To be born of the mist is to know everything and nothing at once. For as long as the valley had existed, Lura had been its dream. While her mother, Lumsa, was rooted in the dark muck of the riverbed and the cold weight of the cliffs, Lura was a creature of the "Between." She lived in the space where the water shattered against the rocks and became air.
Her childhood was measured in centuries of rainbows. She would catch the morning light in her translucent palms and cast it into the dark corners of the gorge to wake the sleeping ferns. To Lura, the valley was not a fortress to be guarded, as her mother believed, but a garden to be shared.
She moved through the trees like a trick of the eye. A hiker might see a flash of a pale dress behind a Rowan tree, only to find nothing but a swirling eddy of leaves. She was the "Maid of the Valley," and her magic was the magic of the mend. She could knit a broken bird’s wing with a breath; she could turn the bitterest winter spring into sweet, drinkable nectar.
But Lura was lonely. Her mother’s love was a heavy, crushing thing, a love of boundaries and "thou shalt nots." Lumsa wanted Lura to be a mirror, reflecting only the witch’s own dark power. Lura, however, wanted to be a window.
She first saw Dale on a Tuesday in May, when the bluebells were so thick they looked like a fallen sky.
He was kneeling by the brook, his hands deep in the mud. Unlike the other men who came to the valley with loud voices and sharp axes, this man was quiet. He handled the stones as if they were made of glass. He didn't just see a rock; he saw the "grain" within it. He whispered to the gritstone, and to Lura’s amazement, the stone seemed to listen.
She watched him for seven days before she dared to show herself. She hid in the spray of the middle falls, her form shimmering between woman and water. Dale looked up, his eyes meeting the place where she stood. He didn't scream. He didn't run. He simply smiled, a slow, weary smile of a man who had spent his life looking for beauty and had finally found its source.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of limestone he had carved. It was a perfect, tiny replica of a lily. He placed it on a flat rock and stepped back.
Lura waited until he was gone, then glided to the rock. The stone was warm from his touch. It felt solid, real, and permanent, everything she was not. She pressed it to her chest, and for the first time, the mist-girl felt a heartbeat.
The weeks that followed were a symphony of secrets. While Lumsa brooded in the high caves, plotting against the encroaching mills, Lura and Dale built a world in the shadows of the lower gorge.
They could not speak, not in the way humans do. Lura’s voice was the sound of wind through the reeds, and Dale’s was the low rumble of the earth. Instead, they shared the language of the valley. He taught her about the "bones of the world", how the limestone was made of ancient sea-creatures and how the gritstone held the heat of the sun long after dark. In return, she showed him the hidden pulses of the woods. She led him to the springs that never froze and the hollow trees where the owls kept the history of the Peak District.
Lura began to change. She found herself wishing for weight. She wanted to feel the grit of the path beneath her feet; she wanted to know what it was like to be "held" by the gravity that governed the world of men.
"My mother will see," Lura warned him one evening, her voice a shivering breeze in his ear. "She smells the change in the water. She knows I am no longer just her shadow."
Dale took her hand, or what passed for her hand, a sensation of cool silk and static, and pressed it to his heart. "Let her see," he whispered. "I am building a bridge, Lura. Not just for the wagons, but for us. A place where the earth meets the air. A place where we can stand together."
The night of the Blood Moon arrived with a suffocating heat. Lura felt her mother’s rage before she heard it. The Bentley Brook began to churn with a foul, black energy, and the trees groaned as if the wind were trying to peel their bark away.
Lura ran to the lower gorge. She found Dale standing on the skeleton of his bridge, his face set in grim determination. He was trying to wedge the keystone into place, to finish the work before the flood claimed it.
"Go, Dale!" Lura cried, her form flickering wildly as the storm tore at her. "She is coming! The water is her blade!"
But Dale wouldn't move. He looked at the unfinished arch, then at the girl made of mist. "I promised you a place to stand," he said.
Then, Lumsa appeared. She was a nightmare of salt and fury, standing atop the rising surge of the brook. When she saw Lura clinging to the mortal man, her shriek shattered the windows of the distant mills.
Lura felt the curse before it hit. It wasn't a bolt of lightning; it was a sudden, terrifying increase in gravity. The air around them turned into lead. She watched in horror as Dale’s warmth vanished, replaced by the cold, grey silence of stone. His eyes, which had held so much light, turned to dull mineral.
"No!" Lura screamed, but her voice was being thinned out by the wind.
She tried to pull him back, to breathe her own life into his hardening lungs. But Lumsa’s magic was a "binding" spell. It sought to fix everything in place forever. Lura was caught in the crossfire. Because she was not of the earth, she could not turn to stone, instead, the spell tried to "un-make" her. It tore at her essence, pulling her apart until she was nothing more than a million disconnected sighs.
Lura did not die that night, but she ceased to be a girl. She became the Residual Mist.
She is the reason the Lumsdale Valley never feels truly empty. She is trapped in the "thinning", that state between being and forgetting. She clings to the bridge because it is Dale’s body, and she flows through the ruins because they are the only bones she has left.
When visitors hear "crying" near the bridge, it isn't a sound of terror. It is Lura trying to remember her name. She is calling out to the stone, waiting for the one heartbeat that Lumsa couldn't quite extinguish.
On the nights when the moon is full and the spray of the falls is thick, you can see her for a fleeting second, a pale, elegant curve of light leaning over the bridge’s parapet, her ghostly fingers tracing the carvings Dale made for her so long ago. She is the breath of the valley, and as long as the water flows, she will never stop waiting for the stone to wake up
0 comments