Chapter 31 — The Wind in the Grain It began with the barley.
Where once the stalks had stood golden and proud, bending gently beneath the wind’s fingers, now they sagged, dull and limp, their tips darkened as if kissed by rot. Jasper noticed first by the sound—or lack of it. No hum of bees. No rustle of mice. Just the dry whisper of brittle husks scraping against each other in the strange, still air.
The wind had changed. It no longer spoke of weather or harvests, but of waiting.
Each day, Jasper rose with the sun, grinding what good grain remained. His mill groaned under the weight of silence, its new sails turning in listless loops. Still, he baked his bread. Still, he watched the fields. Still, he walked the perimeter of his valley, hooves heavy in the packed earth.
Flame, the golden jaguar, stayed close now, fur bristling with an unspoken tension. The shadows beneath the tree line no longer felt like resting places. They felt like mouths, waiting to open.
Then came the four.
Passers-by, they called themselves. Pilgrims, perhaps. All with weary faces and satchels of dried meat and minor wares. But they reeked of magic—old hagwork, stitched into charms and trinkets, ward-etched on their bones and brows. When they crossed the threshold of Windmark Hollow, the air shimmered briefly—and all four staggered. One, a man with a carved antler staff, collapsed entirely, clutching at the smoldering rune on his neck as it fizzled into black ash. Another’s silver ring cracked like glass. The third dropped her pack as the bone idol inside it splintered in a puff of green dust.
Only the fourth, a child with no runes at all, stood unaffected. He looked at Jasper in wide-eyed fear.
“You’re death to spells,” whispered the staff-man, backing away on trembling legs.
Jasper said nothing. His equine eyes, placid and dark, held no hatred—only inevitability.
When they were gone, he walked the edge of the barley rows, his boots turning over the sickened soil. That’s when he saw it—where the scarecrow charm’s shadow fell longest, the grain beneath it curled inward like a fist. He dug there, hands rough and unhurried, until his fingers struck glass.
A jar. Old, sealed with tar and twine, wrapped in sigil-etched parchment that shriveled the moment he touched it. The paper flared, flashed—and vanished, leaving only smoke and a sour tang on the air. Inside the jar: bones of field mice, dirt from a crossroads, rusted nails, a child’s tooth, a clump of red hair.
Wards. Buried hexes. The work of a hedge-hag, meant to anchor something older, deeper.
He unwrapped the scarecrow next. His hands were careful, but firm. Beneath the copper wire and wildflowers, laced in its core, was a second twist of parchment. This one bore her rune. Mairlen’s.
It didn’t even burn. It just faded to white.
Jasper stood very still.
The Horse-Headers—his mother’s kin, those who bore hooves instead of heels, whose bloodlines touched deep roots of the old wild—had no need for magic. They were older. The runes didn’t know how to speak to them. To Jasper, they simply unraveled.
Somewhere far off, a crow screamed.
That night, the first came.
A single Night Flitterer, no taller than a child, clung to the windmill’s arm like a leech. Its wings were leathery veils, twitching in the wind. Its claws tapped, rhythmically. Its yellow eyes glowed like lanterns, staring straight through the dark at Jasper.
He lit no candle. He watched it. It watched back.
By the hour’s turn, there were two. Then three. Then four. By dawn, the sky above the mill turned black with them.
They descended in bursts of chaos—flapping and cackling, tearing into the barley, shredding stalks with their claws, pulling up roots with gleeful violence. They chased Flame through the woods, hounded her with swoops and shrieks until she vanished beneath the rock shelf near the well.
They shrieked at the windows, battered the roof, clung to the blades of the turning sails and spun like manic banners. Jasper did not sleep. He stood beneath the mill’s eaves with his pitchfork in hand. The sword lay under the floorboards, untouched. He would not draw it—not yet. The blade was for old wars, not for scavenger things drunk on shadow.
When they tried to enter, he drove them back. A pitchfork to the gut sent one flittering into a wall with a crunch. Another he skewered through the wing and pinned to the door, where it hissed and laughed until its light went out.
Still they came. Dozens. Hundreds.
At twilight, he stood alone in the center of the yard, breath fogging in the unnatural cold that had crept into the valley. Around him, the fields lay flattened. The scarecrow charm had been torn to pieces, its pieces carried away on wing.
The windmill’s sails turned, slow and groaning.
