Inkling 2025 - Flipbook - Page 27
Falls
by Helen Duan
sparkled, proud and cold—as if built from
the innocence it had destroyed. The fog still
swallowed the forest, but no one feared
it anymore. They had forgotten the fear.
Forgotten the truth.
And I was born into this forgetting—raised
upon blood and broken wings.
My father was once the town’s proudest
hunter. My mother, quiet and kind, walked
into the forest when I was seven and never
came back. Some said she got lost. Others
claimed the mist took her, like so many
others before. I only remember her kneeling
before me, pressing a feather pendant into
my palm. “Never trust the laughter that rides
the wind,” she said.
I didn’t understand then. Not until the night
everything repeated itself.
I was sixteen. Rain tapped the windows, and I
couldn’t sleep. That’s when I saw her—a little
girl standing at the forest’s edge, her eyes
wide and shy, wings just beginning to grow.
Around her neck, the same pendant my
mother gave me swung in the breeze. Before
I could speak, she smiled and turned, running
into the woods. And her smile—it was just
like my mother’s the day she disappeared.
Without thinking, I chased her.
I shouted a name—one I didn’t recognize, yet
somehow knew. It tumbled from my mouth
like a forgotten song. The mist wrapped
around me like silk, and the world turned
INKLING 2025 | 27
