The forest had become my cathedral, vast, damp, and full of whispers.
The Highland wind sang low hymns through the heather and pine, as though the earth itself mourned with me. I had fled with nothing but a cloak and a blade dulled from too much fear and too little courage, yet the land, wild and merciless, had offered its reluctant mercy. It gave what it could: wild berries that stained my lips crimson, the trickle of a stream that sang its silver song through the rocks, a hollow in the roots of an ancient oak where I could hide when the riders passed.
But even in hiding, I was not free.
The smoke I had conjured that day, the desperate act that saved me from the pyre, had become the seed of a legend. I could still feel the sting of the rope on my wrists, the jeers of men who feared what they could not name. And when the mist rose in the square like the breath of some slumbering god, I had become something else in their eyes. Something unholy.
Now they called me The Huntress of Shadows.
The witch who vanished with the mist.
The spirit who walked between the living and the dead.
Their fear gave me shape; their stories gave me breath. Each night, as the moon carved her silver arc above the hills, I heard my name ripple through the valleys, carried by the drunken songs of soldiers, the hushed confessions of shepherds, the prayers of mothers who feared for their sons.
They said I could bend the wind to my will.
That I whispered to ravens and they whispered back.
That I had returned from the grave, bearing the knowledge of what lies beyond.
And with every telling, the truth of me eroded, replaced by something larger, darker, untamed.
Once, I caught my reflection in the stream, hollowed eyes, soot still staining my skin, hair tangled with pine needles, and I wondered if perhaps the myth was truer than the woman. Perhaps Elara Wyn de Roslin had perished on that pyre, and what walked now was something else entirely, the remnant of fire and smoke, of fear and fate.
For days, I wandered deeper into the wilds, moving when the sun bled low and resting when the owls began to call. I learned to listen the way the Highlanders did, not just with the ears, but with the skin, the pulse, the very marrow. The forest spoke in riddles and echoes, but it always warned me before danger came.
Even the wolves learned to give me passage.
The first time I saw them, a small pack, pale in the moonlight, their eyes bright as amber flames, I thought they would tear me apart. I stood my ground, blade raised, trembling as breath misted between us. But the alpha only tilted its head, sniffed the air, and stepped aside. The others followed.
After that night, I began to find signs of them nearby: paw prints in the soft mud near the stream, the remains of a hare left at the mouth of my shelter, a strange stillness in the air whenever I walked. It was as though the wild itself had marked me as its own, neither prey nor predator, but something in between.
And yet… even amidst this uneasy peace, there was a pull in the air, a subtle, electric shift that set my bones to humming.
It was the same sensation I had felt at the stones, just before the world split open. The same vibration beneath my skin, like a whisper rising through the marrow: You do not belong here.
The days bled into nights, the nights into weeks, until time itself seemed to lose its edges. I would wake with frost in my hair and not know whether I had slept for a night or an age. But the dreams came, wild, vivid, and heavy with portent.
I dreamed of a circle of standing stones, their shadows bending toward me like ancient watchers. I dreamed of a woman's cry, desperate, echoing through time, and of light searing through mist, brighter than dawn. I saw her face in fragments: brown curls tangled in wind, eyes filled with disbelief and terror as the world folded around her.
A stranger. A traveler.
A woman caught between centuries, as I was.
When I woke, heart hammering, I could still smell the air of that vision, iron and rain and ozone, as though it had not been a dream at all, but a warning.
Another one is coming, whispered the wind through the trees.
And I knew, with a chill that cut through the soul, that I had not fallen through the veil alone.
Who was she? Another soul bound by the stones' cruel whim? A mirror of my fate, or the harbinger of something worse? The stones had chosen me once, for reasons I still did not understand. Perhaps they were not done choosing.
But fate is not so merciful as to grant warnings without consequence.
For each night that passed, the whispers of the villagers grew louder, the search parties bolder. I saw torches flicker in the distant glens, heard the baying of hounds carried on the wind. Men hunted not for a woman, but for a story, a creature born of fear and superstition.
The Huntress of Shadows had become their phantom prey.
