LUGHNASADH
Northumberland Moors
The road narrowed the farther north they drove, curling through heath and stone like a thread pulling taut. The moor stretched endless and watchful on either side, damp with mist and heavy with silence. Even Wickham wasn't speaking, and that alone was warning enough.
They'd received a particularly disturbing Harrower field report, the agent too distressed to calm the soul. He'd sent word to the Sanctuary for help, and what little they could glean from the sparse report had unsettled them all deeply enough to see to it without delay.
Grey leaned against the rain-fogged window, watching the land bleed into shadow. It was midsummer, but the sky wore the colours of July. No birdsong. No distant bleat of sheep. Just the sound of the engine murmuring beneath them and the soft rasp of Alaric's breath beside her.
He'd been silent for miles.
Not his usual brooding silence, either. Not the theatrical, leather-clad sulk of a creature who liked being misunderstood. No, this was the quiet of weight and memory, of something clawing cold beneath the skin.
He was staring at the hills like they'd personally betrayed him.
Something in the way his jaw tensed, the way his eyes tracked the curve of the moorland without really seeing it—it wasn't just brooding. It was remembering.
Grey didn't ask. Of course she didn't ask. She just watched him in silence, pretending she wasn't quietly cataloguing every flicker of grief that crossed his face like stormlight.
Maybe the landscape remembered too. The wind had gone still, like it was holding its breath for him.
He didn't speak, but gods, she wished he would. Not for her sake—just so she'd know he hadn't drowned in it.
Every time he looked at her she looked away first. Because someone had to. And because watching him made her chest in that kind of silence that made it feel stitched together wrong.
"You alright, Fen?" Grey hedged, gently.
The Huntsman didn't answer.
His eyes, golden and distant, were fixed on the rolling hills ahead as though trying to see something long gone. One hand rested on the steering wheel, the other flexed once—twice—as if gripping a weapon that wasn't there.
She didn't ask again.
When they arrived, the sky had sunk into itself. The sun, if it still existed, was lost behind sheeting clouds and fog thick enough to taste. The moor rose around them in shrouded layers, a landscape carved from sorrow. Wickham stayed behind to speak with the local farmer who'd made the report, leaving Grey and Alaric to walk into the silence together.
The wind came in long, low keens. The fog clung to their coats and lashes. Grey reached out, threading her fingers through the air.
"I feel it," she whispered.
Alaric only nodded.
They reached the hollow a few paces later. It was subtle—just a dip in the land framed by a crown of standing stones, their shapes barely visible through the mist. But the air changed the moment they stepped within it. Denser. Tighter. Charged.
Then the world rippled. The ghost of a young woman stood on the moor. The glamour broke like wet silk torn from a line. And the memory began.
A festival blazed into being. Torchlight flickered across the moor. The music of fiddles and drums rolled wild through the night. Mortals danced barefoot in circles, laughter bright as bells. It was Samhain—spirit night—and the Wild Hunt was passing.
Grey and Alaric stood unseen, as if watching theatre through a veil. The girl appeared first: young, her cheeks flushed with wine and wind, her red hair trailing ribbons as she ran through the grass. Her smile was a whole season. Her eyes searched the horizon.
The moment she appeared, Alaric went completely motionless.
Then came the Hunt. Galloping hooves that didn't stir the earth. Riders in shadowed finery. Horns sounding low and wild. And one of them slowed, peeled away. He dismounted. Even in the illusion, he gleamed. Dark hair, tall frame, a hunter's gait. He removed his helm. Grey almost gasped when she recognised him.
She watched as the girl's breath caught. The music fell away. She stepped toward him. They spoke. They touched. She laughed. Beside Grey, Alaric stood like a statue, watching the memory unfold with a stricken expression. He wasn't being careful, emotion written all over his face for all to see.
The memory jumped. A year passed in a blink. Another Samhain. She stood at the edge of the moor, a ribbon in her hand, waiting. The Hunt came again.
But the dark rider she sought wasn't there.
Instead, another Fae rode close. His features were painfully beautiful—golden hair, moonlit skin, a smile that promised ruin. He dismounted like a king descending from a throne. Grey's blood froze in her veins as the golden Fae held out his hand to the girl. She hesitated. Then took it.
What followed was— Grey could barely breathe.
It wasn't violence, not at first. It was something so much worse.
Delight. Games. The Fae spun her in circles, whispered riddles, kissed her fingertips while watching her cry. He conjured illusions—her parents, her home, the rider she'd once loved—and shattered them before her eyes. Every kindness was turned back on itself. Every moment of hope dissolved.
She screamed. She begged. It lasted for weeks. And still, he smiled.
Eventually, bored at last, he left her. Not with fury. Not with fire. Just disinterest—as if she were a toy he'd grown tired of breaking and putting back together again and again. She lay where he left her: mud-streaked, hollow-eyed, the remnants of her laughter silenced into soil. Her gown was torn, her feet bare and bloodied, and still she clutched the ribbon he'd never asked for. A ghost in a living girl's skin.
She stumbled into the moor, clutching a bundle of ribbons. She fell beneath a tree and curled inward, whispering names that no longer answered.
The glamour trembled. And the memory repeated. Over and over. Every loop a little more broken. A little more hollow.
Grey gasped and broke the thread, her eyes blurring with tears. The world cracked around them. The illusion burst like steam, light flaring and dying. The moor returned—fog-thick and still—but now there was the shape of a girl curled in the hollow, a whisper where her voice had once been.
Alaric seemed to sag, but finally caught himself and dropped to one knee beside her. He passed his hand above her brow. "Rest," he murmured gently at the pitiful soul as it curled in on itself. "That is not your memory, this is not how your story ends."
She sighed with quiet relief, the beautiful face of a heartbroken Fae the last thing she saw as the fog pulled her gently away.
Grey swallowed hard. She was struggling to stifle the grief threatening to choke her. "Whoever made that memory—"
"Wanted her broken," Alaric said hoarsely, his voice a brittle rasp torn from somewhere far beneath armour and artifice. His throat worked around the words like they tasted of ash. For a moment, he didn't seem like the storm-cloaked Huntsman, nor the flirt she'd argued with beside half a dozen gates—he looked like a man standing at the mouth of his own grief, staring down a memory that refused to die.
He stood slowly, but his movements were stiff. Mechanical. The gold in his eyes stormlit and distant, the face of someone walking through a battlefield only he could see.
Grey stepped closer. "You knew her." It wasn't a question. She knew what she'd seen.
Alaric said nothing. A long silence. Then, finally, "Her name was Aine." That was all.
He turned toward the stones and walked into the mist. Grey watched him go, heart heavy as a stone in her chest, the moor a little darker, the wind sobbing quietly through the standing stones.