What lied in the Mist

The fog rolled in from the harbor just after sunset, thick and gray like wool pulled from some enormous sheep. Mira had lived in Millhaven for most of her life, sixty-fiv years to be exact, and knew the patterns of the mist—how it crept between the weathered houses, how it muffled the sound of footsteps on cobblestone, how it made the familiar streets feel like pathways to somewhere else entirely.

But tonight felt different.

She first noticed it when Mrs. McCormick's dog started barking—not the usual territorial yapping, but something desperate and afraid. Then the streetlights began flickering, one by one, as if something large was passing beneath them. Mira peered through her kitchen window, watching the fog swirl in patterns that seemed almost deliberate.

That's when she saw it.

At first, it looked like nothing more than a denser patch of mist, a shadow within shadows. But as she watched, the shape began to move with purpose, flowing between the houses like water finding its course. It wasn't walking so much as drifting, and wherever it passed, the fog seemed to whisper—not words exactly, but something that made her chest tighten with a longing she couldn't name.

The creature was tall, impossibly tall, with limbs that stretched and condensed like vapor. Its face, when the mist parted just enough to glimpse it, was beautiful in the way that deep ocean trenches are beautiful—ancient and unknowable. Its eyes were the color of fog itself, pale and shifting, and when they turned toward her window, Mira felt something stir in her memory.

She had seen those eyes before, decades ago, when she was young and foolish enough to walk alone in the mist. The creature had been smaller then, or perhaps she had been braver. It had spoken to her in that voice like distant thunder, telling her stories of the places between places, of the lonely spaces where lost things gathered.

"You remember," it seemed to say now, though its mouth never moved. "You were the one who listened."

Mira opened her window, letting the fog drift into her warm kitchen. She wasn't afraid—not of this old friend who came with the mist, who fed on solitude and offered companionship to those brave enough to see beauty in the strange. She had been alone for most of her life almost, and her husband Harold had been dead for more than twenty years, come spring. The creature's presence felt less like a haunting and more like a homecoming.

"I remember," she whispered back, and stepped out into the fog to walk the gray paths once more, her hand reaching out to touch something that was neither entirely there nor entirely gone—but was, perhaps, exactly what the lonely night required.

The next morning, the fog lifted as it always did. The neighbors found Mira's door standing open and her kitchen window raised to catch the breeze. They called it mysterious, the way she had simply vanished. But if they had looked closely at the patterns the mist left on her windowsill, they might have seen what looked almost like a thank you note, written in condensation and morning dew.