Beltane
Swinside Stone Circle, Cumbria
The rain had started before dawn and hadn't stopped since. Not that Grey minded. She preferred the world when it was blurred.
She stood just beyond the ring of stones, boots half-sunk in moss, cloak heavy with water. The lantern in her hand swung gently, a warm circle of amber cutting through the pale morning fog. Behind her, the narrow path that curved through the ferns and nettles was already disappearing in the mist. Before her, the Swinside Circle rose from the earth like teeth—tall, ancient, and silent.
In the centre stood the girl.
She couldn't have been more than twelve. Her bare feet hovered slightly above the mud, toes curled, pale as frost. The rain passed through her.
Grey took one slow, deliberate step forward. Her boots sank slightly into the spongey moss, releasing the soft squelch of soaked earth beneath her heel. The rain whispered around her, tapping on her shoulders and hood like a dozen questioning fingers, but her steps made no sound beyond the steady hush.
"Cold, isn't it?" she said softly, her voice barely more than a breath.
A breeze stirred at the edge of the circle, but carried no chill. Normally a haunting smelled like heather and iron. Instead, there came a faint, incongruous scent—jasmine and cedar—drifting through the mist like memory. It didn't belong to the rain, nor the peat smoke clinging to the hills. It smelled like something sacred, like a gift left at the wrong altar.
She moved carefully, her posture a quiet offering of calm. She didn't reach for her tools just yet. She waited, watching the way the ghost girl turned, speaking gently—not out of ritual, but respect. Her presence was neither dominant nor deferential. She was simply… there. Kind. Real. And unafraid.
The girl didn't look at her. She was turning slowly, eyes flicking across each stone like she was trying to remember their names. "I was waiting," she said, her voice thin and distant. "But I don't remember for who."
Grey stopped just outside the circle. The stones weren't dangerous—not to her—but old things had rules, and Grey had learned to respect them. She crouched carefully, resting the lantern on a dry patch of lichen and pulling a small bundle from her coat pocket: a river pebble, a blackthorn twig, and a length of red thread wound around her smallest finger.
"I can help," she said. "If you want to go."
The girl hesitated. Her eyes—a dull grey, almost matching Grey's own, except completely devoid of spark—narrowed slightly. "Go where?"
"Not back. Not forward. Just on."
She looked at Grey for the first time. Rain still passed through her, but a single drop clung to the tip of her nose and didn't fall. "I forgot my name."
"That's alright," Grey said, and smiled with one corner of her mouth. "I'll remember it for you."
She reached out with her left hand—slowly, carefully, like catching a moth—and brushed the air near the girl's shoulder. The thread stirred. It was faint, barely visible even to her, but it glowed like moonlight behind a veil. A single strand of soul-memory, tangled and trembling. She whispered the old word under her breath, the one Maerlowe had taught her and Wickham had made crude jokes about. The thread answered.
There was a room, walls the colour of buttered cream, lit by the amber wash of morning sun. A red stuffed fox lay curled on a neatly made bed, its fur threadbare from love. Somewhere just out of sight, a girl sang—a clear, high voice carrying a lullaby that smelled like spring rain and crocus blossoms, full of memory and motion. The sound was soft and round, as if carried in cupped hands, and it danced between the sound of distant bells. The moment shimmered, impossibly gentle, as though the soul itself had curled inward to remember what it meant to be warm.
The thread pulsed once, warm and sad, and then began to fray.
Grey nodded, but her throat was tight.
"You're ready," she said, her voice low, almost reverent. She felt it then—that ache that came sometimes, not sharp like sorrow, but slow and spreading, like the weight of something sacred slipping just out of reach. The girl's soul had brushed against something old in Grey too, something she couldn't name.
A part of her wanted to speak again, to delay the moment just a little longer. But it wasn't hers to hold. So she folded her hands in her lap, grounding herself with the soft pressure of her fingertips, and let the silence settle. She didn't look away as the thread began to fade—she owed the soul that much.
She laid the red thread at the base of the central stone and wound the blackthorn around it. The soul light followed, spiralling down like mist caught in a slow whirlpool. The circle hummed faintly. The girl exhaled—and vanished, with a soft sigh that smelled of mint and milk.
Grey remained kneeling.
Rain pattered on the stone behind her. The lantern flickered. Something in her chest ached—not grief, exactly. Not loss. A kind of hollow awe.
Most souls went quietly. Most didn't linger long enough to speak. But when they did, it felt like this. Sacred. Unwritten.
She rose slowly, knees stiff. She caught her reflection in a rain-slick stone: dark hair, soaked to the shoulders, grey eyes too large for her pale face. She looked like a ghost herself. The older villagers called her Changeling, though never to her face. Not out of cruelty—more superstition than malice.
Grey didn't correct them.
She picked up the lantern and turned toward the path home.
At the edge of the treeline, someone watched.
An Unseelie Huntsman stood beneath a twisted hawthorn, one hand resting on its gnarled trunk. Rain slid from his shoulders in clean lines, darkening the black leather of his coat. His hair hung like wet ink to his waist, unbound. Eyes like amber glass followed the girl's every movement—still, arrogant, unreadable.
The soul light had pulsed too brightly. The thread had shimmered through the Veil itself.
It disquieted him.
Not the ghost—he'd seen hundreds pass. This one was slow and sad, but he had seen too many like it for it to affect him.
But the way the girl had handled it. She hadn't forced the soul on, hadn't used binding sigils or spoken the iron-tongued rites. She'd been kind. Gentle. She had asked. And the soul had answered.
That wasn't how Harrowers worked. It wasn't how they'd ever worked.
The memory of her hand brushing the air beside the ghost, like coaxing a bird to perch on her fingers, lingered in his thoughts longer than it should have. Her Threadcraft was precise, yes—but it was something else that disturbed him. Something older.
Something dangerous.
He narrowed his eyes.
Then, without sound, he turned and vanished into the trees.
Grey paused halfway down the path. The mist had thickened, folding around the hill like a curtain. The lantern's light barely reached the tips of her boots.
Something shimmered—just briefly—in the distance. For a moment it looked like a cat's eyes in the dark.
She turned and searched the treeline. Narrowed her eyes thoughtfully.
She looked at the old standing stone to her left. The rain was cold as always, but the stone felt… warmer, as though it had been watching her too. She stepped closer, breath held, heart quickening beneath the soaked linen of her shirt. The rain didn't touch this stone anymore—it hissed and steamed off its surface in faint tendrils. There, on its face, a faint spiral glowed—just for a heartbeat—etched in light rather than pigment. It pulsed with meaning too old for language, too elegant to be mere graffiti, a sigil shaped by hands that once knew how to tame stars.
A sudden wind stirred her cloak, though the trees were still. The mist shivered.
Silk brushed across her thoughts—soft, cold, and whispering secrets in a voice she almost knew. Then it vanished, leaving her mind ringing with a silence too deep to be empty.
Grey reached out. The stone was only stone.
She left the path and continued toward home. Behind her, the mist swallowed everything.