Iris walked deeper into White Wood Forest, surrounded by pale trees that seemed to stretch endlessly through the fog.
Strange knots, cracks, and patches of dark bark covered their trunks, several of them forming patterns that looked uncomfortably similar to eyes.
No matter where she looked, Iris couldn’t shake the feeling that something was staring back at her.
That was usually how places like this worked.
T.A.L.E.s rarely formed without a reason; there was almost always an anchor somewhere beneath the rumor, some incident, story, tragedy, or creature that gave people something to fear in the first place.
Once enough people repeated that fear, belief began filling in the gaps until the story became more important than whatever had actually happened.
“I vaguely remember Mom telling me stories about this place,” Iris muttered as she continued forward, pushing aside a low branch.
“Dad was really interested in folklore, and after he died, she pretty much became obsessed with studying it herself.” Iris sighed, trying to drag twenty-year-old memories back to the surface.
She remembered the rumors surrounding White Wood Forest, but the exact details were hazy.
At the time, she’d never had much reason to care.
It had just been some creepy forest on the edge of town, something children dared each other to enter before running home and exaggerating whatever they thought they’d seen.
She certainly hadn’t expected those stories to matter decades later.
Her ear suddenly twitched.
Iris stopped.
Something was lying across one of the branches above her.
She slowly raised her head, squinting through the thick fog.
The shape was difficult to make out, little more than a dark silhouette hanging awkwardly across the pale wood.
For a moment, nothing moved.
Then came a loud crack.
The branch snapped beneath its weight and crashed to the ground several feet ahead of her, bringing whatever had been resting on it down with it.
Iris remained still for a few seconds before cautiously approaching.
Then she saw the body.
“That’s my corpse, you know.”
Iris screamed.
She spun around so quickly that she nearly tripped over the fallen branch, one hand flying toward her chest as she found a girl standing only a few feet behind her.
“Don’t judge me!” Iris immediately snapped, more at her imaginary listener than the ghost.
“I just don’t do well with ghosts. It’s a perfectly normal fear. If Charles were here, he would’ve cried.”
The ghost giggled.
Iris glared at her before slowly looking between the spirit and the corpse lying on the ground.
They were identical.
Both appeared to be around sixteen years old, with long brown hair, freckles, circular glasses, and pale blue eyes.
The corpse wore a torn yellow dress, though most of the fabric had been stained dark with blood.
Bite marks covered her body, chunks of flesh had been ripped away, and part of her skull was simply missing.
The ghost, by comparison, looked almost untouched, smiling pleasantly as though her mutilated body wasn’t lying a few feet away.
Iris’s eye twitched.
Then the memory finally surfaced.
“Oh… shit.”
Years before Iris was born, a sixteen-year-old girl had run away from home and disappeared into White Wood Forest.
Her body had eventually been discovered mauled beyond recognition, and the official explanation had been simple enough: an animal attack, most likely a bear.
But Applecrest had never been satisfied with simple explanations.
People whispered that something else lived in the forest.
Parents told their children not to wander too far between the trees, while older kids passed around stories of a monster that hunted anyone young enough to resemble its first victim.
Over time, a single dead girl became a local legend, and the legend became stronger than the truth.
Eventually, White Wood Forest started listening.
Iris slowly looked down at herself.
Yellow dress.
Small hands.
Sixteen years old.
“I’m a sixteen-year-old girl…” Her gaze shifted back toward the mutilated corpse.
“Just like her.”
The ghost’s smile widened.
Iris sighed.
“Of course the difficulty gets worse.”
“The monster tore me apart piece by piece,” the girl giggled, swaying slightly in place as she stared at Iris.
“You’re next. You’re next. You’re just like me, so you’re its favorite food.”
Iris’s expression tightened.
This wasn’t actually the spirit of the girl who had died here.
At least, probably not.
T.A.L.E.s were excellent at imitating things people believed existed, and one version of White Wood Forest’s legend claimed that the dead girl’s voice could still be heard between the trees, warning children before the monster found them.
Enough people had repeated that story for long enough, so now the forest had created exactly what they expected.
A dead girl who warned children.
Whether she wanted to help them was apparently a separate question.
Iris’s eye twitched.
Then she heard the roar.
Something massive moved through the trees overhead, branches cracking beneath its weight as it leaped from one trunk to another.
Iris immediately threw herself behind the nearest tree and crouched beneath a cluster of leaves, keeping as still as possible while watching through a narrow opening.
The creature dropped from above.
It landed directly on top of the ghost.
The girl vanished beneath it, but just before disappearing, she turned toward Iris and gave her a small wink.
Iris stared.
What the hell was that supposed to mean?
The creature slowly rose.
Its body was completely hairless and white as snow, stretched over a horribly malnourished humanoid frame.
Its skin glistened beneath the fog, slick with saliva and moisture, while impossibly long limbs hung nearly to the ground.
Elongated fingernails covered in dried blood dragged across the dirt whenever it moved.
Its eyes were sunken so deeply into its skull that Iris could barely see them, and when it opened its mouth, rows of long, jagged teeth seemed to fill almost the entire thing.
It reached down and picked up the girl’s corpse.
Iris remained hidden, watching carefully.
