Once Upon a Quiet Pond

De: Darlene Zagata

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

They found the miller's wife standing at the edge of the pond at dawn, her eyes open but unseeing. She had no reflection.

The villagers knew better than to ask questions. Some curses were older than memory, older than the stones that ringed the water's edge. They wrapped her in linen and whispered prayers that weren't quite prayers — more like bargains with forces they didn't dare name.

The pond had been there longer than anyone could remember. It sat in the woods beyond the village like a watching eye, its surface so perfect, so impossibly still, that children were warned away with stories. The water remembers, mothers would tell their restless sons and daughters. It takes what it reflects.

Most dismissed it as folklore. A way to keep the curious from wandering too far into the dark between the trees.

But every few years, someone would vanish. And every few years, their reflection would remain in the pond — a ghost trapped in silver, moving and living and desperate — while the body above grew hollow and mad.

Liora Wren had heard these stories all her life. She believed them the way one believes in distant mountains: as something real but irrelevant to her own small world.

She would learn, before her sixteenth year ended, that the most dangerous beliefs are the ones we don't yet hold.

And she would learn it at the edge of a mirror that lied.

In the language of the old magics, reflection meant memory. To steal a reflection was to steal identity — to make a person forget themselves so thoroughly that even their shadow would not recognize them.

The Fallen Fairy Queen Selunara had learned this long ago. It was how she had survived, century after century, in the prison beneath the pond.

And she was hungry.