You grew hungry whilst in the wood, trying to sort out this new unfamiliar place. You walked further into the forest, any sense of direction lost to you, your stomach growling, pressing you forward. Foraging while the light darkened the glen, you combed the ground in your famished desperation. The light tricked you, your hands grazing what you believed to be edible – they were not. Morels are so delicious, if not for their falsely identified poisonous counterparts. Excited, you unknowingly walked into a crooked circle of false morels. Before you could even raise that red-brown cap to your lips, you vanished, just a murmur along the tall grasses.
You reappear somewhere darker from whence you just left. There’s a distinct snap of chill in the air. You breathe out, once again trying to get your bearings. A picturesque puff of wintry air escapes you, hanging in the air, nearly crystallizing right in front of you. The trees you had seen before – all frozen. The cap of the single mushroom within your palm is iced over, frigid, the cold nearly burning your hand. It is so cold; your eyelashes are already lined with frost.
A slow movement behind the nearest tree startles you. Nothing alive could possibly survive here.
A creature incredibly tall and thin emerges from the darkness of the frozen landscape, clothed in translucent veils, torn at the edges, pooling around their shapeless form. What might be features is a shroud, goosebumps immediately raise on your arms – the toxic mushroom within your grasp now a small misfortune to the true horror in front of you.
Spindly fingers, aged deathly grey with time, point out towards you, an ancient face curtained by whispering veils in the slight breeze, their gauze illuminated by the full moon. The form, ghostly, shifting in the low light, glides towards you – like sleep paralysis, you cannot move, you cannot yell out. You feel strangled by your own inability to run.
A blackened nail, coffin-shaped, grazes your cheek curiously. When you do not pull away, the creature reaches both hands to clasp your face tipping your head up to it – the hands that hold you are colder than ice, stinging, and still you cannot move.
Whilst the creature is both air and solid, human and not, there is the hint of two eyes beneath those rippling transparent sheets swathed about their head. You stare into the bottomless pits of their eyes, knowing you must barter your freedom. The maw of the creature opens, another unfathomable darkness - a sharp and tight wheeze escapes, like a high wind seeping under a crack of a door. A head cocked to one side, a winter storm of breath blows in your face, each word an utterance that shakes you to your chilled core: “Tell… me… a… story…”
False Morel Mushroom Circle – (Five Words, One Story - Every Sunday)
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