Echoes from the Loam: The Taste of Sorrow

The graveyard gate was open, as it always had been. The hinges had rusted decades ago, and the iron itself had apparently given up on keeping anything in or out. When the narrator stepped through that night, the fog rose to meet them—not drifting or swelling, but rising as though the ground itself exhaled at the sight of a living person. They had not come to hunt folklore or gather material. They came because grief had been sitting in their chest like a stone that refused to dissolve, and they thought, foolishly, that walking among the dead might loosen it.

The Feeding Begins

What the narrator encountered was not a ghost or a spirit in any recognizable sense. The shape that formed beside them was a presence without a person—a length of cloth hanging in the air without wind or support, its shroud so heavy with folds it seemed wet, though no rain had fallen. The hood concealed whatever face might have existed beneath, and the creature gave off no breath, no warmth. Only a pull: a soft pressure behind the ribs, as though something inside the narrator leaned toward it without permission.