Humming sweetly to no one but the walls, Eileen stands in her kitchen at the bright and respectable age of eighty-four, swaddled in a plush sky-blue bathrobe that has seen more winters than she bothers to count. The robe is handwoven, by whom, she can’t quite remember, but it hugs her with the firm affection of something that has outlasted trends, storms, and perhaps an argument or two with time itself.

  She wraps the robe tighter with a soft huff, not from cold, but from the way mornings seem to bring everything back around. Thoughts arriving whether she asks for them or not.

  Like the robe’s pocket which yields the key with a quiet sort of loyalty, cool, familiar, a shape her fingers know better than some memories. It was Callum who had found the cottage, after Daniel passed. Her eldest, always thinking two steps ahead and calling it love. He said it would be good for her. Quieter skies. Cleaner air. A place Callum chose with the sort of love that plans instead of asks.

  She hadn’t wanted it, not at first. Grief doesn’t take kindly to being repotted. But in time, she’d let the silence soften. Let the kettle settle into the rhythm of a house that wasn’t quite hers, but was trying to be.

  She still doesn’t think she lives here for herself. But she’s come to live here all the same. And with time, it’s softened into something nearly hers.

  Like the sunlight, which leans through the gingham curtains in golden stripes, laying its cheek across the countertop like a sleepy grandchild. Or the stand mixer which hums contentedly, in its magically subtle kind of way, the mana motor purring with the slow satisfaction of a cat kneading dough out of old dreams.

  On the far shelf, the teacups rattle faintly in their hooks, not from any tremor, but from gossip. They clink once for agreement, twice for disapproval, and she’s long since stopped trying to understand them. Let them whisper. Let them judge. They don’t wash themselves, after all.

  Eileen leans toward the mixer and murmurs to it like an old confidante. The recipe is part memory, part spell, part apology. “One more dash of cinnamon… a pinch of cardamom… a bit of salt… and …a tablespoon of nutmeg?”

  The mixer stops mid-knead with a mechanical sulk. Eileen flicks it off and swings the arm upward with the practiced rhythm of someone who has both fought and forgiven kitchenware. Peering into the bowl, she squints through her thick-rimmed glasses, the kind that have been threatening to fall off her nose for most of a decade but never quite commit to the act.

  “Rats,” she mutters. The nutmeg has vanished into the vanilla and brown sugar like a guilty child hiding in a blanket fort. She stares into the batter. Hoping for logic. Finding only regret.

  A tablespoon. What was she thinking?

  Joey wouldn’t notice, he was six and more likely to eat the wax paper than detect a spice imbalance. But Sarah. Sarah was almost eight, which is the same as thirty in terms of judgment when it came from children. Sarah had Opinions. And worse, Sarah remembered.

  Eileen’s eyes drift to the spice shelf again, standing proudly to attention. Alphabetized, polished, blessed under the full moon (only once though, but it had been a rather stern moon that night). Leaning forward her hand hovers over the capsaicin. Just a sprinkle. A little warmth. It would distract the tongue. Muddle the mistake. A harmless sleight of flavor.

  “No,” she says aloud, firm enough that the kettle lets out a startled yip of steam from the counter behind her. She turns from the shelf. She has made her decision. She would not deceive her grandchildren, not even for something as small as spice. Not even with the technology of magic. Especially not with the technology of magic. They would learn from her that mistakes weren’t the end of anything. They were the beginning of trying again.

  At the far edge of the kitchen, the breadbox huffs at her, indignant that it’s been ignored this long. Its hinges creak with exaggerated offense. She pats it in passing. "Later," she says warmly. “You’ll have your moment.”

  Inside the fridge, she selects her jars: one honey, one jam, one cinnamon spread that warms faintly at her touch. She places them down beside the loaf she baked last night, which now waits under a cloth embroidered with her initials and a crooked duck. The duck wasn’t part of the original pattern. It just happened. Like most things.

  She slices the bread, thick, steady, even and begins to spread. First the jam. Then the honey. Then the cinnamon, with a little extra flourish on each slice. As these are for her and she does so not because she’s greedy, but because no one should be the only person in their house who doesn’t get a little something special.

