1038: Story 1038: Beneath the Willow Veil 1038: Story 1038: Beneath the Willow Veil There was a tree at the edge of the drowned cemetery, so ancient its branches bent like sorrow.
The villagers called it the Weeping Veil, and no one dared approach after sunset.
The legend was simple: beneath the willow, you don’t just mourn the dead—you become them.
But grief has no rules.
And Calla Muir, freshly orphaned and spiraling into obsession, ignored them all.
She came barefoot and shaking on the third night of the thunder moon, a single photograph clutched to her chest—her mother, father, and baby brother, their eyes eaten by the plague, their bodies swallowed in a government pit before she could say goodbye.
The willow awaited her, whispering her name in a voice that wasn’t wind.
Its drooping tendrils parted like a curtain as she approached.
Beneath them: a hollow, not made of earth, but of memories pressed into soil—shoes, rings, lockets, wedding dresses, all half-buried in the roots.
The offerings of countless mourners.
Calla stepped inside.
Time collapsed.
Inside the veil, the world was muted green and gray, like an old filmstrip fading into mold.
Calla blinked, and she was in a dining room that wasn’t hers—yet she knew every plate, every photo, every misplaced fork.
Her family was at the table, smiling.
Whole.
Alive.
“Stay,” her mother said, though her mouth didn’t move.
Her father’s eyes bled softly into his cereal.
Her brother giggled, despite the centipede crawling from his ear.
Calla backed away—but the door was gone.
She screamed.
And the willow roots heard her.
They dragged her into the trunk.
Within the willow’s heart pulsed a second world—a tomb built from stolen grief.
Shades wandered in endless circles, trapped in their happiest memories turned grotesque.
A wedding froze mid-kiss.
A child played with a headless teddy bear.
An old woman crocheted her own skin into a blanket.
Calla ran through them, each step sinking into memory-mud.
The tree didn’t feed on flesh—it fed on the pain of those who couldn’t let go.
And Calla, it whispered, had so much to give.
She found the Egress wrapped in willowfire—a pale light flickering in a knot shaped like a screaming eye.
To escape, she had to let go—not just of the memory, but of the hope that anything would ever be the same again.
She burned the photograph.
The tree shrieked, shaking from root to crown, and expelled her like phlegm.
Calla awoke beneath the willow’s shadow, eyes wet, fingers blistered.
The photograph was ash.
But her grief—her real grief—was finally hers again.
Not twisted.
Not imprisoned.
The Weeping Veil still stands, weeping for the world.
But Calla Muir no longer does.