Book of Mara

Once upon a time.

Power.

So much power.

In the air we breathe, the ground we tread, the cries of the helpless.

In the hatred we harbor for our own kin.

In the comfort of a meal that fools the heart into warmth.

In the delicate scent of flowers, quieting even the stormiest of minds.

Power in the elements that tear buildings, nations, and lives asunder.

All of it, untouchable.

Until now.

May you never be tempted.

Or the world will suffer the consequences.

Cold knifed through her.

Not the polite kind of cold she was used to during late Scandinavian winters, the brutal kind that settled into bone after several hours outside. Her cheek stung as if it had frozen to something rough. Gravel. Frost. Dirt. What the hell?

She jerked upright too fast, and the world pitched sideways before snapping back into place. Breath streamed out of her in frantic clouds as she tried to make sense of where she was. A ditch. Beside the road home. At dawn. Her thoughts scattered like startled birds. No. No, no, no. She did not. She would never…

Her hands shook as she pushed hair out of her face. Frost clung to her lashes. Clothes stiff, muscles aching as if she’d sprinted for miles. While flexing her fingers to make sure they still worked, she checked the road. Empty. Silent. Blue-gray light settling over everything like a thin sheet of ice.

“How…?” The word tore out of her in a whisper. Her phone flickered weakly. 06:03. She’d left campus late last night, and exhausted at that, but not the kind of exhausted that ended in frostbitten ditches and missing hours. Not drunk, not high, not careless. Not someone who passed out on the side of the road like a cautionary tale.

A tight, humiliating panic crept up her spine. The kind associated with doing something wildly out of character. She’d never broken a rule in her life. Never lost control. Her pulse spiked, breath quickening.

She didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t. Something else happened. But the alternative was worse. Each thought more terrifying than the last. Drugged, attacked, kidnapped. Dumped here. But as she checked herself, she found no bruises, no torn clothes, no aching gaps in memory, except… all of it. So her mind searched for explanations like a madman. Maybe she was mad? Hypothermia, stress, vasovagal syncope. But none of that would put her in a ditch. Tears burned in her eyes, but she blinked them back fast. Crying didn’t solve anything. It meant losing control, and she refused to lose more of it.

The first car of the morning hummed faintly in the distance. Shame came crashing through her at the thought of anyone seeing her like this, rumpled, freezing, wild-eyed. Sitting in a ditch like she didn’t belong to her own life.

“Get it together,” she whispered, voice shaking. The winter air gnawed at her as she climbed out of the ditch and onto the empty road. Each step sent cold stabbing up through her shoes. Streetlights flickered off one by one in the distance, marking her slow return to normality. Home.

By the time she reached her apartment door, she was half-numb, half-shaking. Her key slipped twice before she managed to fit it into the lock.

Inside, she didn’t stop to breathe. Didn’t take off her coat. She headed straight to the bathroom, turned the shower to scalding, and stepped in fully clothed. Thank god she was living alone.

The water plastered her clothes to her body, heavy and suffocating, until she peeled them off piece by piece and let them fall to the floor. Only then did the trembling start, uncontrollable, violent. She braced her palms against the tile, whispering: “This isn’t happening.” But it had. And no matter how hot the water ran, it couldn’t wash away the memory of stone-cold gravel, the taste of panic, the blank space where her night should have been.

When the steam finally thinned from the mirror, her reflection surfaced through the haze. Eerily composed, as if it belonged to someone else. Black strands sleek against her shoulders. Golden-toned skin glowed warm against the white tiles. Her eyes, clear, awake, held a sharpness that didn’t match the crackling panic beneath her ribs. Different. Subtly, unmistakably different. She leaned in. The reflection lagged. Just by a heartbeat, but enough to squeeze her heart in a fist of ice. She blinked hard. The image snapped into sync. Maybe she was going crazy? No. A trick of steam. Exhaustion twisting perception.

She wrapped herself in a blanket, hands shaking more than she wanted to admit, and planted herself at the dining table. Textbooks lay open to familiar diagrams, neuron pathways, receptor cascades, and tidy explanations of biological processes. Science always behaved. Science didn’t lie. She forced her eyes across the lines of text, clinging to structure, rules, and normality. Anything to keep her mind occupied until the daylight could wash away the terrors of the night.

By the time she reached the stables, daylight had carved the frost into glittering patterns across the ground. Horses exhaled warm clouds into the crisp air, stamping their hooves, grounding her in a way nothing else had since waking. Astrid spotted her immediately, mud on her boots, blond hair escaping her hat, worry pulling tight at her mouth. They talked about the usual stuff, university, friends, non-life threatening situations, while getting ready and riding off into the forest.

“You okay?”

Mara tried to answer. Tried to find words that didn’t sound insane. Too bad that was impossible.

“I woke up in a ditch today.” Her voice cracked despite herself. “I must’ve passed out.”

Astrid paled. “Passed out? Mara, you could’ve died out there!”

“I was tired. That’s all.”

“Do you think someone drugged you?”

A bitter laugh escaped her before she could stop it. “At the library? No chance.”

Astrid didn’t laugh with her. “Stranger things have happened. People our age go missing all the time.” A cold thread pulled down Mara’s spine. She wanted to dismiss it, she really did. But people had gone missing. People in her age.

“…young people between the ages of twenty and twenty-seven have gone missing over the past few weeks. No traces have been found, and the police…”

The memory of the news report that had been running for weeks flickered through her mind.