And in the distant woods, just beyond the reach of firelight, a deeper cackle echoed—low and female. The hag was watching.
She had seen her spell unravel.
And she was sending worse.
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
Chapter 32 — The Dream in the Mill The last of the Night Flitterers shrieked as Jasper drove it off with a savage swing of his pitchfork. The air stank of singed feathers and sour magic. Scratches covered his arms and shoulders where their claws had reached him, but he still stood—breathing heavy, soaked in sweat, pitchfork trembling in his hands.
The windmill creaked mournfully in the night breeze, the wooden sails turning in long, tired circles. The fields lay in ruin, furrows trampled and crops torn. Yet Jasper had held.
He barred the mill door, slumped against it for a moment, then staggered to his straw bed in the corner. His limbs ached, and the scent of dust and old grain was strangely comforting. He fell onto the pallet like a felled oak. Within moments, sleep swept him into its depths.
Far off, at the edge of the forest, the hag watched.
She stood cloaked in shadow beneath the twisted trees, a smirk playing on her cracked lips. At her feet, the golden jaguar Flame lay sleeping, his chest rising and falling in a rhythmic, enchanted trance. Her spell, whispered with a voice like dry leaves, had slipped into his ears and bound him.
The hag—Miriam to those who feared her—stepped out into the fields. The moonlight touched her as she moved, and in its silver glow, her disguise flickered. For a moment she was hunched and hideous, her skin like rotted parchment, her jaw elongated and split with yellow fangs. But as she stepped into shadow again, the illusion returned: a woman in a tattered shawl, with the grace of something that had once been beautiful.
She approached the mill.
Inside, Jasper dreamed.
The mill was no longer cold and battered, but full of sunlight. The scent of flour and baking bread floated in the air. Sarah stood before him—her chestnut hair shining like copper flame, her green eyes brimming with kindness. She wore the dress with the frayed hem, the one he’d always loved. She smiled and took his hands.
"Jasper," she whispered, pulling him close.
He pressed his face into her neck. Her warmth, her scent—it was real. They sank to the floor together, tangled in the golden shafts of light. Her breath was sweet against his skin, her fingers strong and tender as they explored him. He surrendered to the dream, to her, to love unspoken for years.
But outside the dream, another figure had entered the mill.
The hag moved silently, smoke-like. She knelt over Jasper’s sleeping form, straddling him with a slow, deliberate motion. Her tongue ran over her cracked lips, savoring the moment. Her form shimmered—and where the hag had crouched, now Sarah lay across him, skin glowing, smile soft.
In the dream, Sarah kissed his chest, whispered his name, and began to move.
The hag’s illusion held as her body worked, drawing from him the deep-rooted magic of the Horse-Headers, the ancient seed she sought to twist and consume. Her hunger was endless.
But then—it slipped.
A glimmer of moonlight caught the rune on her wrist, etched by the jaguar's earlier strike. The ward flared, resisted—and failed. The illusion flickered.
In the dream, Sarah's face blurred. Her eyes turned too black, her grin too wide.
Jasper jolted awake.
He saw her.
Not Sarah.
The hag.
Her skin was grey and warty, her smile grotesque. She hovered over him, panting, nails digging into his chest.
Jasper roared. His hoofed leg kicked out, knocking her off him. He struck with a hay hook lying nearby, slashing her face.
She shrieked, staggering back with a clawed hand to her cheek. Black ichor oozed between her fingers, but she only laughed.
"I enjoyed that ride, my stallion," she hissed, her voice wet with venom. "You are mine now."
She convulsed, her limbs cracking and shifting as her body folded inward and outward at once—legs bending the wrong way, hair fusing into twitching limbs. In seconds, a massive black spider crouched where the hag had been, its abdomen slick with shadow, its eyes like coals. Then it scuttled up the wall and disappeared into the rafters, gone into the night.
Jasper dropped to his knees in the straw, breathing hard, his body shaking with rage and shame.
He stared down at his hands.
"You took what was precious to me..." His voice trembled.
Then it rose. "You twisted it."
He stood.
"The plough no more."
He crossed the mill, tore up the floorboards beneath the flour sacks. There, wrapped in linen, was his old sword—heavy, black with age, still sharp as winter.
"My sword. My steel."
He lifted it.
"Hag."
Entered by: 0xe9a1…78d3
