Chapter Text
The stories started first with Gillan, daughter of Tyre. No one else in living memory could recall a time where her hair wasn't white, or had a back that didn't stoop. No one knew how old she was. But her hands never trembled to pull a bowstring taut, and her shots always placed fair and true. Her little house was also the farthest residence from the Meeting Point, right on the edge of the forest, and if the Dead were ever to come, they would pass by her front porch before anywhere else. Her tales were thus treated with alarm rather than passed off as the paranoid ramblings of an old woman.
Genim, who was the son of the Sheriff, knew the following: that for a week, a rotating guard was dispatched to patrol the forest edge during the night; that the townspeople shouldn't have known, but they tittered up a storm all the same, their children purporting wild tales and dares amongst each other; that while the first few patrols were tense and fearful, by the last day the guards were joking and smiling as they set out; that nothing was found but Gillan kept insisting, and wouldn't be placated no matter what was said.
A month later Gillan, daughter of Tyre, mother of Martin, who had lived by the woods all her life with a quiver of arrows strapped to her back, was found dead.
There was no obvious cause. No sickness for a natural death, no signs of struggle in the little property. And yet there it was, Gillan in a collapsed heap on the ground with her dirty trousers on, long cold by the time her son had found her. Old age was the obvious answer, but the townspeople were suspicious all the same. Gillan was old but strong, they said, and it just didn't seem right that such a sprightly woman should die in such a way.
The next day, Sydrielle, the orphan girl who fancied herself a lost lady and claimed to be a Seer, was found crying on top of their little Town's charter stone, body littered with marks. She would not speak for another three years. Gorden, coming back from chopping firewood, would not stop chanting in a nonsensical language, singing in a tilting, haunted voice.
There were whispers, now, of a little road that only appeared at night, that none of the townspeople have ever seen. There were fearful hushed whispers insisting on eyes that follow you, of low, dragging groans; of fog settling in a clearing so thick that one could not look across, and yet never spilling into the tree line.
Of ghost children transparent as charter sendings, a faint tang of metal lodged in the back of the throat.
It was Madeline next month, a five year old with parents from down South, beyond the whistling Wall. They dragged her water-logged body up an old well, its rough stone brick colder than the corpse from the permanent shade. Her eyes were wide open, her fingertips raw from grasping at the cold stone, and on her arm...
Sheriff Stilinski penned the letter to Belisaere that very night.