The Siege of Shadows: Book one

Fear the Shadows (6)

I stood by the well, my hands cold on the rough stone as I stared into the inky depths, my mind churning with thoughts I couldn't contain. Nox, my collie, was still missing. I had combed the village, searched the outskirts, and wandered the woods just beyond the edge of Winlow, but there was no trace of him. Just an emptiness that mirrored the questions spinning in my head.

The hobgoblin's words echoed in my thoughts. "You might not be as Human as you think-
The answers you seek? They're there. In the heart of the wilds, where the old magic stirs. You might belong there, with them."

It was impossible to ignore. The weight of what it had said about the Fae lingered in the air like a faint, haunting whisper. The Fae. I had heard the stories, of course. Everyone in Winlow had. The legends told of creatures that roamed the dark, dangerous woods surrounding the village—things with power, things that lived in realms beyond the veil. But they were just stories, weren't they? Just old, fear-filled tales to keep children from wandering too far. Or at least, that's what I had always believed.

But now... now, standing here in the quiet village, with the sun beginning to dip low on the horizon, I could no longer dismiss it.

I had seen one.

A hobgoblin—small, with sharp eyes that gleamed like lanterns, its voice dripping with ancient knowledge and something darker, something I couldn't quite place. And the way it had looked at me, called me a "lost one," something about it made my skin crawl and my pulse race. It didn't know my name, but it had known I was different. Not as human as I seemed.

I pressed my palms against my eyes, trying to stave off the headache that was threatening to break through. "This doesn't make sense," I muttered to myself. "None of this makes sense."

But no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, the truth was there, gnawing at me, too loud to be silenced. The Fae were real. And for some reason, they were interested in me.

The hobgoblin had said that the answers to my questions lay deep in the Fae wilds, in the heart of the forest that the villagers had feared for as long as anyone could remember. The place it spoke up was near the veil supposedly lie, an invisible barrier separating the human world from theirs. But it had also hinted—no, insisted—that I wasn't just some random person, washed up from the Smoky Mountains. No, I was a part of something much older. Something deeper.

I couldn't deny it anymore, not with the way everything felt wrong. The way I had fallen into this world, as if pulled from one reality into another. The memory of being swept away by the flood, the water crashing over me, the feeling of being lost, drifting in some endless current—I had never been able to make sense of it. I had told myself it was just an accident, a freak occurrence.

But what if it wasn't?

What if this wasn't an accident? What if the Fae had something to do with it?

The words of the hobgoblin echoed again. "You may not be as human as you think." It made my head spin. What did it mean? What if I wasn't supposed to be here, in this village? What if I had been taken from my world for a reason?

I looked out toward the dark edge of the forest. The Fae wilds. The very place that had haunted the villagers' dreams for generations. The very place where things—creatures—were said to slip in and out of reality, where the veil between worlds grew thin and fragile.

I had always thought the Fae were a myth. Stories told around fires to keep us in line. But after seeing that hobgoblin, hearing its voice like a cold breeze, feeling the power that hummed in the air when it spoke... I couldn't deny it. I had crossed the line. The veil had let me through. And now, I was part of something much bigger than myself, something ancient and powerful.