  Each sandwich is then wrapped in waxed paper, edges folded with reverence. One for the way in. One for the way out. One for the unknown. “Always keep one for the unknown.”

  She pauses then at the drawer and pulls out a little scrap of ribbon, soft green, left over from a present she gave herself two years ago. She ties it around the middle sandwich. Just in case someone needs to know that this one is meant to be shared.

  For she never knew what quiet aches people carried, what old griefs, what new worries, what strange little hungers they would meet. The ribbon was for the ones who might need kindness without asking. And on the road to the city, she always found a few.

  Her family believed she came back to the city twice a week for the children. For Joey and Sarah, who waited with sticky hands and questions too big for their shoes. And of course, that was true. But if she was being honest, really honest, it was also the open mic nights she missed.

  Once a week at the inn, tucked between the firewood smell and too-sweet cider, she’d climb the little stage and sing. Nothing grand. Just her old songs. Lullabies in disguise, stitched from memory scraps and a voice that hadn’t quite been used up yet. The townsfolk listened kindly. Patiently. Which is all any singer really needs.

  She never said this aloud. Not even to Callum. Especially not to Callum. But the basket always had one sandwich wrapped with a ribbon, just in case someone asked her to stay long enough for the second song. The memory passing like steam off a kettle, warm, lingering, then gone. Her hands find the sandwiches again.

  Only once they’re packed does she rinse the spoon under the tap, rubbed clean with the dish towel that always smells faintly of lavender and old sunlight. She dries it thoroughly, the way her mother taught her, if you’re going to do it, do it kindly.

  Then, with the same spoon, she scoops the dough and begins to roll. The batter is thick. Yielding. Warm at the center. It lets her shape it without complaint. One mound. Then another. Then another.

  She places each on the baking sheet, spaced like lullabies. They do not complain about the nutmeg. They do not ask for perfection. They simply hold the shape they’re given, and wait.

  As the oven begins to hum, she opens the window just a crack, letting the morning in. The cold meets her cheeks like a greeting. She closes her eyes. Breathes in deeply.

  Cinnamon. Mist. A whisper of frost. And beneath it all, something faint, something shifting begins to turn.

  But Eileen does not notice all of it. Not yet. She is still rolling cookies. The dough remembers her hands. And today, the world can wait.

  The door to the cottage closes with a soft, satisfying clunk behind her. Tuesdays were for the grandchildren. Always had been. Joey with his endless pockets and Sarah with her endless questions. She never took the fastest path to the city, but she always took the kindest one, winding through the trees, past the moss and murmuring brook. They wouldn’t expect her for hours yet, but that was alright. Grandmothers don’t need rushing. Only sandwiches. And good boots.

  Eileen pauses on the stone step, letting the basket settle beside her feet as she tucks her shawl tighter across her shoulders. The chill is here earlier than it should be, drifting down from the Yombell peaks like old news passed between birds. A sly kind of cold. The kind Daniel used to predict a week in advance, just by the way the clouds sat on the hills or how the apples ripened on the north side of the tree.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  She smiles to herself, not at the memory, but at the way it’s returned without asking permission. “Should’ve brought the wool one,” she murmurs, tugging her shawl again. “You always knew.”

  No answer, of course. Just the wind, which doesn’t quite blow, nudges. It slips through the lattice of the porch rail and runs fingers down her arms like it’s checking if she remembers how to listen. She doesn’t shiver. Not from the cold. Or from any ghosts.

  She leans down and lifts the basket with a low, theatrical groan. Her knees: loyal but dramatic. Her boots scrape the stone, and she takes her first step off the porch into a morning that smells like cinnamon and turning pages. Just past the gate, she pauses. Not because she’s forgotten anything. But because something has remembered her.

  A spider sits on the path. Small, gray, still. Perched atop a pebble like a punctuation mark at the end of an invisible sentence. “Well,” Eileen says, smiling as she bends slightly. “There you are.”

  She doesn’t step around it. She doesn’t move it aside. She waits. And after a few heartbeats, a second spider appears from under the edge of her boot, tiny, pale, legs trembling in the morning air. It joins the first, silent and trembling. “Oh” she murmurs, “you’ve brought a little friend. Or maybe your partner?”

