny stage where a magician pulled scarves from nowhere. Even the path under his shoes looked wrong, the gravel crunching into something finer, smoother, more like the pressed stone of an old street.

    His heart thudded in his ears.

    “Dad?” he called, voice swallowed by the fair. “Mum?”

    No answer. Just the cheer from a ride spinning somewhere out of sight, and the distant crack of fireworks test-firing.

    He swallowed the hot knot in his throat. He was nine, almost ten. Too old to cry about getting separated. Too old to be scared of the dark that was rolling in like a slow wave over the horizon.

    The map in his hand fluttered. He looked down at it, hoping for a miracle.

    The bright lines of rides and food trucks and exits had smudged. The little icon of a smiling fox advertising “Funnel Cakes!” had stretched impossibly long, its tail curling around the edge of the paper like it was trying to slip away.

    He blinked hard.

    The fox lifted its head.

    Not on the paper. In front of him.

    Lantern-light bloomed where there had been nothing a heartbeat ago. A small shape stepped out of a crack between two stalls that shouldn’t have been large enough for anything bigger than a cat.

    The fox’s fur was the colour of embers at midnight, dark at the roots, burning brighter toward the tips. Its eyes were molten amber, reflecting the fairground lights and something deeper beneath. A lantern hung from its tail, light swaying gently, casting little ripples of gold across the gravel.

    Eli forgot how to breathe for a moment.

    The fox tilted its head, studying him. No one else seemed to notice it. People drifted past, laughing, brushing close enough that Eli had to edge aside, but no one glanced down at the glowing creature at his feet.

    “Hey,” he whispered, because it felt wrong to raise his voice. “Are you—are you real?”

    The fox didn’t answer. It simply stepped closer until the lantern light wrapped around Eli’s shoes and soaked into his jeans and skin, warm as a hand around his fingers.

    The panic loosened its grip on his chest, just a little.

    A soft gust of warm air rustled his hair, smelling faintly of woodsmoke and something sweet, like toasted sugar. For a moment he could hear—beneath the roar of the fair—another sound entirely: low conversation, clink of mugs, the murmur of a hearth.

    Then it was gone, as if someone had turned down a volume slider inside his head.

    The lantern fox turned away and trotted a few steps, then glanced back over its shoulder. The lantern on its tail swung, a gentle beckoning.

    Eli looked over his shoulder, in case some sensible grown-up had appeared to take charge.

    No one.

    He was lost. The exits kept moving. The map had turned strange.

    And yet… he wasn’t alone.

    He took a careful step toward the fox.

    It waited.

    Another step. Another. The fairground around them seemed to blur at the edges, booths stretching a little taller, lights smearing into long streaks of colour. Each step away from where he’d been felt like walking off the edge of something familiar and into a picture book you weren’t supposed to fall into.

    “Where are we going?” he muttered.

    The fox’s ears twitched. It didn’t speak, but the lantern flared a fraction brighter, as if answering: Somewhere you need to be, not somewhere you expect.

    They slipped between two stalls that had not been there a moment before: one selling glass bottles that glowed softly from inside, the other hung with wind chimes that made no sound. People moved past like shadows, a little slower now, a little less distinct.

    Eli realized the noise had changed. The roar of the fair had softened, receding like tidewater. He could hear his own breathing again, and the faint pad of the fox’s paws.

    Ahead, the chaos of booths and rides thinned. A narrow lane appeared, cobbled stones pressed into the earth, running away into the deepening dusk. Old brick walls rose on either side, patched and mismatched, doors tucked between them where no doors should have been.

    This wasn’t part of the fairground. This wasn’t part of his town at all.

    He stopped. “This… this isn’t right.”

    The fox stopped too, turning back toward him. For the first time, it closed the distance between them completely and pressed its forehead lightly against his knee.

    Heat poured through the fabric of his jeans, spreading up into his chest. Not burning, but a deep, steady warmth that seemed to push out the cold knot of fear. Images flickered at the edges of his thoughts: a little boy at a different crossroads, a woman on a ship staring at too many stars, a man in a forest with no path… all of them wrapped in the same lantern glow.

