Then, something snagged my ankle.
I choked on a scream.
The grip was not hands, not fingers—but something colder, something worse.
A tangle of lake weeds? No—hair. Her hair.
A rope of dark, sodden hair coiled around my ankle like a leash, tightening, pulling me back toward her.
The surface blurred. The reeds on the shore faded. The sky, the trees—all slipping away as the dark pulled me under.
She hummed softly as if soothing a child.
Something else stirred, responding to my terror.
“I am owed a debt. You cannot have her.” The Unbidden’s words slithered through the water like oil. “She is already mine.”
“Pretty girls, all of them,” the Lady’s voice was warped, twisted, shifting through echoes of pain and time. “All of them trying to take my place. But it is me who carries his child. He built that manor for me. Yet he married another.”
Dear Lord, what kind of tragedy happened here?
“And I wept until my tears swallowed me. While he laughed and celebrated with his new wife.”
The lake’s grip tightened.
Her face was closer now, too close, the black pits of her eyes bottomless.
I struggled—kicked, twisted—but the hair around my ankle wouldn’t let go.
“She is mine,” the Unbidden’s voice cracked through the lake like splitting ice. Then it spoke again—this time in a tongue I had never heard before.
The grip loosened.
A scream ripped through the water, high and ragged, as the Lady in the Lake reared back.
I kicked hard, breaking the surface and dragging myself toward the shore.
“She took my place. And he left me. I wandered around, and everyone looked away from my shame. But not the lake. The water called me. Welcomed me. Nobody can see me crying in the deep.”
The voice tangled with the wind, twisting and breaking.
I clawed at the mud, coughing, spitting water, my nails digging into the shore.
I threw one last glance over my shoulder—
The Unbidden’s words churned the lake. The wind picked up, bending the reed. The drowned woman hovered above the rippling black water. I wiped my eyes—was I really seeing this? The water beneath her formed arms and tentacles and reached for her bony ankles.
“She is mine.” The Unbidden’s voice cracked like a whip. The lake trembled, its surface rippling outward.
The darkness beneath her feet rose. A thick, glistening tentacle pulled the Lady under the water. The last thing I saw were her eyes—bottomless like cursed wells, and her face—a frozen mask of eternal torment. Bubbles rushed to the surface, carrying a scream that chilled my marrow.
Then she vanished. The Lady in the Lake was no more.
Birdsongs and the soft whisper of the wind returned, and with it, an unexpected sound.
Applause.
Slow, mocking, deliberate.
