The town of Greyhaven had always lived with the fog. It seeped in from the sea every evening, curling around the fishing boats, swallowing the streets, and pressing against the windows like a living thing. To Nia, it had always been a nuisance—when she was younger, she used to laugh at the townsfolk who whispered about it stealing memories. Now, at nineteen, standing on the porch of her childhood home, she wasn’t laughing. Her mother was gone.

“They said she walked out into it like always,” Mrs. Calloway muttered when Nia knocked at her door with her recorder in hand. “But she didn’t come back the same.” The old woman’s eyes darted toward the fog that still blanketed the shore. “None of them do.”

Nia filled her notebook with stories: fishermen who forgot their wives’ names, children who woke speaking in voices that weren’t theirs, and neighbors who stared at the sea as if listening to something no one else could hear. Each account pressed down on her skepticism.

On the fourth night, she followed the mist to the cliffs. The air was colder there, heavy with salt and something metallic, like old blood. She almost turned back—until she saw him.

Elian. A boy no older than twenty, yet his eyes carried decades. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, voice soft as the tide. “The fog doesn’t just take. It trades. Every moment you spend here, you’re giving it pieces of yourself.”

Nia tightened her grip on her recorder. “My mother’s in there. I need to find her.”

He shook his head. “If you pull her out, she may not be your mother anymore. The fog fills what it empties—with fragments, echoes, things older than us both.”

The mist swirled around them, and for a heartbeat, Nia forgot why she had come. The recorder felt strange in her hand, as though it belonged to someone else. Panic flared, and she forced herself to remember: her mother’s laugh, the way she hummed while cooking, the scar on her thumb from cleaning fish.

“Go back,” Elian urged. His outline blurred, as if the fog were already claiming him again. “Save yourself before it’s too late.”

But when Nia turned, she thought she saw a familiar figure deeper in the mist—a silhouette, standing still, waiting. Her mother. Or what was left of her.

Nia’s breath caught. One step would mean risking her mind, her name, her very self. Yet retreat meant abandoning the only family she had left. The fog pulsed, patient and hungry.

She whispered to herself, Remember who you are. And then, heart pounding, she stepped forward.