    Then, clearer than any of those, he saw his mother’s face as she’d looked at him earlier that day when he’d made a joke about “getting lost on purpose so no one could make him do chores.” She’d laughed, but her eyes had softened in that way they did when she was worried and trying not to show it.

    “Never on purpose,” she’d said, ruffling his hair. “You belong with us, you hear? If you ever feel lost, you yell loud enough for me to find you.”

    Eli’s throat tightened again, but now it wasn’t only fear; something else tangled there too. Regret. The sudden sharp knowledge that he had wished, just a little, to disappear. To step sideways from all the bickering and noise and rules.

    The fox leaned back, watching him.

    “I didn’t really mean it,” he whispered. “I don’t want to vanish. I just… I don’t like it when they fight. Or when they’re tired and forget I’m there.”

    The lantern’s light shifted, shadows tucking themselves neatly away, as if the world were listening politely. The fox turned and padded down the lane.

    This time, Eli followed without hesitation.

    The further they went, the more the air changed. The sharp scent of frying food faded, replaced by cool stone and distant rain, even though the sky above remained clear. The cobbles under his shoes were damp and old, moss peeking between them. The buildings on either side leaned inward like they were listening in.

    Doors lined the alley. Some were plain wood. Others had carvings: waves, leaves, stars, symbols Eli couldn’t name. A few were cracked open, warm light seeping through.

    They passed one doorway where voices murmured, fragments of words curling out into the lane.

    “…thought I’d lost it all, but then…”

    “…found my way back…”

    “…a lantern, like a fox’s tail, of all things…”

    Eli slowed, peering through the thin gap. For a heartbeat he saw a room that could have been in any storybook tavern: low beams, a stone hearth with fire painting the room in amber, people in travelling cloaks and modern jackets both, gathered around chipped mugs. A sign hung over the hearth, emblazoned with the stylized outline of a fox wrapped around a lantern.

    His heart gave a little jump of recognition, though he couldn’t have said why.

    The fox brushed against his leg, drawing him on. When he looked back at the doorway, the crack had closed. The sign over the hearth was gone, as if it had never been.

    “Was that… a pub?” he asked, reflexively. “Like in old movies?”

    The fox didn’t answer, but the lantern’s glow shivered with something like amusement.

    They walked on until the alley opened up into a small square.

    It wasn’t big—more like the space in the middle of four old houses that had agreed to share a backyard. A dry fountain stood at its center, stone basin carved with little foxes chasing one another’s tails. The world beyond the square was a haze, as if someone had forgotten to finish painting it.

    The lantern fox padded to the fountain and hopped gracefully onto its rim. It turned to face Eli and lowered its tail so the lantern hung just above the basin.

    Light spilled down like liquid.

    Water rose to meet it.

    At first it was empty, clear. Then shapes surfaced beneath the glow: waves of colour, fragments of moving scenes.

    He saw himself, only minutes ago, standing by the wooden dragon, map in hand. He watched as a knot of teenagers pushed past, watched his parents carried away on the tide of bodies, unaware he had stopped. He saw his own face, a little stubborn, a little curious, as he stepped toward the dragon instead of clinging to Mum’s sleeve.

    “It’s my fault,” he whispered.

    The fox’s ears flicked. The light in the lantern dimmed, and the image shifted.

    Now he saw his parents. Not from his eyes this time—from somewhere above. His mother’s face was pale, lips pressed tight as she scanned the crowd, calling his name. His father spoke to the nearest staff member, gesturing sharply, trying very hard not to look as scared as he was.

    They circled the fair, again and again, their paths looping, almost touching the spot where Eli had stood and then missing it by a single step, a single breath, as if the fairground itself were twisting to keep them apart.

    He watched his mother’s shoulders shake once when she thought his father wasn’t looking, saw his father’s jaw clench as he pretended not to notice.

    The knot in Eli’s throat loosened into something else entirely.

    “They’re… they’re looking so hard,” he said. “I thought…”

    He had thought, in a small, secret part of himself, that maybe if he disappeared they would shrug eventually and keep going, like when a toy broke and no one had time to fix it. But this—this frantic searching, this fear—this was something else.

