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The frost had only just begun to set on the night Cecylia Broz went missing.
It had been the very heart of autumn, and the chill in the air kept most from wandering outside to possibly see what happened. If it hadn’t been for one of her classmates, a boy who lived near the forest’s edge spotting her solitary trek through the window, it would have seemed like she vanished into thin air.
According to his testimony and those of anyone who knew her, she walked up to the woods and entered it without hesitation, completely alone and without speaking a word of it to anyone beforehand.
The immediate reaction had been panic. Countless hours were spent canvasing the forest, desperately searching for any sign of where she could have gone and what could have happened. Nearby towns were warned to be on high alert. For months the remaining teens of the community were placed under a strict curfew to keep the same from happening to them.
But time passed, as it always did, and no further evidence ever came up.
Slowly, the restrictions started to lift. Searches went from daily to weekly until they stopped altogether. The official curfew was eventually dropped, and before long parents stopped caring if their kids went out alone. Even the caution tape blocking off the forest itself was removed before a year had passed.
It was a tragedy, but there was nothing they could do. Cecylia was still lost, still gone, but that had become just another fact of life. Their community had little changed in the wake of the incident, besides the absence of one teen girl.
The adults completely moved on by the next year, with shaking heads and kind words but nothing concrete to offer. The kids who actually knew Cecylia, though, still whispered. She had never told anyone about leaving for the woods, never hinted that there was anywhere she needed to go or anyone she might want to meet, but that didn’t mean she had been quite herself leading up to her disappearance.
It was nothing major enough to be of note to detectives, so they had ignored it in favor of the more concrete eyewitness testimony, as limited as that was. It hadn’t even seemed related enough to look into.
But for months before she took off alone, Cecylia had spoken of a fog only she ever saw, and none of the children had quite forgotten that, even as the adults looked away and dismissed it.
Kasandra had never been close enough to Cecylia to have been told about the fog personally, in that time, but she certainly heard about it afterwards. The logical among the crowd assumed she had had a mental health crisis that was both missed and dismissed. The popular rumor, though, suggested that she was spirited away by the fog itself.
Before, Kasandra had agreed with the realists amongst her peers.
Before, she only knew about the fog through the whispered rumors after the fact.
Before, she thought the only connection she had to Cecylia was that they grew up in the same small community but never quite close enough to be associated regardless.
Then Kasandra saw the fog herself.
If the rumors were to be believed, Cecylia had sold it short by a wide margin. She had heard of the girl offhandedly mentioning it was a bit hard to see through a haze no one else experienced, or commenting on it being hotter than one would expect with as much coverage she noticed on a cloudless day.
It was odd, and it was alarming, but it was also simplistic enough that the first day, Kasandra didn’t even make the connection between the missing girl’s concerns and her own sudden plight.
The morning it started, she woke up the same as usual, only to see a wall of pure white outside her window instead of the pleasant weather that’d been promised by reports.
What she saw was not a haze or some low hanging clouds. The fog was an overwhelming force, a billowing miasma of darkness that covered the entire town. Kasandra could barely see a foot in front of her face amongst the murky vapor, but when she said as much to her mother…
“It’s just a touch cloudy, dear. You won’t have any trouble getting to school.”
Her walk to school, usually a simple ten minute walk, was suddenly instead a nightmarish trek through an overwhelming darkness that curled around her limbs and blocked out all sight. She was nearly an hour late to school.
What she had hoped was just a bizarre, unfortunate day kept happening. Everyone became frustrated when she seemed distracted. Being on time to anything became impossible, and she didn’t have an excuse anyone would accept. There were just disappointed looks she could just barely make out through the haze, coloring every glimpse of humanity she could manage to take hold of.
(There had been one day where it was clear. One day where the fog was gone, and she could go about life like it was before. No one got annoyed at her and she could see the sunlight through the window. She thought she might have, just possibly, imagined the whole incident.
Kasandra went to bed more at peace than she had been in months.
Kasandra woke up to a world of grey.
It was worse, after that, even as it was the same as it ever was.)
Everything had changed, and no one else noticed, and no one else cared. It was frustrating, it was maddening, and Kasandra wasn’t sure what she was meant to possibly do about it.
Until, one day, she realized there was a movement in the fog. Subtle, barely noticeable, but present all the same: a swirling from a specific direction, always blowing the same way. It took time to figure out where that path could lead, weeks trying to follow the directions only she could see, but she wasn’t surprised by the results.
The frost had only just begun to set on the night Kasandra retraced Cecylia’s steps.
