Do Not Follow the Light Into the Ashwood

We find the hollow at the base of a root formation the size of a small house. The missing livestock are there — all of them, alive, standing in a loose cluster, utterly calm. Around them, pressed into the earth in a wide ring, are the same long-toed prints, circling, circling, as though whatever made them had walked the perimeter for hours.
And in the center of the ring, sitting with its back against the largest root, is a child.
Not a child. I know that the moment I see it. It is the size of a child, and it is shaped like one, but its skin has the same pale grey tone as the Ashwood bark, and its eyes, when it opens them, are the cold silver-green of the luminous moss. Its fingers are too long. Its stillness is absolute — the stillness of a thing that has never needed to pretend to be still because it has never known what stillness isn’t.
Sven raises the crossbow.
Ognar puts one hand on the stock. Gently. Firmly. “Wait.”
The creature — the child — looks at us. It does not move. Then it looks at the livestock, and then it looks at us again, and there is something in that sequence that I recognize, slowly, with a cold settling feeling in my chest. It has been keeping them. Circling them through the cold nights. Holding them inside the ring.
“It’s protecting them,” Isolwen says. Her voice is barely a sound.
Sven doesn’t lower the crossbow. “From what?”
The light gathers at the edge of the clearing. And then I understand why Isolwen told us not to follow it. Because the light is not ambient. The light is something else — something that moves with intention through the Ashwood, something that the creature has been keeping the animals away from, circling them, guiding them deeper where the light does not pool.
The creature rises. It moves to the edge of the ring and it makes a sound — not language, not quite, but structured, rhythmic, the way a person hums to keep themselves from being afraid. The gathered light wavers. Pulls back. The creature hums again, and I feel the sound in my teeth and behind my eyes, and then the light is gone, and the Ashwood is just grey and still and smelling of old smoke.
Sven lowers the crossbow.
We bring the livestock back. All of them. The creature does not follow us, but when I look back at the edge of the tree line, I see it standing there, watching us go, its silver-green eyes tracking the animals with something I can only call relief.
This is what I report to the Warden: the livestock were recovered. The threat has been neutralized. I use that word deliberately because it is the word the Warden’s contract uses, and because it is technically accurate, and because if I say anything else I will have to explain what I saw.
But here is what I did not put in the report.
The morning after we return, Isolwen comes to find me. She has been back into the records — old garrison ledgers, the kind nobody reads. Twenty-two years ago, a child went missing from one of those outermost farms. A girl. Silver hair. They searched the Ashwood for a week and found nothing.
I look at Isolwen’s close-cropped silver hair. I look at the way she is holding the ledger. I watch her face do the slow, terrible work of understanding something she has been carrying her whole life without knowing its shape.
She closes the ledger. She does not speak. She goes back to her room and closes the door, and I let her, because there is nothing I can say that is larger than what she now knows.
Three of us came back from the Ashwood.
The fourth one never left.

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About the Author

Vael Mor’Kharr — necromancer who walks freely among the dead, communing with spirits and commanding the undead. His name is whispered in every cursed tomb.

— Vael Mor’Kharr

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Categories: Fantasy, High Fantasy

Tags: 10min stories, ashwood, atmospheric, creature, dark forest, fantasy, fantasy fiction, framed narrative, group of hunters, high fantasy, monster hunter, orc character, plot twist, short story

July 30, 2026

10min-stories