Who Comes Back When the Forest Lets You Go?

I am standing at the tree line when I realize I have been here before.
Not in the way travelers speak of déjà vu — that shallow flutter of misplaced memory. I mean I know the exact angle of this root where it breaks the soil, the way the bark of the nearest elm has split into a shape like a sleeping face, the particular silence that lives inside Varenwood, thick and pressurized, like the moment before a held breath breaks. I know it because three months ago my sister Ngozi walked into this forest and did not come back. And I know it because six days ago, something wearing her face did.
My name is Catriona Sullivan. I am twenty-four years old, I am a cartographer’s apprentice in the walled town of Duskfen, and I am about to walk into a cursed forest to pull my sister’s soul out of whatever it has been replaced with.
I have a compass that belonged to our mother, a satchel of salt, a knife I do not intend to use for violence, and a piece of advice from a woman I met only once, in a market stall that was not there the following morning.
—
Six days earlier, I am at the salt-seller’s end of the Duskfen market when Ngozi walks out of the Varenwood road and into the crowd.
The market of Duskfen is the kind of place that insists on being real. It smells of cured fish and wet wool and the sweet-rot of overripe pears. The stalls are jammed between the town’s inner wall and the wide cobblestone square, and the noise — the haggling, the children, the clatter of iron pots — is a physical thing you push through rather than simply hear. I am there buying salt because I always buy salt on Tuesdays, and because buying salt on Tuesdays is the kind of small, reliable ritual that has kept me sane since Ngozi disappeared. I am reaching into my satchel for coins when the crowd parts just slightly, the way crowds do around something that unsettles them without their knowing why, and I see her. She is wearing the green coat she left in. Her hair is in the same two braids she always wore. She is smiling at me with Ngozi’s wide, warm smile, and every nerve in my body goes cold and still, the way a pond goes still before something large surfaces beneath it. I know, in the way you know things that bypass language entirely, that this is not my sister. The smile is correct. The face is correct. But the person behind the face is like a painting of a fire — it has the shape and the color, and it gives off no heat at all.
I buy my salt. I walk to her. I say her name.
“Catriona,” she says back, and her voice is Ngozi’s voice. “I missed you.”
I take her hand. Her fingers are the right temperature. Her grip is the right pressure. I smile and I say I missed her too, and I spend the next six days watching the thing that is almost my sister move through our shared rooms, eat Ngozi’s favorite foods, laugh at Ngozi’s jokes, and never once make the small, irreducible errors that would let me prove what I know to anyone else.
Only one thing is wrong. When she sleeps, she does not dream. I know because I watch. Her face is perfectly, utterly still.

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About the Author

Morwenna Hexweaver — Morwenna knows 77 spells that must never be spoken aloud. Her spellbook, the “Hex Codex,” is alive and constantly rewrites itself.

— Morwenna Hexweaver

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Categories: Fantasy, Witchcraft/Curses

Tags: 10min stories, atmospheric fantasy, bittersweet ending, curses, dark forest, fantasy, first person fantasy, folk magic, parallel narrative, short story, sisters, witchcraft

July 30, 2026

10min-stories