ilovecows59
In a quiet forest, hidden from the world, stands a humble cottage. Within it drifts a ghost-a woman of pale blue light, bound to silence and ritual. She cleans, she wanders, she waits. Yet with each passing day, she feels herself unraveling thread by thread, her glow dimming, her memories crumbling into dust. Her heart is hollow, her soul aches with a longing she cannot name, and time has become a cruel trickster, leaving her with nothing but fading echoes.
One night, the monotony shatters. From the depths of the forest comes a cry-fragile, desperate. Drawn by instinct, she discovers a swaddled infant abandoned beneath the roots of an ancient oak. The sight pierces her with sorrow both foreign and familiar, as if she had once held a child of her own.
She carries the boy back to her cottage, and for the first time in centuries, warmth fills her spectral chest. His breath, his laughter, his tiny hand brushing against her face-each moment rekindles fragments of memory she thought forever lost. With him, the silence softens, the rooms stir, and the cottage is no longer empty.
But the forest is restless. More children begin to appear, left behind, crying in the shadows. The ghost cannot ignore them. Though bound to her cottage, she knows she must break the tether that holds her there. To protect the children and return them to the world of the living, she must step beyond her sanctuary, into the outer world she has long avoided.
As she ventures outward, the mystery of her forgotten past deepens. Why does her chest ache at the sight of armored figures? Why do infants awaken emotions she cannot suppress? Beneath her spectral mask lies a woman who once lived, loved, and lost-and with each child she saves, the truth of who she was begins to surface.
-This is a story written for fun. I may go back and make edits as time goes by.