  She doesn’t swat either of them away. Doesn’t need to. She’s lived long enough to know a sign when she sees one. The stillness of it, the neatness, like a letter left just for her.

  Eileen closes her eyes, just briefly, and bows her head. “Blessings on small legs, travelers of threads. May Urgu grant you safe crossings and clever knots. Tá an t-ádh ag baint leis an damhán alta.”

  She then murmurs her thanks once more, quieter this time, to Urgu herself, goddess of the road and the weary-hearted, of mismatched socks, second chances, and cups of tea gone cold between stories too good.

  The wind lifts again, this time through the open kitchen window behind her, grinning, as she realizes she left it open. Inside, the teacups clink once. Then twice. A rhythm like ritual for them. A sound like breath held between lines. Agreement and approval. Or maybe disagreement, followed by acceptance. Hard to say.

  The spiders part, one vanishing into a crack in the stone, the other crawling up the stem of a dandelion and vanishing entirely. Eileen steps forward.

  The path welcoming her without ceremony. The trees leaning just slightly overhead, not ominous, just familiar. Like old great-aunts with long shadows and stronger opinions. The brook ahead is already murmuring louder, threading its voice between the thinning trees, weaving it through damp leaves and moss-covered stones.

  She walks slowly. The trail narrows just a little near the water, pressing her steps closer together. Her boots whisper through the carpet of copper and olive and soft brown. Each footfall is a note in some half-forgotten lullaby.

  To her left, the old windchime dangles from a tree stump. It hasn’t rung in years, not since it fell and she rehung it slightly wrong, but today, it spins lazily, twirling in the still air. “Mmhm,” Eileen hums to herself. “Show-off.”

  She doesn’t question it though. And the wind chime doesn’t explain itself. They have that in common at least.

  Further along the path she stops in front of a mossy mound tucked beside a fork in the trail. It’s nothing much, just a thick stump, green with years. But Sarah had once named it Sir Greenbottom in a fit of gleeful importance. She’d even tried to crown it with a paper leaf hat, which Eileen had returned two days later to find perfectly folded by the breeze.

  She taps the top of the stump now with two fingers. “Good morning, Sir Greenbottom,” she says. “Hold the path while I’m out, won’t you?” She curtsies, only slightly, and moves on.

  The air thickens near the bend. The smell of water deepening, mingling with leaf rot and something cooler, something that smells like wet stone in a place no sunlight reaches. But she doesn’t stop. Not yet.

  For a bench waits ahead, half-swallowed by lichen and stubborn moss, hunched beneath an old oak that lifts its branches like arms stretched in prayer.

  Eileen steps off the trail. Her boots sink softly into the earth. She brushes her sleeve over the bench’s wooden slats before sitting, clearing a patch wide enough to see if it’s still there. Her fingers trace the wood. Slowly. Carefully.

  D + E.

  A carving worn thin. Faded by time, rain, fingers. Faint as breath on a windowpane. She presses into it with her thumb, just to be sure. Still there.

  “Romantic,” she says, half a whisper.

  Her eyes close, and for a moment, she sees him. Not as he was at the end, but younger, tongue poking out as he carved the letter D with that ridiculous little penknife. Eyes squinting with the effort. Hands too big for the gesture. “Still there,” she murmurs again, rubbing the groove like it might hum in response.

  “We were babies,” she says, smiling gently. “And we thought it would last forever.”

  She tilts her head up to the oak. Its branches stretch wide above her, weathered and creaking gently in the shifting light. “And we thought it would last forever,” she repeats, quieter now. Not sad. Just… remembering.

  A single acorn drops beside her foot. Not sudden. Not sharp. Just… timed. She blinks. A chill presses against the back of her neck like a breath. Not quite a breeze. The birds are quiet here. Too quiet.

  She stands slowly. Brushes her skirt flat. Straightens the shawl at her shoulders. From behind the trees comes a faint scent, damp, iron, unfamiliar. Not dangerous. Just wrong. The brook sounds different here, too. Like it's falling inward instead of down.

  She doesn’t mention it aloud. She simply starts walking. Down the path. Past the place where the trail bends again. Past where the light begins to gray.

