prompt: ghost hunting - garden
fable: Mendorientry:Beneath the Willows
Mendori arrived at the hotel with meticulous documentation. She had heard the rumors: a haunting, unexplained phenomena, supernatural occurrences. Most would dismiss such things as superstition. But Mendori recognizes a system in chaos, and a system can be understood. Mapped. Controlled.
She came not for adventure, but to prove that even the inexplicable follows rules.
The groundskeeper's warning should have been routine: stay on the paths, don't approach the lake. Mendori appreciates clear boundaries. But the figure's abrupt disappearance suggests something that breaks its own rules. An inconsistency. A flaw in the pattern.
She cannot leave a flaw unexamined.
The footpath curves deliberately around the lake, and Mendori traces its geometry, looking for the logic beneath. Someone designed this boundary intentionally. Someone understood that the lake required containment. But why?
She moves closer to the path's edge and examines the lake. The water's surface reflects nothing true, not the sky, not the trees, not her. It reflects something else. Something that moves beneath, a pattern shifting in tune with her breathing.
The air here is colder. Colder than it should be in a garden at midday. And there's a sound, almost beneath hearing, like wind through a cave.
Mendori has spent her entire existence imposing order. Calling out times. Demanding precision. Building schedules tight enough so that her people can move like clockwork, predictable and controlled.
But this lake does not follow her rules. The thought should disturb her. Instead, it thrills her in a way she doesn't want to examine too closely.
She counts backward from three, grounding herself, and observes the water more carefully. The patterns are not random. They follow a logic, just not one she recognizes. Yet. There is meaning here. There is structure. She simply hasn't decoded it. Her voice, when she speaks, is steady but not quite as commanding as usual.
"I am here for answers," she announces to the empty garden. "Show yourself, or cease this game."
The water stills completely. For a moment, nothing moves. Then, from beneath the willows, she hears it: a sound like a bell, ringing once, clear and true. Mendori's pulse quickens. Not from fear, but from recognition. That sound. She knows that frequency. She's heard it before, or something like it, in the moment between sleep and waking.
"Show yourself," she repeats, disdain creeping in her tone.
The bell sounds twice, then three times. A pattern. A rhythm that is not hers. One that she didn't create and can't control.
She steps forward, head high, taking care to remain on the path, closer to the water's edge. The willows seem to lean toward her, their branches creating a bower of shadow and green. The lake's surface begins to shimmer, not with reflected light, but with something else. Phosphorescence, maybe. Or something that has no name in the waking world.
The bell continues its rhythm, faster now. Building. Insistent. Mendori realizes, with startling clarity, that this is not a haunting. This is a summoning. And she has always been punctual.
The question is: what called her? And more importantly: what does it want?
She takes another step forward. The path curves, and suddenly she can see the lake's center. There, where the water should be still and empty, something breaks the surface. Not a creature, not quite. A shape made of light and sound and the memory of something that was never quite alive.
It forms itself slowly, deliberately, as if constructing itself from the very fabric of the garden. Translucent. Waiting.
Three, two, one. She counts silently, centering herself.
Whatever this is (ghost, spirit, manifestation, or something without a proper name) it has shown her respect by warning her away.
"What is your name?" she asks the figure.
The bell sounds again, and in its resonance, she hears an answer forming.
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prompt: ghost hunting - forest
fable: Merewifentry:Among the Pines
Merewif came to the hotel because something is wrong with its forest.
She felt it three days' journey away, a disturbance in the natural order, a rhythm fallen out of sync. The trees here do not sing the way they should. The moss does not settle right. The air tastes of copper and a silence she does not know. A silence that hungers.
When she heard the rumors of a haunting, she understood. This is not a ghost story. It is a predator out of balance.
She approaches the woods as she approaches all hunts: with the understanding that what she does here matters. The seasons depend on it. The cycle depends on it. She has come to restore what has been broken.
The figure leaning against the tree trunk is unexpected. Merewif does not recognize her. She speaks of lost hounds, of searching, with a casual indifference that grates on her. Up to you, she says, as though the return of her hounds is optional. As though consequences don't ripple outward.
Merewif does not respond to her. Instead, she moves past, into the woods.
She notices immediately; the trees are wrong. Their bark is too smooth in places, too rough in others, as if something has been moving through them, reshaping them. The autumn breeze that rustles the branches carries a scent she cannot identify; not decay, not blood, not anything that fits what she knows.
She is, for the first time in years, uncertain.
Merewif does not like uncertainty. But she moves deeper anyway, her hooves careful on the forest floor, her breathing measured.
The light is fading. Merewif thinks she has perhaps thirty minutes before the forest becomes even more hostile.
She finds a clearing. Small, perfect, surrounded by ancient pines whose trunks are thick enough to anchor the world.
Merewif settles into stillness the way others settle into sleep. Her breathing slows. Her muscles relax into readiness; not tension, but potential. Her eyes, deep and patient, open fully to the darkening forest. She does not move. She does not chase. She simply is, present and inevitable as gravity, as the turning of seasons.
Her ritual begins.
The forest notices. She feels it; the wrongness shifting, turning toward her like a flower toward light. Something that has been prowling the trees, consuming whatever it touches, senses her presence and understands, the way predators understand each other: here is something that will not run.
It emerges slowly from between the pines. Not solid. Not quite real. It is made of the forest's own corruption, shaped from the broken things that dwell here. It moves toward her deliberately, drawn by her stillness the way moths are drawn to flame.
Merewif does not move. She watches it approach, this broken thing, hungry and half-alive. She understands now what has happened here. Something was killed in this place, poorly, incompletely. It has been festering ever since, reshaping the forest in its image.
The creature stops before her. Close enough that she can feel the wrongness radiating from it, the way it distorts the air itself.
"You," it says, a sound like rot hollowing a tree. "You are different."
Merewif does not answer.
"You do not run. You do not fight."
Still, she does not move.
The creature circles her slowly, searching for weakness, for hesitation, for anything that might explain her composure.
"What are you?" it finally asks.
Merewif's eyes track it as it moves, but her body remains still.
The creature recoils. For the first time, fear flickers across its corrupted form.
And in that moment of fear, Merewif understands: the hunt has already begun. The prey has already been drawn. All that remains is the ritual's completion.
The darkness deepens. The forest holds its breath.
Merewif waits.
