F — Fog on the Avon

 

The unnatural fog that rolled across the river before the horrors began.

The fog on the Avon rolled low and deliberate, swallowing the riverbanks in a slow, creeping hush. At first, it was just an inconvenience, boats delayed, lanterns lit earlier than usual, voices carrying strangely, if at all, across the water. But then came the silence. No birds. No insects. Even the current seemed to dull, as if the river itself were holding its breath.

People noticed, of course, but not all at once. A missing fisherman here. A barge found adrift there. Shapes glimpsed just beyond the veil, always dismissed a moment later as tricks of the light. Padua is the sort of place that lives with danger; it takes more than fog to spark panic. But unease spread anyway, subtle and persistent, like an infection working it’s way through a body.

For Vaervenshyael, the fog was wrong in ways she couldn’t immediately explain. It didn’t just obscure sight, it dampened sound.  And the sounds it hid, it would not release. Distance became unreliable. Tracks ended where they shouldn’t, or doubled back in impossible ways. It turned her strengths against her, blinding the careful logic she relied on. And that alone marked it as dangerous.

By the time the first true horrors stepped out of it, it was already too late. The fog hadn’t merely come to hide them. It had come to prepare the ground.