  And somewhere, behind her, the bench remains. The carving softening in the moss. The windchime turning without wind. And Sir Greenbottom listening, silent as stone. Just in case.

  The ground tilts.

  Not enough to stumble, not enough to mark but enough to notice. Eileen pauses mid-step, one foot pressed gently into moss and the other just hovering. The balance of the world has shifted by a breath. The trees no longer lean in agreement; they bow, faintly, like they’ve remembered something.

  She steps again. The ground firms beneath her foot. But it remembers having tilted. The sound of the brook has changed. Still a murmur, still a trickle, but thinner now, stretched. A ribbon being pulled too taut. The birdsong has gone quieter, not with fear, but with deference.

  And then she sees it. A well sits where no well should be, pressed between two trees too close together, half-draped in lichen and shadow, its stones a dark granite slick with dew. The crown is timber, freshly hewn and strangely pristine. It smells of ash and rosemary. Of something sanctified.

  Eileen tilts her head. “Now, where have you come from?” she asks.

  No answer. But the air tightens. Then the sound. A voice. Small. Wavering. “Help! Help, can anybody help! My bwodder, he’s hurt, he needs help!”

  A child’s voice, trembling through the well’s mouth, ragged with panic and echo. It’s the kind of cry designed to find mothers. Grandmothers. Anyone with hands steady enough to lift and eyes soft enough to stay. Yet Eileen does not rush. She sets the basket down carefully and steps closer, scanning the edges for rope, pulley, bucket. Nothing. Not even a hook.

  “Don’t worry, little one!” she calls down. “Grandmother’s here. I’ll be right down to help.”

  “Re-weally?” the child calls back, desperate and hopeful in equal measure.

  “Yes, yes of course, my dear,” she soothes, kneeling now, hands on the lip of the well. “I just need to go for help first. Wells are tricky, and… well, I’m not as spry as I used to be.”

  “But my bwodder!” the voice hiccups. “He’s wet an’ red an’ messy, and I fink he’s going away! Please don’t weave us!” Eileen’s fingers tighten around the stone. She leans in further, searching for any purchase, a notch, a foothold, a miracle. But the stone is wrong. Not rough, not smooth, just… intentional. Like it had been waiting for her to arrive.

  She sighs through her nose, soft and long, then murmurs, “Alright. We’ll do it your way.” Then she braces and prepares to jump but a sharp edge catches her palm. A flake of the granite, like glass. A single bead of blood rising on her skin, round and bright. The well exhales.

  A hiss. A pop. Smoke curls up from the mouth like breath held too long. Then words, strange, luminous, scrawl themselves in the vapor, each letter precise and barbed like silver calligraphy on old vellum.

  DONATION ACCEPTED

  WELCOME, DISTINGUISHED OFFERANT

  Eileen blinks. “Well. That’s a bit much.”

  Below her, the ground trembles. A soft, reverent quake. The stone around the base of the well begins to shift, folding outward, inward, down. A staircase spirals into being, not carved, not built, but revealed. Like it had always been there, waiting for a reason.

  Until each step settles with a sigh. Moss pulling back. Roots recoiling. And something beneath the soil giving a long, low hum of approval. Eileen doesn’t move at first. She glances down at her palm, the blood already crusting at the edge. “I didn’t offer,” she says, not to protest, but to clarify. “That was just clumsiness.”

  The well doesn’t answer. But it listens. So she picks up the basket instead and checks that the sandwiches are still in place, and then pauses. Something glints to her left.

  A beetle, green as spring glass, rests on the edge of a leaf. Still. Watching. And just below it, a single wildflower leans out from the stones, bold and bright as if it, too, has something to offer.

  So she plucks it gently. Tucking it beside the wax paper and ribbon. Not for herself. For the child below. She then steps onto the staircase, one foot, then another, without waiting for permission from the stones or the sky. “I’m coming, little ones,” she calls down, voice even, voice sure. “Grandmother’s on her way.”

  Behind her, the well begins to close, not with malice, but with formality. A seal. A nod. A gate politely shutting behind someone who has already made up her mind. She doesn’t look back.

  The air cools. The light narrows. The moss pulls away. And with each step, the world above forgets her just a little. But Eileen remembers. Who called. And why she answered.