And in truth, I had become what they believed, invisible, patient, and unyielding.
I learned to move like mist, through silence, through darkness. I covered my trail with pine sap and smoke, wove snares to mislead them, and slept high in the branches where no man dared look. Once, a band of Dougal's scouts passed within arm's reach of my hiding place, muttering curses and prayers. I could smell their sweat, their fear, the faint tang of ale on their breath.
I might have pitied them once.
Now, I pitied only myself, for the woman I had been was gone, scattered like the ash of my near-burning.
The nights grew stranger. The air seemed to shimmer at times, a thin veil of unreality that left me breathless. When I touched certain stones, I felt them pulse beneath my fingers, faint as a heartbeat. The veil between times was thinning, or perhaps I had begun to see what others could not.
More than once, I thought I saw shadows move without cause, figures just beyond sight.
And once… I heard a voice.
"Elara."
It came from nowhere and everywhere, a low, familiar murmur that stirred the earth around me. I froze, listening. The trees were still, the stream silent. I whispered back, though I knew it was folly.
"Who's there?"
The wind sighed, and the name echoed again, softer now, almost tender.
It sounded like Murtagh.
For a heartbeat, my resolve faltered. I remembered his rough voice, the steadiness in his eyes when all others looked at me with fear. But when I turned, there was nothing, only the forest, endless and empty.
Perhaps the stones were mocking me.
Or perhaps memory itself had found a way to haunt me.
Still, I carried on, deeper, always deeper.
The glen became my home, its mists my veil. I built a shelter of moss and fallen branches, gathered herbs that dulled hunger, and learned to read the sky for storms. The seasons shifted. Winter crept upon the hills with quiet cruelty, draping the land in frost. My cloak grew heavy with damp, my fingers raw from cold, yet I endured.
And all the while, the legend grew.
I began to hear it in every passing wind: stories of a witch whose touch could heal or curse, whose eyes glowed in moonlight, whose voice could call rain. They said I walked with wolves, that I had no shadow, that the Devil himself had marked me.
The truth no longer mattered.
In their world, truth was what they feared most.
So I became their fear.
Once, I stumbled upon a pair of hunters resting by a fire. I crept close, hidden behind the brush, and listened.
"…swear I saw her, I did," one said, voice trembling. "Black cloak, hair wild as storm, eyes like embers. She looked right through me."
"And you're still alive to tell it?" the other scoffed.
"She let me go. As if… as if she knew me."
They fell silent after that, their fire crackling like the heartbeat of the woods. When they left, I stepped from the shadows and stared into the dying embers.
It struck me then, they had begun to build their own religion from my ghost.
And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
But beneath that fear, a deeper truth stirred, one that made my skin prickle and my heart race.
The air itself was changing. The same energy I had once felt at Craigh na Dun now rippled faintly through the glen. It hummed in the stones, in the earth beneath my feet, in the way the wind seemed to hold its breath at dusk.
Something was awakening.
One night, as I stood on a ridge overlooking the valley, I saw it, a faint shimmer far to the east, like lightning trapped in fog. The stones. They were alive again.
And in that light, I understood.
Another crossing was near.
Another soul was being called.
Perhaps the same power that had ripped me from my time was preparing to do so again.
Perhaps the woman from my dreams, the one who screamed through the centuries, was already on her way.
A pang of fear ran through me, sharp and cold.
If I stayed too close, our fates might collide, and the world could not bear two lost souls walking its past at once.
So I did what I must.
I wrapped myself in the dark, in shadow, in silence, in the solitude I had made my penance. I gathered my few belongings: the dull blade, the threadbare cloak, the small pouch of herbs Murtagh had given me long ago.
I took one last look at the world I had both loved and feared, the endless sea of heather, the mournful pines, the sky heavy with stormlight. Then I turned toward the deeper glen, where the stones whispered softly in the wind.
They called my name, not with malice, but with memory.
As though they, too, mourned the woman I had been.
And as I walked into their shadow, I thought, perhaps this was what it meant to be a ghost before death.
To live unseen.
To breathe in silence.
To vanish, until even the world forgot the sound of your name.