    The lantern fox lifted its head slightly. The scenes in the water folded and collapsed like pages turning.

    Eli saw flashes of other people then, only glimpses: a figure on a cliff-edge, staring into fog; a woman in a starship corridor with panels flickering; a scholar surrounded by books and yet completely lost. In each picture, the fox’s lantern light gleamed somewhere close, never forcing, only offering.

    Then the fountain went still. The water lay flat as glass, reflecting only the lantern above.

    Eli stepped closer until he could see his own face in the surface. Freckles, wide eyes, hair sticking up in three directions. He looked small. He also looked… present. Solid. Like he belonged here, in this strange in-between square, at least for a moment.

    “I don’t want to disappear,” he said quietly, more to himself than to the fox. “I want to go home. Even when it’s noisy. Even when they’re tired. I want to be where they are.”

    The fox hopped down from the fountain. The lantern swung close to Eli’s chest, brightening until he had to squint. Warmth wrapped around his ribs, his heart, like someone was fastening a button deep inside him that had come undone.

    He felt, clearly and simply, a sense of agreement.

    Then the world tilted.

    The square, the fountain, the doors around it—all stretched away like reflections sliding off glass. Lantern light became the sharp glare of the fairground bulbs. The damp cobbles under his shoes turned back into gravel dusted with dropped popcorn.

    He staggered, catching his balance.

    He stood exactly where he’d first realized he was alone: between the game booth and the carousel. The dragon still circled, its emerald eye shining. The map in his hand was just a map again, crumpled and slightly sweaty.

    But the warmth in his chest remained.

    “Eli!”

    His mother’s voice cracked over the noise, raw and sharp. He spun.

    She shoved through the crowd, hair a mess, jacket half-zipped, Dad close behind her. The moment she saw him, she broke into a run. He thought he’d be in trouble, or at least scolded, but instead she crashed into him in a hug that knocked the breath out of his lungs.

    “Oh thank God,” she whispered against his hair. “Oh, Eli, we couldn’t find you, everything kept looking the same, I thought—”

    His father’s hand landed on his shoulder, squeezing hard enough to hurt in a good way. “You alright, kiddo?” His voice was rough. “You hurt? You scared us half to death.”

    “I’m okay,” Eli said, the words muffled by his mother’s jacket. He swallowed. “I was… lost. Really lost. But…”

    He hesitated. How did you explain cobbled alleys and silent tavern doors and a fox made of lantern light?

    He pulled back enough to look up at them. “I’m sorry,” he said instead. “For the joke earlier. I don’t want to get lost on purpose. I want to stay with you. Even when everything’s… kinda loud.”

    His mother’s eyes filled, a complicated mix of relief and guilt and love. His father ruffled his hair, too hard, the way he always did when he didn’t know what else to do.

    “We’re going home,” his dad said. “Fair’s over for us tonight.”

    Eli nodded, slipping one hand into his mother’s and one into his father’s, anchoring himself left and right. For a moment, walking between them felt like the safest place in the universe.

    As they headed toward the exit, he glanced back over his shoulder.

    Between two stalls, where the shadows pooled thickest, a small shape moved. A tail tipped with light curled briefly into view, the lantern swinging in a slow arc. The fox’s eyes met his across the distance—warm, watchful, amused.

    Eli smiled, a quick, fierce little smile that felt too old for his face and exactly right at the same time.

    “Thank you,” he whispered.

    The fox dipped its head once. Behind it, for the barest heartbeat, he thought he saw a door outlined in warm gold, and beyond it the glow of firelight on old beams and the suggestion of a sign shaped like a fox coiled around a lantern.

    Then the crowd shifted. A man walked between them, pushing a stroller. When he passed, the door and the fox were gone. Only the ordinary dark remained.

    Except, of course, it wasn’t entirely ordinary anymore.

    Eli walked out of the fairground holding his parents’ hands, the warmth of lantern light still tucked under his ribs like a secret. The world felt a little bigger than it had that morning—stranger, maybe—but also kinder.

