The forest was overgrown, but not unkind. There were thorns, yes, but there were roses, too. The path curled ahead through petal and bramble, lit by the hush of things that do not need to speak to be understood.
She did not flinch as the thorns grazed her hem. She had always known: torn dresses could be mended.
This was no place of accident. It was the world she had lived in long ago. A parallel one, carried like a secret beneath her skin through thirty three summers and thirty three winters. Not a refuge nor a dream. But perhaps something quietly promised by the gods themselves.
There are paths we fear, and paths we follow because they are familiar. And then, there are the ones we enter with quiet certainty, not for their ease, but for their truth. Even if they lead us far from what we once called home. Even if they do not offer a way back.
She had never longed to belong to her past world. That hunger had never lived in her. Even as a girl, she understood: the world she came from was not one she wished to carry forward.
Over time, she stopped apologizing for the quiet distance she held between herself and the rest. She was not lost. She was not broken. She simply did not wish to inherit what did not belong to her.
And now, in the stillness beneath the moon, with silver light catching the curve of her mask, she understood: She had not been wandering. She had been returning. Not to a place, but to herself.
Not of the living. Not quite of the dead. But the ghost of the girl they buried, and the woman who came back for her.
