The Call of the Mist

The tide moved gently against the shore as Lark MacKenna approached the water's edge. Dunmore, an old fishing town, had rumors of unusual occurrences beyond the horizon, but Lark had not considered them seriously until now.

Tonight, the sea called to her in a way it never had before.

The sky was a bruised shade of twilight, deep purples and smudges of crimson melting into the endless expanse. The wind carried the scent of salt and something else—something unnameable, ancient, like forgotten memories buried beneath the waves. Lark’s father had been a fisherman, lost to the sea when she was just a child. Her mother spoke of it as though it were a certainty, but no wreckage had ever washed ashore, no body had ever been found. Just gone, as though the ocean had swallowed him whole.

She had spent years staring out at the horizon, wondering what lay beyond the mist. Tonight, with the wind weaving ghostly fingers through her hair and the moon spilling silver onto the restless waves, she felt it—a shift, an invisible thread pulling her forward.

“Don’t go out past the break,” called old Mr. Doyle from his weathered porch, his voice a rasp against the night. He was the town’s self-appointed keeper of stories, and more than once, Lark had heard him ramble about the ones who disappeared. “The mist ain’t what it seems.”

But Lark wasn’t afraid.

She stepped into the water, the chill sending a shiver up her spine like icy needles threading through her skin. A boat rocked gently at the dock—her father’s boat, long untouched, its hull scarred by time and salt, as if waiting for something. Her fingers brushed the worn wood, and she felt it hum beneath her touch, alive in some way she couldn’t explain.

As she climbed aboard, the mist rolled in, thick and silver, swallowing the shore behind her. It wrapped around her like silk spun from moonlight. She should have been afraid. She should have turned back. But the moment the mist touched her skin, the world tilted, and she was drifting, not in the sea, but somewhere else entirely.

The water glowed, pulsing like a heartbeat beneath her. Shapes moved within the mist, spectral forms gliding just below the surface, their eyes gleaming like submerged stars. She heard music—not played, but felt, as though the air itself was alive with melody. It wrapped around her, a song she had known forever but had never heard before.

“Lark,” a voice called, smooth as the tide and edged with longing. She turned sharply, her breath catching in her throat.

A man stood at the bow of the boat, his dark hair wild with the wind, his eyes deep and endless as the ocean’s depths. He was young, but there was something timeless about him, something carved from the sea and sky themselves.

“Who are you?” she asked, but the words barely left her lips before she knew.

Her father. Or rather, something of him—something the sea had taken and shaped into something else.

“You came,” he said, stepping closer. “I’ve been waiting.”

Tears burned in her eyes, hot against the cold mist. “I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

The mist thickened, swirling around them like dancers in the moonlight. He reached for her, and the moment their hands touched, she saw everything—the day he had vanished, the storm that had swallowed him, the moment he had stepped beyond the veil of mist and into something greater than the world they had known.

“The sea doesn’t just take,” he whispered. “It calls.”

Lark’s heart pounded. She had spent her whole life waiting, longing for answers, and now she stood at the threshold of something vast and unknowable. The music swelled, the mist curled around her like an embrace, and her father smiled—a sad, knowing smile.

“You don’t have to stay,” he said. “But if you choose to go back, you’ll always hear it. The song. The call.”

Lark looked over her shoulder. The mist had begun to thin, revealing the faintest outline of Dunmore’s shore. The lighthouse beacon flickered, distant and hazy, a tether to the world she knew. She could return. Live her life. Let the mystery remain a story whispered by the waves.

Or she could step forward—into the mystic, into the song that had always been calling her name.

The boat rocked gently as she made her choice.