    Somewhere, not yet fixed in any one place, a tavern waited to be fully real, its hearth ready, its doors not quite settled on which street they belonged to. For now, it lived in glimpses and echoes and the paths the lantern fox walked.

    Eli didn’t know that. Not yet.

    He only knew that when he closed his eyes on the backseat ride home, the darkness wasn’t empty. It was filled with the soft glow of a lantern swinging in time with his breath, keeping pace with the beat of his heart, leading on—quietly, patiently—whenever he felt lost.

  • Chapter 2 – The Runaway Noble

    Chapter 2 – The Runaway Noble


    The first thing Elira of House Varn learned about running away was that silk was a terrible choice of travel clothing.

    By the time the city walls were a smudge of grey behind her, the embroidered hem of her gown looked as though it had narrowly survived a small, determined war with every bramble in the kingdom. Mud streaked up past her boots, her lungs burned, and her carefully pinned dark hair had given up and fallen into her eyes.

    It felt glorious.

    Wind rushed at her cheeks, tasting of rain and river stones instead of incense and old stone halls. Her heart hammered, not with the measured, polite dread she carried at court, but with wild, raw fear that didn’t bother pretending it was anything else.

    They’ll be after you already.

    The thought came with the memory of her father’s face—ashen, controlled, the way it always was when he was more angry than he dared show. There had been the letter sealed with golden wax, the crest of House Meron impressed too deeply, as if the signet carrier had leaned hard on purpose.

    An alliance. A marriage. A man she had never met, except in whispered rumors of how he crushed rebellions with the same calm hand with which he poured wine.

    “Duty,” her father had called it.

    “Prison,” Elira had answered, though only in the privacy of her own mind.

    So she had done the unforgivable thing.

    She had waited until the castle settled into its nighttime hush. She had donned riding boots beneath her gown, hidden a plain cloak under the formal mantle, and slipped from her chamber into passageways she knew better than the bloodlines of her own house.

    The stables had been easy. The stablemaster loved her; she’d tended the foals herself when she was younger. He’d questioned her only when she saddled a quieter, sturdier mare rather than her usual hot-tempered favorite.

    “Road’s poor,” she’d said, voice steady. “Going out to see the flood damage at the lower farms for Father.”

    He’d believed her. Or pretended to.

    Now, hours later, the mare was a dark, solid warmth beneath her, snorting clouds into the cooling air as they picked their way down a narrow game trail through the forest that clothed the foothills.

    Elira slowed to a walk and finally to a halt. She slid down from the saddle, legs trembling with the effort of keeping the horse at a run so long. The forest wrapped around her in shadowed greens and blacks, the last light of evening threading through branches.

    She tied the mare’s reins loosely to a low branch. The horse nudged her shoulder in quiet complaint.

    “I know,” Elira murmured, stroking the damp neck. “I’m tired too. But if we stay on the road they’ll catch us. We just need one night. Just one.”

    One night to get beyond her father’s reach. One night to become something other than a bargaining piece on a ledger.

    She’d thought it all through. She had coins sewn into the hem of her shift, a small knife strapped to her thigh, a bundle of dried meat and cheese tied behind the saddle. She’d memorized the map: two days’ ride through back ways to the river town of Brellin, where no one cared who you were if you paid, and from there… a boat, maybe. A job as a scribe. She was good with numbers, with words. She would find something.

    All she needed was time.

    The forest, however, did not seem particularly interested in her plans.

    Mist began to gather between the trees, a thin, pale veil that crept along the ground. The last light died more quickly than it should have. Elira frowned and tilted her head back.

    The sky had gone from bruised violet to a uniform slab of grey. Clouds had rolled in from nowhere, swallowing the last hint of stars.

    Of course. “Why would the world make this easy?” she muttered.

    Thunder grumbled, distant but moving closer.

    She untied the mare and led her deeper beneath the trees, hoping the canopy would blunt the worst of the rain. The path narrowed, then disappeared entirely. Roots grabbed at her boots, damp leaves slipped beneath her soles.