While it was nearly impossible to properly see through both the darkness and the mist, she was still able to reach the forest without much trouble regardless. The fog itself, overwhelming as it was, was still moving all around her, pushing out of its supposed source and swirling away, so all she had to do was move against that current.
If there was anyone around to see, like there had been for Cecylia, Kasandra wouldn’t have known. Cecylia couldn’t have known she had been seen then, either. None of the nearby houses were visible through the murk, outside of an occasional hulking shadow.
If there was anyone around to see, none of them moved to stop her like no one stopped Cecylia either. While there were a few stray pieces of caution tape near the entrance of the forest from the road, brightly colored enough to pop out and be seen, they weren’t positioned in any way that could stop her either. There was nothing in place that could cease what was happening.
The community didn’t care to notice the first time. Why would they now?
She knew she reached the forest only when the ground beneath her shifted from concrete to twigs breaking with her footfalls and occasionally steps sinking more into cold mud than she would prefer it to. It seemed like it had to have been a practical miracle that she didn’t run into any of the trees that had to be surrounding her by this point as she couldn’t see a single one.
The fog had gotten worse, after all, as soon as she entered the threshold. Kasandra, and Cecylia before her, had to have been right about the source coming from the woods. It was a comfort, to be so sure that something in this whole mess couldn’t have been imagined, that she absolutely noticed the direction it seemed to swirl and seep from, until she followed it back here.
She didn’t know what she could possibly find, what could possibly be causing what she’d been experiencing, but it had to be here, amongst the murk that made up her world. If she found it, maybe she could stop it.
Kasandra made a concerted effort into not thinking about the fact that this path has been walked before, and no one had seen Ceyclia since.
It was difficult to find something else to think about, though, in the sea of darkness she found herself having to swim through. Without sight, her thoughts circled wildly through every possibility of how this could end, of what could happen, of what would certainly happen to her.
Then for a moment, for an instant, something disrupted that unending grey.
It was so quick Kasandra wasn’t even sure what it was that she saw. A flash of a large, dark shadow that was gone as quickly as it appeared. It was large enough, in fact, that she instinctively shot her gaze in its direction, twisting her head so quickly with a gasp that it threw her entirely off balance.
Her footing was impossible to see, through the smog and darkness of the night, but it was easy enough to realize she was on the edge of a hillside when gravity pulled her down and tipped her over the edge.
It was a miracle that her head didn’t land on a rock on impact, but it was hard to consider that when it instead bounced off the cold dirt, stealing her breath before she could so much as scream. The hill had to have been at a steep incline as well, since instead of settling where she fell, free to crumple into herself as pain seeped through her body, Kasandra began to tumble further down.
Each turn of her body felt harsher and crueler than the one before it, and it didn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. Did the forest even have hills as tall as this? She couldn’t remember any, but then again she never spent much time amongst the trees before, so she couldn’t have properly known.
Did Cecylia fall like this? Did she know that it was possible to tumble down, and down, until she wasn’t herself anymore, just a story that disappeared into the night? Was that what happened to her?
Was it happening to Kasandra now?
How long would the town look for her, before giving up and moving on? She remembered how quickly everything went back to the way it was, once they stopped caring about the girl who went missing without a trace. It’d probably go by even quicker, this time, the sensationalism and novelty gone.
Just another crazy girl who talked about fog that wasn’t there disappearing into it, who’d only be mentioned in whispers and legends by a year’s time.
The pain and dizziness was so overwhelming that Kasandra didn’t even actually notice she had stopped rolling until the sound of footsteps cut through the buzzing in her head.
Even then, it took her a moment to even remember how to look up, how to do anything but lay there, sore and weary. The motion was slow going, and her eyes were just barely open to see what stood before her.
She didn’t even notice that the fog was, for that instant, gone.
But she did notice the soft smile that greeted her, the hand outstretched to help her up, and the shockingly clean appearance of Cecylia Broz looking down on her.
There was a shadow behind Cecylia, a looming thing that Kasandra was certain had to have been what made her trip to begin with. It probably should have scared her. It would have, if Cecylia’s hand didn’t look so inviting.
If anyone understood the pain she was in right now, it would be Cecylia. The girl who was ignored, who was dismissed, who was pushed aside until she vanished, from the town first and then from their minds. It would happen to Kasandra too. It’d already started.
The ground was coated in a low hanging mist as she struggled to sit up, which emanated from the feet of the creature hovering in their space, but that didn’t seem to matter much as Kasandra took Cecylia’s hand and stood up, finally understood.