The forest never gave back what it took.
Ten years had passed since her mother vanished, and Isla Blackwood had not returned to the cottage at the edge of the woods—not even to collect her belongings. Ember Hollow, ever fearful and full of whispers, had already boarded the place shut. The villagers called it cursed. They called her cursed too.
They didn't say it to her face, but they didn't need to.
Their stares followed her like shadows.
She now lived with the Halwells, a solemn couple who owned a dusty apothecary tucked between the chapel and the smithy. Liora Halwell had soft eyes and hands that always trembled slightly when she braided Isla's hair. Calem, her husband, was made of stone—barely spoke, barely blinked, and never smiled.
They gave her the attic room.
The floor creaked with every step, and the small round window looked out toward the graveyard hill. Some nights, Isla would lie awake and count the gravestones, pretending her mother was only asleep beneath one of them, waiting to be found.
But each morning came without answers.
And each night, the whispers grew louder.
It started with flickers—barely glimpsed figures in the corner of her eye. Then came the dreams. Twisted things: blackened hands reaching through the floorboards, burning skies, and that damned bell—always tolling thirteen times.
She never told the Halwells.
She didn't tell anyone.
Instead, she scribbled it all into the back pages of an old herb journal Lady Hallswell had given her. Pages filled with ink stains and frantic sketches. The same symbols she'd seen on the gate in the woods. The same symbols she'd drawn as a child, long before she'd ever known what they meant.
She didn't know what was happening to her.
Only that something had been left behind when her mother disappeared. Something dark.
Something inside her.
---
It was on a gray morning in late autumn when Isla first saw him.
She was walking back from the market, a basket of dried angelica tucked under her arm, when the air shifted.
She felt it before she saw it—like a pull behind her ribs.
Across the square, beside the crumbling statue of Saint Vellis, stood a stranger. Tall. Dressed in black. His hair tousled, cloak frayed from travel. His eyes—dark and sharp as broken obsidian—met hers with unnerving calm.
She stopped walking.
Everything around her—the market chatter, the wind, the noise—blurred into silence.
And then he turned, disappearing down a narrow alley that no one ever used.
Gone.
She stood frozen, heart pounding.
She didn't know him. Had never seen him in Ember Hollow before.
But something deep in her bones knew this wasn't the last time.
---
That night, the dreams returned—more vivid than ever.
She was standing at the gate again. Only this time, the stone was cracked, bleeding black mist. A figure stood on the other side, half-shadow, half-fire. Eyes like nightfall. A voice, distant but familiar, whispered her name:
"Isla…"
She woke with a gasp, the sheets twisted around her like a shroud.
The pendant around her neck—her mother's last gift—was ice-cold.
She didn't sleep again.
Somewhere beneath the floorboards, the whispering had begun.
And in the hills beyond Ember Hollow, the thirteenth toll waited for its hour.