We had gone into the woods together that night. He carried a lantern and I carried my doubts. The moon hung low, pale and thin, and the fog curled around our feet like it was listening. We were looking for the fairy ring, the one the old women whispered about when the hearth was low. He laughed when I warned him not to mock it. I wish I had left him there to laugh alone.
The ring was smaller than I imagined, no more than a dozen pale mushrooms in a perfect circle. They shimmered faintly, as if breathing. He crouched beside them, curious, tracing one with his fingertip. I felt something shift in the air, a stillness so deep it pressed against my skin. I told him to stop. He didn’t.
He whispered something, just to tease me. A little promise. “I’ll keep your secrets forever,” he said, smirking as if the words meant nothing. But they did. The circle heard him. The ground seemed to breathe, and from within that perfect ring came a sound like wind moving through hollow bones. The lantern flickered.
At first, I thought it was only the dark playing tricks. Then the whispers began. Soft, melodic, wrong. They brushed against my ears, curling like smoke. I could not understand the words, but I felt them. They were answering his promise. His grin faded. His breath caught. He looked at me and I knew that something had changed behind his eyes.
We ran. I don’t know how long. I remember branches tearing at our clothes and a coldness that sank through bone. When we reached the edge of the forest, the moonlight felt strange, too bright, too sharp. He said he was fine. I wanted to believe him.
Days passed, then weeks. He began to forget things. Little things first, then faces, then his own name whispered wrong. Sometimes at dusk he would wander toward the woods without realizing. I followed once. The lights were waiting for him, drifting low over the earth, and when he stepped near, they pulsed as if greeting him. I called to him, but he didn’t turn back. The forest swallowed him.
I thought it ended there. But last night, I woke to the sound of the lantern’s hinge creaking open. The air smelled of moss and cold iron. When I looked toward the window, a pale light was shining from the edge of the trees. His voice came with it, calm and clear, whispering the same words he once said in jest.
“I’ll keep your secrets forever.”
Now the lantern sits outside my door, still burning. The ring has followed me here. At first I thought it was a cruel joke, a trick of shadows and fog. But the whispers came too, curling along the edges of the room. They do not speak my name, not yet, but I feel the weight of the promise pressing against my mind.
The mushrooms have begun to appear at the threshold of the garden, tiny and perfect. When I step too close, I feel the pull, the same pull that took him. I do not know if I am next, or if I am already bound. The Sidhe are patient, and they wait.
I can no longer walk beneath the moonlight without hearing voices between the trees, voices that echo promises I never made. The forest does not forgive mistakes, and its memory is longer than a lifetime. The ring is here. The lantern burns. And I wonder how long it will be before my own whispers are claimed.