The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 6

Nella drew back from the window, pulled her woolen hood over her ears, and eased the latch of her cottage door. The iron was cold enough to tear the skin from her fingers, but she barely felt the bite. Slipping outside into the icy lane, she pulled the door shut behind her, making sure the latch fell silently into its keeper. The bitter mountain air hit her face like a sheet of wet canvas, smelling faintly of woodsmoke, rotting bark, and the sharp, alkaline tang of frost. Keeping to the heavy shadows cast by the overhanging thatch of the workshops, Nella trailed the column of sleepwalkers, her boots pressing silently into the mud.

The procession wound through the crooked lanes of the village, turning away from the square and heading steadily toward the perimeter. As they passed the blacksmith’s forge, Nella looked up at the shuttered second-story windows. Inside, she knew, the adult villagers lay beneath the heavy stupor of the ghost-poppy, snoring in their warm beds, their minds scrubbed clean of the missing hour. Not a single shutter opened; not a single lantern flickered to life. The village was an open tomb, allowing its own young to be herded out into the dark without raising a single hand to bar the way.

At the edge of the settlement stood the ancient boundary ward-stones—massive, moss-encrusted boulders dragged down from the cliffs generations ago to mark the line no villager was ever meant to cross. The elders warned constantly of the wilderness beyond: of bottomless fissures, packs of feral gray wolves, and sheer drops where the mountain shelf fell away into the fog. But Finnian did not pause at the stone markers. He led the column straight between the two largest megaliths, his small feet crushing the dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor.

Nella hesitated for the fraction of a heartbeat at the stones. A prickle of ancient, superstitious dread crawled across her scalp, whispering of old pacts and f*******n thresholds. But ahead of her, Brielle Foster let out a ragged, wet cough that rattled in her fragile chest, her small body swaying slightly before snapping back into the uncanny, hypnotic rhythm of the march. The sight snapped the hesitation in Nella’s limbs. Drawing her cloak tight around her shoulders, she stepped past the ward-stones and plunged into the f*******n timber after them.

The moment she crossed the boundary line, the nature of the woods transformed. The weeping ash trees here grew so close together that their twisted, lichen-scabbed trunks formed a solid wooden palisade on either side of the narrow game trail. Overhead, their branches intertwined in a dense, suffocating ceiling, hanging thick with gray beards of Spanish moss and pale, stringy fungus that dripped freezing moisture onto Nella’s face. The air was dead, heavy with the stench of stagnant water, decaying wood, and centuries of undisturbed leaf rot. Yet despite the sub-zero chill that coated the dead leaves in hoarfrost, Nella noticed a terrifying detail: the children ahead of her were not breathing out steam.

She rubbed her eyes, blinking hard against the darkness. Finnian, Brielle, and the older boys leading the line moved through the biting cold without a single wisp of vapor escaping their lips or nostrils. Their small, bare shoulders rose and fell, but they produced no warmth, no heat to react against the freezing air. When Nella exhaled, a thin, faint plume of fog drifted from her lips, but even hers was wispy and sluggish, dying almost before it left her mouth. She quickened her pace, her heart knocking against her ribs in that strange, hollow rhythm, closing the distance between herself and the tail of the procession.

The trail ascended steeply, winding through a jagged gully where the mountain seemed to have split open in some long-forgotten upheaval. High, sheer walls of wet black granite rose on either side, slick with weeping sheets of black ice that mirrored the dim, dead twilight. The children navigated the treacherous, stone-choked floor with terrifying, mechanical agility. Where Nella slipped on ice-glazed roots and bruised her shins against sharp shards of slate, six-year-old Brielle leaped over fallen trunks with effortless grace, never once looking down, her sightless stare fixed forward.

After half an hour of relentless climbing, the narrow gully terminated abruptly against an impassable barrier.

It was the western cliff-face—the sheer, monolithic wall of solid granite that formed the valley's western rim, rising two hundred feet straight up into the hanging fog. There was no pass, no cleft, and no trail continuing beyond. The jagged floor ended in a pocket of damp gravel hemmed in by the stone wall. Flush against the sheer cliff stood two ancient, dead weeping ashes. Their massive, gnarled trunks were thicker than haywains, their bark bleached of all pigment and split by deep, vertical fissures, their dead roots clawing into the black granite like the fingers of drowning men.

Finnian did not slow his stride.