    “This is still fine,” she told herself. “You grew up riding the forest ring. You’ve snuck out more nights than anyone ever knew.”

    Except this forest wasn’t the well-groomed hunting preserve of her childhood. The trees here were older, their trunks thicker, bark furrowed like ancient faces. Moss draped from branches. The undergrowth was a tangle of thorns and ferns, unbothered by gardeners with pruning hooks.

    The first heavy drops fell a heartbeat later—thick, cold coins of water that splashed her face and soaked through her cloak. The mare shied, ears swiveling, eyes rolling white.

    “Easy,” Elira soothed, though her own heart lurched. The storm came down as if some unseen hand had upended a bucket over the world. Rain hammered on leaves, turned the ground to slick mud underfoot.

    Within moments, she was drenched. Her cloak clung, heavy and cold. Her carefully planned escape began to feel less like a daring story and more like the moment in a tale where the foolish noble is punished by the uncaring wild.

    Lightning split the sky, close enough to turn the forest silver-blue for a blinding instant. The mare squealed and jerked away, ripping the reins from Elira’s hand. Before she could grab them, the horse bolted, thrashing through wet undergrowth, hooves pounding away into the storm.

    “No!” Elira shouted. “Come back!”

    Her voice vanished in the roar of rain.

    She stumbled after, branches whipping at her face, mud sucking at her boots. In seconds, she could no longer see the mare—only the fading flares of movement between trees, then nothing at all.

    Elira stopped, chest heaving, hair plastered to her cheeks. Her thigh burned where a branch had raked it. The world around her had dissolved into shades of dark and darker, the shapes of trees blurring as rain sheeted down.

    The smart thing would have been to stop and think. To mark a tree, set a direction, remember where she’d been.

    Instead, she did what every terrified creature does when the world becomes too loud: she ran.

    Branches reached for her like fingers. Roots rose suddenly to catch her feet. Once, she slipped to one knee, palms slamming into cold, slick earth. She pushed herself up, cursing, and ran again.

    By the time the storm finally began to ease, the last of her frantic momentum died with it.

    She staggered into a small clearing and nearly went to her knees again. Instead she braced herself, hands on thighs, and tried to force her breathing into some kind of order.

    Silence fell slowly. The rain retreated to a whisper in the leaves. Water dripped from branches in a steady, mocking rhythm.

    Elira straightened, turning in a slow circle.

    The clearing was ringed with trees she didn’t recognize. That wasn’t particularly unusual; trees rarely introduced themselves. But nothing looked familiar. No trail. No hoofprints. No broken branches that might show where the mare had crashed through.

    Her stomach dropped in a way that had nothing to do with hunger.

    “You’re fine,” she told herself. The word sounded thin. “You’re not far from the road. You just… need to pick a direction and walk.”

    The problem was that every direction looked exactly the same.

    She picked one anyway. Pride could still be louder than fear, if you fed it well enough.

    For what might have been an hour—or five minutes, or three days; time warped strangely when one was drenched, cold, and stubborn—she pushed through undergrowth. The forest grew denser, not thinner. A fog crept in low, curling around her boots, rising slowly to her knees.

    At some point she realized she was shivering too hard to think properly. Her teeth clicked when she tried to clench her jaw. The knife at her thigh might as well have been a decoration. The coins sewn into her shift felt like stones dragging at her.

    Elira stopped walking because stopping was the only choice left.

    “This is ridiculous,” she whispered. Her voice sounded very small in the muffled forest. “I am Elira Varn, heir of—”

    Her throat closed around the words.

    Heir of a house she’d abandoned.

    Daughter of a man she had betrayed.

    Future wife of a man she refused to meet.

    The titles tangled in her mouth. Out here, none of them meant anything. The forest did not care whose ring she wore or whether her dowry could fund a war.

    Out here, she was just lost.

    “I did the right thing,” she said, more fiercely. “I won’t marry a man who crushes people like ants. I won’t be traded like grain. I won’t—”

    Her voice broke, not from conviction this time, but from the simple, crushing weight of exhaustion.

