Everybody knew it-- whispered about it, written about in brilliant, glowing red on the stone archway at the entrance to the village. Everyone knew it by heart in one form or another, before they could spell their own name.
"DO NOT ENTER THE FOREST AFTER SUNSET."
Nobody ever argued about it-- not because we were mindless sheep, but because those consequences tended to be real for people who did not obey the rule, or at least, that's what people believed. The people who enter never come back. Their houses always stay [un]locked, their meals stayed cold on the table, and eventually their names fell off the lips of the living entirely.
I, Arin Vale, never thought I would find myself in the position to break it.
But love has ways of testing the oldest laws.
Her name was Elira, and she came from the other side of the river, where the sky was always orange and her voice sounded like it had once belonged to someone else. She wore a coat made of moth-wing fabric and she had a clockwork eye that ticked quietly when she was deep in thought.
She fascinated me. Not just because she was beautiful, or mysterious, or different, there was something else. She never flinched when people whispered. She never bowed when the elders of the village passed by. And she had a strange quality of staring into the forest like it whispered to her.
One night as the sun slipped behind the trees like honey, I found her standing at the edge of the woods with a satchel swung over her back.
"You can't be here," I said, "it's almost sunset."
With her one golden eye she looked at me. "Then come with me."
And just like that, before I could say no, she crossed the threshold.
I hesitated. The last threads of sunlight clawed at the earth behind me, begging me to stay. But her footsteps were already fading into the woods, and every second made the rule tremble beneath my feet.
Then I did the unimaginable.
I followed.
It wasn't like stepping into a darker version of the same world. It was like stepping out of it altogether. The trees didn't rustle. The air didn't move. The ground had a faint throbbing pulse, as if the world itself was breathing.
Elira turned and smiled. "You did it."
"What is this place?"
"It’s what’s left."
She didn’t explain. She just kept walking, deeper and deeper into the woods, and I followed, the rule shattering behind me like glass.
We went past trees that bled silver sap. Shadows that didn't belong to us. An opening in the trees where a seven-eyed deer offered us a bow, leapt and disappeared into the moonlight.
"Why aren't we dead?" I asked, "Everyone says the forest kills."
"The forest doesn't kill," Elira said, "It remembers."
I didn't understand. Not yet.
But I saw them. The watchers.
They stood in the corners. Figures without eyes, just mirrors for faces. Their bodies were like smoke sewn together in human form. And every time I blinked, they were a little closer.
"Don't be afraid of them," she said, "they're not here for you."
"Then who---"
"They're my memories."
We arrived at a pond that rippled upward like rain falling backward. Elira took off her coat and laid it next to the water.
"This is the place," she said.
"For what?"
"To fix it."
I could only watch as she knelt down next to the water and reached out her hand. Immediately, everything around us melted, like smeared oil paint. I saw flashes—fire in a city, a baby with one golden eye, a clock unwound and whirled backward in time.
"What did you do?"
"I broke the world," she murmured. "Years ago. And the forest was the only thing that kept the fragments together."
She turned to face me.
"But now that you broke the rule, it can break again."
The sky cracked.
The watchers charged. The air shrieked. The woods thrashed as if they were ejecting a parasite.
Elira shouted something that I couldn't process, drowned out by the screams. Then her eye erupted in light, and a wave of silver energy exploded outward, freezing everything mid-motion.
"You have to run," she gasped. "They can't follow you if you don't look back."
"What about you?"
She smiled with sorrow. "I was always a part of the forest. I was just taking borrowed time."
Just like that, she began to flicker, pieces of her becoming moths and flitting into the wind.
So, I turned and ran.
And didn't look back.
I broke through to the other side of the woods, and a sky thick with twilight waited for me. The village looked...different.
Smaller.
The air was crisp, the cobblestones were unfamiliar. And when I knocked on my old door, it was opened by a man I didn't recognize.
"Can I help you?"
"I live here," I said.
He frowned. "You mean the old Vale house? That family disappeared over a century ago."
They discovered me wandering barefoot in the street, dazed, babbling about Elira and the watchers. Nobody believed me, obviously. I got sent to Old Pine Asylum, and I write this story on the walls and each word is another leaf fallen from a tree no one remembers.
But some nights, when the wind is just right, I can hear her clockwork ticking, and I see moths just outside my window.
And I know that not just the rule was broken that day, but I lost a part of myself in that forest.
Forever...
React