Panic surged through Nella’s veins, hot and sharp. "Finnian!" she whispered, the word tearing from her throat in a ragged hiss. She broke from the shadows of the rocks, lunging forward over the frozen scree. "Finnian, stop! The rock—"

Her voice produced no echo; it was swallowed instantly by the dead moss hanging from the boughs. Finnian did not turn. He marched directly toward the narrow space between the two dead ash trunks, where the black granite wall waited to shatter his fragile skull.

Then, the air between the trees began to boil.

Nella froze, her boots sliding in the loose gravel. The space between the bleached trunks shimmered like the air above a blacksmith’s hearth, rippling with oily, iridescent ribbons of light. A pale, luminous gray mist began to bleed out of the rock face itself, pooling over the roots like freezing steam. The solid black granite did not c***k or crumble; it simply thinned, losing its opacity, turning translucent and watery, as though the mountain were nothing more than a sheet of oiled parchment held before a distant lantern. Through the shimmering veil of mist, Nella could see an impossible horizon: a flat, colorless void extending beneath a blinding sky of flickering white static, entirely devoid of earth, trees, or mountains.

Finnian reached the threshold. Without a moment of hesitation, without breaking his fluid stride, the boy stepped forward.

His right foot touched the pale mist, and the lower half of his leg simply ceased to exist in the valley. His small torso leaned forward, his linen smock fluttering in a wind that did not blow from Somber Hollow, and then he sheared straight through the surface of the granite. It was not a fall, nor was it a passage through a tunnel; it looked as though he were stepping through a tear in a painted canvas. One moment his pale back and tangled hair were visible in the dim mountain light, and the next, he was entirely gone, swallowed by the gray shimmer.

Immediately behind him, Brielle Foster stepped up to the fissure. Her small, bare feet crossed the lip of the rock, the hems of her soiled nightgown brushing against the mist.

"Brielle, no!"

The maternal terror that had coiled in Nella’s gut snapped like an overwound cord. Forgetting caution, forgetting the strange coldness in her own limbs, she launched herself across the gravel. Her boots skidded over the wet roots, her shoulder slamming hard into the petrified bark of the left-hand ash tree. The shock rattled her bones, but she did not stop. She threw herself forward, her arm shooting out into the shimmering gray boil, her fingers clawing frantically for purchase.

She caught the coarse woolen hem of Finnian’s coat just as the boy’s shoulders were slipping entirely through the rift.

The instant Nella’s bare fingers breached the mist, an intense, arctic shockwave detonated through her hand. It was not the cold of winter snow or mountain ice; it was a pure, predatory vacuum that sucked the sensation from her skin in a single violent pulse. An electric charge raced up her forearm, prickling through the bone like millions of microscopic needles, vibrating straight into the hollow chamber behind her ribs.

All the sensory reality of the mortal world cut off as cleanly as a severed thread. The smell of wet loam, the stink of decaying leaves, the bitter fragrance of pine pitch, the distant dripping of mountain water—everything vanished in a fraction of a heartbeat. They were replaced by a freezing, bone-dry draft that tasted of pure ozone, crushed chalk, and static electricity.

Nella tried to plant her feet in the gravel, intending to haul the boy backward out of the tear, but the fissure did not operate on mortal physics.

A violent, gravitational suction seized her wrist, as though the rift itself possessed a starving, desperate appetite. Instead of pulling Finnian out, the current wrenched Nella forward off her feet. Her boots lost their purchase on the scree, her knees hitting the wet moss, and then she was being hauled violently through the stone.

She screamed, but no sound came from her throat. The sheer granite wall dissolved around her vision into a blinding, featureless roar of white glare. The physical world folded inward with a sickening, elastic snap, twisting her ribs, compressing the empty chamber beneath her sternum until she felt entirely hollow, a skin of cloth and ash dragged through the eye of a needle into the absolute void beyond.

The world returned not with a sound, but with the brutal, jarring impact of dead matter against bone. Nella slammed into the ground on her hands and knees, the breath punched from her lungs in a sharp, dry rasp. There was no splash of icy autumn mud, no yielding give of wet moss or needle-strewn loam, and no familiar smell of rotting weeping ash. The earth beneath her splayed palms gave way with a powdery, hollow crunch, like a crust of compressed flour laid over dry bone. When she dragged her hands inward, gasping for air, her fingers sank into a fine, alkaline silt that felt lighter than ash and colder than river gravel. It clung to the damp wool of her skirt and coated her knuckles in a chalky, pale scum that immediately sucked every trace of moisture from her skin.