Witer's Cramp - 10-5 992 Words

Valley of Shadows - When those who do not learn from the past suffer from their own folly

         

Valley of Shadows

          We always lived under the shadow, south of what the maps called Mount Aethel, but every soul in the valley called Misty Mountain. It wasn't the height that earned the name; it was the legend.

          The old stories, the ones whispered only when the wind was down and a fire was roaring, spoke of a time when the mountain wasn't just a landmark, but a sovereign entity. Once upon a time, they said, a thick, living Mist would descend annually. It would roll down the slopes, swallowing the river and the road, wrapping the houses like dead cloth for two days, sometimes three.

          No one spoke of what happened during those days. The narratives always broke there, like a bone. The history books were silent, and the elderly simply tightened their lips and looked toward the peak as if waiting for a judgment.

          Boundaries defined our relationship with the mountain. The first was the wildness, the dense forest, and the infamous grizzly population. Those who came back were quiet, their eyes holding a distant, crystalline quality, speaking only of colors and cold air, never of bears or trails. They were different. Hollowed out.

          However, for generations, the threat had been distant. Life in the valley became flat, predictable, and safe. Nothing much happened around here until the day the sky turned that strange, muted shade of pearl.

          It wasn't a fog. Fog is damp, cool, and smells of moss and rain. This was the Mist.

          It began subtly, creeping over the tree line at noon--a colossal, silent white tidal wave. As it poured down the slopes, the air grew incredibly still. The sounds of the town--the whine of tires, the distant clanging of the mill--began to drown, muffled by the sheer density of the creeping white.

          The Mist had come back.

          The reaction was immediate and absolute, split perfectly like age.

          The old ones moved with a panicked reverence, like initiates performing a forgotten rite. My grandmother, her face etched with a terror I had only ever seen when she watched the news, didn't speak. She just pointed. Doors were slammed, bolted, and then reinforced with chairs. Curtains were drawn tight, blocking even the weak, diffused light of the Mist. The lamps were turned off. The rule was ancient: lights off, absolute silence, and retreat to the center of the house, away from walls and windows. They remembered the silence that followed the broken stories.

          But we, the young ones, we saw only novelty. We saw a challenge.

          "Look at them," my neighbor, Silas, laughed, his voice sounding oddly brittle in the thick air. He stood in the middle of the street, spinning slow circles. "They act like it's the end of the world. It's just heavy fog!"

          We had no memory of the old fear. We had only the dullness of the valley life. A deep, thick, enveloping Mist felt like an invitation, a stage.

          Ignoring the panicked, muffled banging from the houses of our parents and grandparents, we poured out. Teenagers and young adults--twenty or thirty of us--emerged from the dissolving houses. We shouted challenges into the white void. We chased each other, playing games of blind tag, delighted in the disorientation.

          I stood on the edge of the lawn, halfway between the ancient fear inside and the foolish freedom outside. I watched Maria, who lived across the street, step further than anyone else. She was beautiful and reckless, treating the world as if it existed solely for her amusement.

          "Come on, Elias!" she called, her voice already sounding distant, warped by the Mist. "It feels like nothing at all! Just fresh snow!"

          I couldn't move. The silence was the worst part. When we were young, we feared the grizzlies because they were known to be violent and loud. I now realized the true terror of Misty Mountain was its capacity for quiet, for total erasure.

          The laughter of my peers sounded strange--high-pitched and utterly heedless, a dangerous folly echoing in the vast, still, white chamber the town had become. The laughter continued for an hour, growing wilder, more unhinged, closer to a shriek than a greeting.

          Then, around the time the mountain should have cast its afternoon shade, the laughter stopped. Not gradually, but definitively. It was replaced by a silence so profound it felt like a pressure against my eardrums.

          I waited, heart hammering. I told myself they must have gone indoors, bored with the game. But the door of Maria's house remained ajar, and the air held the metallic tang of deep, unnatural cold.

          Slowly, the white mass began to thin, pulling back toward the mountain's peak, folding itself into the dense, dark pines. The familiar shapes of the town reasserted themselves, dripping with moisture, washed clean of sound.

          They came back one by one, emerging from the residual wisps of the Mist. They were covered in dew, their clothing soaked, but they hadn't a scratch.

          They were silent, exactly as the stories of the mountain men described.

          Silas, the one who had been spinning in the street, walked past me, his eyes wide and unblinking. There was a faint sheen of white across his lips. He looked through me, not at me. He had left foolish and loud; he returned bearing the impenetrable silence of the high peaks.

          Maria didn't spare me a glance. She walked straight to her front door, pushed it open, and stepped inside. She didn't turn on a single lamp.

          The Mist had retreated, but it hadn't left. It had simply deposited the mountain's truth into the hearts of the foolish, reminding us that some boundaries are sacred and some silences must be deeply, fundamentally respected, for they hide things worse than bears. And we, who were young, now carried that heavy, empty, chilling knowledge within us.

          We had stepped into the myth, and the myth had consumed our laughter.


Word Count: 992