The cabin’s walls glowed with a pale, honeyed hue, that strange in-between color the old woman once called Blonde Wood. Drysla traced her fingers along the grain where sunlight seeped through cracks like a memory, warm but unwelcoming. She had built this place herself decades ago, though she could barely recall the rhythm of the hammer or the smell of the fresh sap in the icy air.

Now the boards whispered each night. They spoke in the dry rasp of bare feet brushing sawdust, the brevity of breath caught inside hollow spaces. Drysla had stopped sweeping weeks ago. The dust seemed to move on its own, gathering near the hearth even when no one sat there.

Tonight, the light from the oil lamp swam in the shadows, drawing out the walls’ golden tones until they shimmered. Her reflection in the glass flickered, half to herself and half the house remembering. A faint, long mark appeared on the wood behind her shoulder, as if someone had pressed a finger into it from the other side.

Drysla turned. The surface looked smooth. Perfect. Yet from within, she could hear a single word rise, faint as breath against a windowpane: Stay.