“A wendigo?” she whispered.
Her eyes narrowed as she studied it.
“Maybe that thing was already here before the rumors started. People don’t exactly jump straight to wendigos when they hear ‘monster in the woods.'” The more she thought about it, the more the pieces began fitting together.
“Maybe that girl wasn’t killed by a bear at all. Maybe this thing killed her, and when the T.A.L.E. formed, the story just built itself around what was already here.”
Her gaze remained fixed on the creature.
“If that’s true…”
A small smile crossed Iris’s face.
“Then you’re the anchor.”
The creature suddenly stopped moving.
Iris’s smile faded.
“And if I kill you, this whole place comes apart.”
The wendigo lowered itself over the corpse and began to eat.
It tore the body apart piece by piece, ripping away flesh and snapping limbs as blood spilled across its pale body.
It didn’t stop once the meat was gone either.
Even the bones disappeared between those jagged teeth, crushed beneath its jaw until nothing recognizable remained.
Iris felt her stomach turn.
Mentally, she had seen things far worse than this.
She had walked through battlefields, watched friends get torn apart by monsters, and survived horrors that would’ve shattered the sixteen-year-old girl she used to be.
Unfortunately, her body didn’t care about any of that.
This body had never even seen a corpse before.
Now it was threatening to empty her stomach onto the forest floor.
“Seriously… don’t betray me now,” Iris muttered, pressing a hand over her mouth while forcing herself to breathe slowly.
Her old mind knew there was no danger in watching someone already dead be eaten.
Her sixteen-year-old nervous system apparently disagreed.
Eventually, the nausea passed.
The wendigo finished what remained of the corpse, lifted its head, and sniffed the air several times before suddenly leaping back into the trees.
Branches shook above Iris as it disappeared into the fog.
She waited.
One second.
Two.
Three.
Silence.
Iris slowly stepped out from behind the tree and looked toward the bloodstained patch of ground where the dead girl had been.
“Don’t worry. I’ll avenge you.”
She bit down on her nail again as she forced herself to think.
“Wendigos have terrible eyesight, so escaping from this place would probably be easy enough. Unfortunately, I don’t need to escape. I need to kill it.” Her gaze moved toward the fog surrounding her.
Even without any supernatural senses, she could feel how heavy the air had become.
Miasma saturated the forest, far denser than anything that could naturally gather outside a T.A.L.E.
“If I had my Curse, I could just burn this entire forest down with that thing inside it.”
Iris carefully stood.
A sharp pain ran across her palm.
“Ow.”
She looked down.
A thin branch had sliced across her skin, leaving behind a shallow cut.
A small line of blood slowly gathered across her palm.
Iris stared at it.
Then she smiled.
“Oh.”
Her eyes drifted toward the fog.
“That’ll work.”
There was another supernatural art Iris had learned long after awakening her Curse, one that didn’t actually require a Curse to perform.
Magic existed separately from Curses, though most ordinary humans could never use it in any meaningful way.
Without a supernatural affinity, the right training, and enough Miasma, casting even the weakest spell was more trouble than it was worth.
Fortunately, White Wood Forest currently had more Miasma than Iris knew what to do with.
“Let’s see if I still remember how to do this.”
She crouched and pressed her bleeding fingers against the ground, slowly drawing a circle into the dirt.
Almost immediately, the surrounding Miasma reacted.
The invisible pressure hanging in the air gathered around the blood, clinging to each line as Iris traced out the structure of the spell.
Some of it seeped through the cut in her palm, sending a cold, nauseating sensation through her arm and into her chest.
Iris grimaced.
Miasma poisoning.
Wonderful.
Thankfully, a D-Rank T.A.L.E.
didn’t contain nearly enough Miasma to seriously harm her from something this small.
At least, not yet.
She finished the final line and placed her bleeding hand against the center of the circle.
Iris took a breath.
Then she spoke.
“Ignis-Forma-Min.”
The spell responded.
A glowing Roman numeral I appeared across the back of her hand.
The magic circle flashed beneath her.
Tiny crimson butterflies began pouring from it, each one formed entirely from flickering flame.
They fluttered around Iris in a loose swarm, their wings scattering embers through the fog as faint red light washed across the pale trees.
A sharp headache immediately struck her.
Iris winced and pressed two fingers against her temple.
“Yeah… definitely weaker than I remember.”
One of the butterflies landed on a nearby leaf.
The edge blackened.
A few seconds later, the leaf finally caught fire.
Iris stared at it.
Then stared at the swarm around her.
Compared to the magic she had wielded in her old life, it was pathetic.
At her peak, flames like these would’ve been beneath consideration.
But that wasn’t what mattered.
It worked.
Iris slowly smiled as the burning butterflies gathered around her.
“Ember Wing.”
For the first time since returning twenty years into the past, Iris had cast a spell.
Magic.
The art of demons.
A weapon she hadn’t expected to regain this early.
Iris raised her hand, and the butterflies followed the motion, gathering loosely around her arm before spreading back into the fog.
She looked toward the direction the wendigo had disappeared.
“Alright.”
Somewhere deeper in the forest, something roared.
Iris adjusted her glasses and started walking.
The crimson butterflies followed.
“Now I’m the one hunting you.”