    What if you’ve only traded one prison for another? whispered a quieter thought. What if you die here and no one ever even knows where your bones lie?

    The idea slid through her like ice.

    Elira sank down with her back against a tree, knees drawn up, cloak dripping a dark pool around her. She pressed her forehead to her arms and let herself, for the first time since she’d left her chamber, admit the truth.

    She was lost.

    Not in the harmless way of a girl who took the wrong hallway in a castle she’d grown up in.

    Not in the romantic way of a noble who wanted to “find themselves” and had the money to get safely lost and safely found again.

    Truly lost, in a place that might never give her back.

    “Please,” she whispered, to no one in particular. “I need help. Impossible help.”

    She had never been much for prayer. The gods she’d been taught to honor had always felt distant and political, more interested in oaths and offerings than in scared girls in wet cloaks.

    Still, alone and shivering in the dark forest, she closed her eyes and let the words fall out anyway.

    “I don’t want to go back,” she said. “Not to them. Not to that life. But I don’t… I don’t know where to go instead. If anyone is listening—anyone at all—show me a path that isn’t a cage. Please.”

    Silence answered.

    For a long breath, two, three, the world held itself very still.

    Then, somewhere in the mist-veiled trees to her left, something flickered.

    Elira lifted her head, breath catching.

    At first she thought it was a trick of exhausted eyes—a remnant lightning flash, or the pale glow of fungus on old logs. But this light was warm, not cold; a steady, gentle amber, pulsing faintly as though it had a heartbeat.

    It floated at the edge of the fog, bobbing softly. As she watched, it moved closer, then paused, as if considering her.

    A lantern, she thought, before her mind had time to add any rational objections. Someone has a lantern.

    “Hello?” Her voice wobbled. “Is someone there?”

    The light brightened, then dimmed again, a slow exhale.

    Something stepped out of the fog.

    It was not a person.

    At least, not the kind she was used to.

    A fox, she thought at first—about the size of a hound, with a long, bushy tail and narrow, clever face. Its fur was a pale, silvery white, tipped in ember-gold at the ears and paws, as if it had walked through the last light of sunset and carried it away with it.

    But no fox she had ever seen had eyes like that.

    They glowed—not with the cold, hard shine of a predator in the dark, but with the same soft amber as the light it carried. And carried it did, for dangling from the end of its tail, by a thin chain that seemed made only of light, was a small lantern.

    The lantern’s glow washed the fog in warm color. Its glass panes were etched with tiny, intricate runes that shifted when she tried to focus on them.

    Elira stared.

    The fox tilted its head, studying her in turn. Its tail swayed once, the lantern swinging gently. Then, without drama, it turned and padded away a few steps. After a moment, it stopped and looked back over its shoulder.

    “Of course I finally go mad out here,” she muttered. “Why not?”

    The fox waited.

    Elira pushed herself, creaking, to her feet. Everything hurt. She was cold enough that the thought of movement felt impossible—and yet the idea of sitting back down in the dark and letting herself slowly freeze felt worse.

    “Are you… real?” she asked.

    The fox blinked slowly, as if to say: real enough.

    Then it flicked its tail. The lantern chimed once like a tiny bell and flared brighter, casting a slender path of light between roots and stones.

    Elira hesitated only a heartbeat longer.

    “If this is a trap,” she told the fox, “I will be very irritated.”

    The fox’s ears twitched. Then it turned again and slipped into the trees, lantern dancing.

    She followed.

    The path it wove was not one she would have chosen. At times the ground dropped away into shallow ravines and they had to pick their way along slick, narrow ledges. At others, they waded through knee-high ferns that slapped damp fronds against her legs.

    Whenever she faltered, the fox would pause and look back, tail swaying in patient encouragement.

    And always, the lantern light stayed just bright enough to show what lay directly before her, and no more.

    “You couldn’t make it easier?” she complained, half to herself.

    The fox’s ears flicked again, as if in dry amusement.

    “Fine,” she muttered. “Teach the lost noble a lesson in humility. Very wise.”

    Despite herself, she felt the faint ember of a laugh somewhere deep in her chest. It was small, and easily smothered, but it was there.