“Astrid, I”

A sharp crack split the air. Everything detonated at once. Horses screamed and reared, metal clattered, hooves tore into the frozen ground. Astrid’s shout vanished under chaos. The world lurched, before Mara even understood she was falling. Pain slammed into her ribs. Blackness rushed in. And then… Nothing.

Cold seeped in first. Then pain. A dull, pounding ache bloomed behind her eyes, throbbing with every heartbeat. Her cheek was pressed to frozen earth. Again. For a moment she couldn’t remember how she’d fallen. Or why. Then the memory hit. Horses screaming, the crack like a gunshot, the world breaking open.

“Astrid…” No answer. The clearing stretched around her in heavy, unnatural stillness. Birds were silent. Air thick, as if the forest itself leaned in to listen. Horses gone. Astrid gone. Something ugly twisted in her chest.

A wave of dizziness washed over her, every muscle trembled with shock, as she pushed herself upright.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. Just walk.” And she did, forest pressing tight around her as she followed the familiar path back to the stable. Breath leaking out in fast, frantic burst she couldn’t slow.

Halfway down the trail, a shimmer caught her eye. A puddle. Nothing more than a stretch of melted snow. Great, wet boots were the last thing she needed. She crouched to see where the shallow water ended. Her reflection stared up from the surface. And froze her blood.

Her face was streaked with dried blood, skin looked pale, hair clung in matted knots to her forehead. She leaned closer. The reflection didn’t follow. Lingering one heartbeat behind. Then its eyes brightened, silver blooming like metal under sunlight. And its mouth curled into a slow, deliberate smile she wasn’t making.

“What…”

She stumbled backwards, but the reflection surged forward. The puddle rippled outward as though it hid a depth impossible for something so shallow. A hand shot through the surface. Her hand, but not. Too hot, too alive, wrapping around her throat. Lightning shot up her head, everything blurred, and the world broke open.

Pain, bright and blinding, detonated through her side. Don’t vomit, don’t vomit. She rolled onto her hands, retching. Vomit splattered across smooth cobblestone. Metal, ozone and bread. Strange smells.

Voices cut through the haze. Soft and musical, but wrong. She lifted her head. A courtyard stretched around her, vast and unreal. Just like how she imagined heaven, light filtered down in colors that seemed to disobey the normal spectrum. Figured moved through the space, tall, graceful, and beautiful. This wasn’t home. Perhaps she was in hell. She tried to crawl backward, nails scraping against stone.

And then a man stepped into her line of sight. Hair like living fire. Something in him vibrated wrong, like a chord slightly off key. Bad omen. He looked at her as though she were some curious creature he wasn’t sure belonged here.

“I don’t think this one is ready yet,” he said over his shoulder. The courtyard tilted again, warped at the edges. He stepped closer, a calm softness in his voice that made her panic spike harder.

“It’s going to be okay. Just breathe. Don’t resist it or you might fail”

She couldn’t. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t…

Cold stole her breath before consciousness fully returned. For a second she couldn’t tell which way was up. Then the world tilted, steadied, and the raw bite of frozen ground seeped into her bones. A gasp tore from her throat. Same trees. Same path. Same winter silence that held no memory of the place she’d just seen. No. No, no. She caught herself against a tree, legs buckling as she tried to stand. Vision warped, steadied, warped again. An ache pulsed deep in her chest, like something inside her had snapped in two and only half of it had returned.

Her gaze dropped. The puddle waited at her feet. Still. Shallow. Ordinary. A harmless smear of melted snow. She crouched, breath trembling as she leaned over the water’s surface. Her reflection stared back. Normal. Human. Undisturbed. No blood, no silver. No hand. Just her. Did she imagine it? All of it? Hallucinations. Psychosis. Stress-induced blackouts. Textbook terms she’d studied in neat clinical paragraphs, slammed into her mind with vicious weight. She’s losing it. Actually losing it. As she limped towards the stable, each step felt borrowed.

Dusk had swallowed the sky by the time she reached the yard. Warm light spilled from the stable doorway, soft and golden against the frost. Astrid burst out the moment Mara came into view.

“Mara!” her voice cracked. “What happened?! I managed to get my horse back and when I got here, you were gone! I thought… I thought something awful had happened.”

Something awful had happened.

“I’m fine,” she answered, the lie scraping her throat raw. “Where are the horses?”

“They came back on their own.” Astrid rubbed her arms. “I almost called the police.”

Police. Hospital. Psych ward.

“Let’s just go home.”

Astrid nodded, still watching her like she might crumble. They started down the frost-hardened path toward the bus stop.

Astrid muttered as she flipped her phone’s flashlight on. “God, it’s pitch black. I hate this forest. We need streetlights.”

Mara lifted her head. The world sharpened. The darkness wasn’t darkness anymore. Frost crystals glittered like tiny stars. Pine needles glowed in the faintest scrap of dying light. She blinked. Her contacts didn’t blur. Her eyes didn’t sting.

Something in the shadows tugged at her vision, drawing her attention whether she wanted it or not. She forced her eyes on the path. Didn’t matter.

But it did. Because the world wasn’t just more visible. It was awake. Turned to a frequency she didn’t want to hear. And somewhere deep inside her, the thing that had reached through that puddle opened its eyes. It hadn’t let her go. Not even close.