The Border Mist

The mist

In the heart of the world lay a fertile land where the people had known both war and peace in equal measure. The soil yielded every crop, the mountains gave up silver and iron, and the rivers ran sweet. Life was good—except for one thing: the country’s eastern border pressed against the Land of Mist, a place men called the Country of the Living Dead.

On the last golden morning of summer, old Master Tam worked his potato field that ran right up to that border. A low wall of piled stones and a thin hedge were all that separated his ripe rows from the wall of swirling grey mist that never lifted, never thinned. Beyond that wall, it was said, a single step could carry a man a hundred paces from where he meant to go, and the dead walked hungry.

Tam was bent over his crop, humming, when his foot caught an exposed root. He pitched forward, arms windmilling, and tumbled straight through the hedge.

He landed on his backside in cool, clinging fog.

For a moment he only laughed at himself. “If Dune the drunk saw that,” he muttered, brushing dirt from his trousers, “he’d swear I’d been at his cider.”

Then the laughter died.

The sunlight was gone. The air tasted of graves. The mist pressed against his skin like wet wool, and when he turned, his farm—his house, his scarecrow, the very hills he had known all his life—had vanished.

A chill crawled up his spine. Everyone knew the tales: one wrong step inside the Mist and the world slipped away forever.

“Tam,” a voice said behind him. Dry. Familiar. Impossible.

He turned slowly.

His grandfather stood ten paces off, unchanged from the day he died thirty years ago: tall, stern, eyes like winter ponds.

“Grandfather?” Tam’s voice cracked like a boy’s.

“So the blood runs thin after all,” the dead man said. “Generation after generation scratching in the dirt like peasants. Your father was a disappointment. I see you are no better.”

Tam’s temper flared, but fear quenched it. One did not bandy words with the dead. “I mean no disrespect,” he said quietly.

“Disrespect?” The spirit took a soundless step closer. “If your father had listened to me, you would sit on the throne by now instead of grubbing for potatoes.”

“That throne burned the night you died, Grandfather. The kingdom is a story we tell children.”

The old man’s face twisted. For a heartbeat Tam thought teeth and claws would follow, that the Mist would drag him down its due. Instead the ghost only sneered.

“Go, then. Live your small life. But hear me: stumble in here again and I will hollow you out and wear your skin back across the border. I will yet have what was promised me.”

“How do I leave?” Tam asked, hating the tremble in his words.

“Give the Mist blood and beg,” the ghost spat. “It likes manners.”

Tam drew his sickle, nicked his palm, and let three drops fall into the grey. “Please,” he said to the fog, “return me to the living.”

The Mist coiled, tugged, and began to move.

He walked for three days without sun or stars, eating nothing, drinking dew from unseen leaves, following the pull around his bleeding hand. On the morning of the fourth day the fog parted and he staggered into warm sunlight and the smell of turned earth.

He was home.

But peace would not stay.

The dead man’s words gnawed at him. Every dusk he found himself staring east, watching the Mist crawl like a slow tide against his stone wall. Sleep brought his grandfather’s face, promising to return.

At last he went to Wise Oren, eldest of the village council.

When Tam finished his tale, the old man was silent a long while, stroking his white beard.

“The Mist has always hungered,” Oren said at last. “Long ago our kings bound it with the Amulet of Light and set it in a garden at the heart of that country. The binding frays. Your grandfather is but the first of many who will reach through.”

“There is still an amulet?” Tam asked.

“Still there. Still shining. But no living man has walked so deep and returned.”

Tam looked toward the border. “Then I will be the first.”

He left at dawn with a short sword, a waterskin, and a pine-knot torch that burned with clear white flame—one of the old tricks Oren remembered.

The Mist took him at once. The torch shrank to a candle, then to a spark, yet it did not die. He walked until time lost meaning, guided only by the faint warmth in his chest that told him the amulet was near.

At last the fog thinned and he stepped into a circle of flowers that glowed like moonlit snow. In their center, on a pedestal of black stone, hung the Amulet of Light—no larger than a walnut, yet bright enough to sting the eyes.

Tam reached for it.

The clearing erupted with shrieks.

Shapes poured from the Mist—things that had once been men and wolves and worse, eyes burning with green corpse-fire. They ringed him, hundreds strong, reaching with broken fingers.

Tam lifted the amulet. Light exploded outward, white and soundless. Where it touched, the dead burned like paper, mouths open in silent agony. The clearing became a pyre of clean flame.

When the last ash settled, Tam was on his knees. The torch had gone out. The amulet’s glow was fading in his fist, its work finished, its strength spent in one great burst.

He tried to stand and could not. The Mist folded gently around him, almost kindly now, as if grateful.

Three days later the border wall stood empty. The Mist had drawn back a full bowshot from the stones, revealing barren earth where nothing would ever grow again. Beyond that scar, the fog was thinner, quieter. Children could play near the hedge without their mothers’ hearts stopping.

The people raised a cairn for Master Tam at the new edge of the world. On it they carved a sickle and a single glowing flower.

And on quiet evenings, when the wind came from the east, some swore they heard an old man’s grumble turning slowly, slowly, into a laugh.

The land was safe.

The debt was paid.

And potatoes, that year, grew sweeter than ever before.