    They walked for what felt like hours, though the forest around them slowly changed. The trees grew a little farther apart. The underbrush thinned. The bitter, icy edge of the storm wind softened, replaced by the earthy scent of wet soil and something else—smoke?

    Elira sniffed the air more sharply.

    Yes. Smoke. Not the wild, sprawling smoke of wildfire, but the straight, disciplined thread of a single chimney.

    Hope flared so suddenly it almost hurt.

    The fox veered slightly left. The mist ahead began to glow, not from the lantern’s light, but from a broader, softer brightness.

    They stepped out of the trees onto the edge of a narrow dirt road. Elira blinked against the change in space. The road ran left and right, rutted with wagon tracks, puddles reflecting the dim sky.

    Directly ahead, not fifty paces away, hunched a building.

    It was not big; no grand inn with painted signboard and stableyard. It was a cottage, really, squatting low against the wind, its slate roof patched in places. Smoke rose from a crooked chimney. Light leaked from shutters that didn’t quite close, and from the cracks around a heavy wooden door.

    The door itself bore no sign, no crest or mark.

    Yet as Elira looked at it, something in her bones answered with a sensation very like recognition.

    She had never seen this place before in her life.

    And yet… and yet.

    The fox padded to the center of the road and sat, tail curling gracefully around its paws. The lantern settled beside it, light steady.

    Elira stepped up beside the creature, staring at the cottage.

    “I… don’t understand,” she said quietly. “I thought there was nothing on this road for miles except—”

    Except, apparently, whatever this was.

    The fox looked up at her. For a moment, its gaze felt very old, older than the forest, older than the stones of her family’s hall. It wasn’t unkind. If anything, it held a sort of weary fondness, like a teacher watching a student finally grasp a simple truth.

    It dipped its head once, then flicked its tail. The lantern chimed again. The sound was soft, but it carried—straight to the cottage.

    The door opened.

    Warm light spilled out, honey-gold and inviting. A figure stood in the doorway—broad-shouldered, apron-smudged, hair pulled back. Elira could not see their face clearly at this distance, only the outline of someone solid and real.

    “Storm’s easing!” a voice called, rough with ordinary life rather than polished court. “If you’re out there, you’d best get inside before it thinks better of it.”

    Elira swallowed.

    Choice lay in front of her like a simple line.

    Back into the forest—into cold, and fear, and her own limited understanding of the world.

    Forward into something unknown that, at least for the moment, smelled of bread and fire and the soft murmur of other voices.

    She glanced down.

    The fox was already watching her. Lantern light painted its fur in shades of warm silver. The strange runes on the glass panes shifted again, rearranging themselves into patterns she could almost, but not quite, read.

    “Is this… for me?” she asked.

    The fox’s tail brushed her ankle, a brief, gentle touch. Then it rose in one fluid movement, trotted to the edge of the road, and, with a last backward look, vanished into the trees.

    The lantern remained.

    It did not fall.

    It hung in the air for a heartbeat, then swung slowly toward the cottage door, as if anchored to a path that wasn’t entirely in this world.

    Elira stood alone on the road.

    Alone, except for the echo of her own whispered plea in her ears.

    Show me a path that isn’t a cage.

    She took a step forward.

    The lantern bobbed ahead of her, lighting the way.

    By the time she reached the cottage, she was shaking again, but for a different reason. The figure in the doorway stepped back to let her pass, and as she crossed the threshold, warmth wrapped around her like an embrace.

    Behind her, though she didn’t see it, the lantern’s light flickered once, twice, then streamed in after her, tucking itself neatly into a hook on the beam above the door.

    Its glow settled, filling the small room with a gentle, steady light that had very little to do with oil or wick.

    Outside, the forest watched. The path she had taken was already fading, roots and leaves rearranging themselves over her footprints as though they had never been.

    Far between the trees, a pair of amber eyes blinked once, satisfied.

    The Lantern Fox turned and slipped away into the night, lantern swaying at its tail once more, searching for the next heart foolish and brave enough to ask for impossible help.