The Border

The mountain path ended in mist.

I stood at the edge of it, watching tendrils curl around the stones like beckoning fingers. Behind me, the world I knew... sunshine, birdsong, the distant smoke from the last village where they'd tried to warn me. Ahead, nothing but gray.

"Your sister went that way," they'd said. "Three months ago. She never came back."

Neither had anyone else. Not in living memory. Not in the stories their grandparents told. The mountains that bordered Valdris had swallowed travelers for as long as anyone could remember, and eventually, people had stopped trying.

Everyone except Sera.

And now, everyone except me.

I adjusted my pack on my shoulders and stepped into the mist.

The cold hit me first. Not the crisp mountain chill I'd been hiking through for days, but something deeper. Wronger. It seeped through my clothes, my skin, settled into my bones like it belonged there. The air itself felt thick, weighted with old magic and older grief.

The path beneath my feet changed. One moment, loose stone and scraggly grass. The next, cobblestones, ancient, worn smooth by centuries of feet that no longer walked them.

I kept moving. Sera had kept moving. She'd followed the same trail, asked the same questions, ignored the same warnings. My sister had never met a door she didn't try to open or a mystery she didn't chase into darkness.

The difference between us was that she'd always been the brave one. The protector. Every time I'd gotten into trouble as a child, Sera had been there to pull me out. When the village boys had cornered me behind the mill. When I'd fallen through the ice on the winter pond. When our mother had died and I'd wanted to follow her into the dark.

Sera. Always Sera. Saving me.

Now it was my turn.

The mist began to thin, and I realized I could see shapes through it. Buildings. Towers. The jagged outline of rooftops against a sky that wasn't quite right.

I emerged onto a hillside overlooking a kingdom.

Valdris. It had to be. The cursed kingdom from the stories, except the stories had never prepared me for how beautiful it would be. Spires of pale stone rose from the valley below, catching light from a sun that hung perpetually at the edge of sunset. Gardens sprawled between buildings, their roses frozen in eternal bloom. Fountains sparkled without flowing, their water suspended mid-arc like captured starlight.

Everything was still. Everything was perfect. Everything was wrong.

The same twilight, I realized. The villagers had talked about it in hushed voices. The same twilight for three hundred years. Time didn't pass here. The sun never fully set, never rose. The kingdom existed in a single endless moment.

And somewhere down there, my sister was trapped in it.

I started down the hill.

The cobblestone path wound through fields that should have been farmland but lay fallow, their crops neither growing nor dying. I passed an orchard where apples hung from branches, perfectly ripe, perfectly untouched, probably perfectly ripe for centuries.

A sound made me stop. Footsteps. Not behind me, ahead.

A figure emerged from behind a crumbling wall. A woman, elderly, wrapped in clothes that had been fine once but now hung in tatters. She stared at me with an expression that held three hundred years of hopelessness.

"Another one," she said. Her voice cracked from disuse. "Another fool."

"I'm looking for someone." I didn't break stride, didn't let my voice waver. "My sister. Sera. Dark hair, taller than me, probably asked too many questions."

Her weathered face tightened. Recognition, perhaps. Or fear.

"You should turn back," the woman said.

"I can't. I'm already here."

She laughed, a harsh, rusted sound. "That's not what I mean. The border's right there." She pointed behind me. "You can still leave. Once you go further..." She shook her head. "No one leaves Valdris. Not unless the curse breaks. And the curse doesn't break."

I looked back at where she pointed. The mist still hung there, maybe a hundred yards away. The border. The line between my world and this frozen nightmare.

"Did my sister try to leave?"

"Everyone tries. At first." The woman's gaze drifted to the mist. "It lets you walk right up to it. Lets you think you can step through. But when you try..." She wrapped her arms around herself. "You'll see. Eventually. They all see."

"Where is she now?"

"The palace." The woman's voice went quiet, almost inaudible. "She went to the palace. Kept asking about the curse, about how to break it. Said she could fix everything." A bitter smile. "They all say that too. In the beginning."

"And then?"

"Then they meet the king." The woman was already turning away, retreating into whatever frozen existence she'd carved out for herself. "No one's seen her since."

"Wait..."

But she was gone, vanished around the corner of a building that might have been a shop three centuries ago. I could have followed. Could have demanded more answers.

Instead, I looked toward the center of the valley, where the largest structure rose above the rest. The palace. Even from here, I could see that it was different from the beautiful decay around it. Darker. The stone was black where everything else was white, and shadows clung to its towers in ways that shouldn't have been possible with the sun still in the sky.

Sera was in there. Had been in there for months.

My sister, who had protected me her whole life. My sister, who had walked into a cursed kingdom to find a cure and never walked out.

I wasn't going to be the one who gave up. I wasn't going to be the one who turned back while there was still a chance.

I started walking again, faster now. The cobblestones led me down into the valley, past more frozen gardens and silent fountains. A few times I spotted other inhabitants, a man staring blankly from a window, a child frozen mid-step on a crumbling stair. They watched me pass with the same hollow recognition as the old woman.

Another one. Another fool.

Let them think what they wanted. They didn't know me. They didn't know that I'd spent my whole life being the one who needed saving, and that I'd finally found something worth fighting for.

The palace loomed larger as I approached. The shadows around it weren't natural, I could see that now. They moved. Slithered. Reached toward the eternal sunset as if trying to devour what remained of the light.

The gates stood open. Not welcoming, exactly, but not barred against me either. Like they'd been waiting.

I stopped at the threshold. Behind me, the kingdom stretched in its terrible beauty, its people trapped in their endless moment. Ahead, darkness.

"She went to the palace," the old woman had said. "No one's seen her since."

I stepped through the gates.

The shadows wrapped around me like a greeting, cold and invasive, slithering across my skin before retreating. The courtyard beyond was vast and empty, its stones cracked by centuries of unmaintained frost. At the far end, doors twice my height stood slightly ajar.

I crossed the courtyard. Pushed open the doors.

And stopped.

The throne room stretched before me, cathedral-vast and cathedral-dark. What little light existed came from torches that burned without flickering, their flames as frozen as everything else in this kingdom. And at the far end, on a throne of black stone,

He might have been human once.

The thing that sat there now defied description. Shadows made solid, darkness given form. Claws that could have been hands, or might never have been. And eyes, eyes like dying stars, like the last light of sunset trapped in twin pools of black.

The creature's gaze found me.

"Another one."

His voice ground out of him like stone splitting, like three centuries of solitude compressed into sound.

I didn't run. I didn't scream. I didn't do any of the things I was supposed to do when faced with a monster from nightmare.

I stood my ground and stared right back at him.

"I'm looking for my sister."

A pause. His shadowed form went still. Surprise, perhaps, though it was hard to read on a face made of darkness.

"Welcome to Valdris." The monster rose from his throne, shadows flowing around him like water. "You can never leave."

Every instinct, every survival mechanism, every story I'd ever heard screamed at me to run.

But fear wasn't going to find Sera. Fear wasn't going to break this curse. Fear wasn't going to do anything except make me another hollow-eyed inhabitant waiting for a salvation that never came.

So I lifted my chin and met the monster's gaze.

"We'll see about that."