There are women who move through the world like whispers, and then there are those who move like storms.
Geillis Duncan was both.
The first time I saw her was in the herb garden, her hands stained with the color of life and death, crushed leaves, tinctures, roots pulled from dark soil. The scent was intoxicating, sharp and strange.
She looked up once, sensing me perhaps, though I had long since learned to mask my presence from the living.
Still, her eyes narrowed.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
That alone chilled me.
Days passed, and I could feel her watching, a different sort of gaze from Claire's curious warmth. Geillis's eyes were searching, calculating, as though she were trying to see beneath my skin to the place where time itself had marked me.
When I passed her in the corridor, she brushed too close. My shoulder burned where her touch grazed it, the faint hum of power rippling through the air.
"You walk softly for a woman with such a loud soul," she said, her voice honeyed but sharp as a blade.
I didn't answer, only lowered my gaze in the way a servant might.
But she smiled, too knowingly, and whispered, "Aye, you're no servant."
Her words followed me long after she was gone.
That night, the moon hung low, swollen and red.
I walked beyond the castle walls, into the glen where the stones of Craigh na Dun whispered even from miles away. The forest felt restless, as though the air itself were shifting between centuries.
I knelt by the stream, washing my hands, but the water rippled though there was no wind. I looked up, and found her there.
Geillis.
Cloaked in green, eyes gleaming with a strange fire.
"You shouldn't be here," I said softly, my hand instinctively finding the dagger at my waist.
"Neither should you," she replied.
Her words hung like smoke, and in that instant, I knew she knew.
Perhaps not everything, not who I truly was, not where I had come from, but enough to understand I did not belong to this century any more than she did.
She stepped closer, the ground whispering under her boots.
"I've seen you in the fire," she said. "In the smoke of the herbs, in the curve of the stones. A shadow born from the circle, yet trapped outside it."
Her voice trembled with awe, and something else.
Fear.
I rose to meet her gaze. "If you've seen me, then you know I'm not your enemy."
She tilted her head, studying me as one might study a flame, too close, half-hypnotized by danger.
"There are no enemies in prophecy," she said, "only pieces that fit or break the pattern."
The moonlight fractured on the stream between us, silver threads winding through dark water.
I saw the reflection of two women, both out of time, both standing on the knife's edge of history.
Geillis's voice lowered. "You were the one who called the mist in the north, weren't you? The Huntress they speak of, the witch who vanished with the smoke?"
The title struck like a bell, distant but familiar.
Once, I might have denied it. But there was no use hiding from what I had already become.
"Aye," I said quietly. "And it was not by choice."
She laughed, soft, almost tender. "None of us choose what the stones demand."
There was a pause, a moment suspended in the air like a held breath. Then she reached into her cloak and drew out a small pouch, pressing it to her chest.
"I've studied the old ways," she whispered. "The chants, the alignments, the blood. But your presence… it unsettles the balance."
Her gaze flicked toward the direction of Craigh na Dun, the unseen circle pulsing faintly beneath the veil of night.
"The stones hum louder since you came. You've woken something, Elara Wyn de Roslin."
Hearing my name from her lips sent a shiver down my spine.
"How do you know me?"
Geillis smiled faintly. "Names carry across time. You leave echoes when you walk between centuries, like footprints in fog. I've heard them since the Beltane fire."
I took a step back, but she followed.
"Tell me," she said, her tone now sharp as flint, "what are you meant to do here? What part of prophecy is yours?"
I hesitated. I could not tell her the truth, that I had come through by accident, that I was only meant to survive, not to rewrite the story that was already unfolding.
But Geillis Duncan was not one to be fooled by silence.
She reached out, her fingers grazing the air between us, and in that instant, I felt it, the surge of energy, old and wild. It was as if time itself cracked open like ice beneath our feet.
Visions came. The stones bathed in lightning, two women screaming across centuries, the shadow of a man with fire in his eyes, Jamie, and the echo of Claire's voice calling into the wind.
Then darkness.
When I opened my eyes, I was kneeling on the damp earth, breath ragged. Geillis was pale, trembling, clutching her arm as if scorched.
"What did you see?" I whispered.
Her eyes met mine, wild, terrified. "The end," she said. "And the beginning."
She stepped back, shaking her head. "You don't belong here. You'll tear the veil apart."
Her fear was not of me, but of what through me might come.
"You can't stop it," I said quietly. "Whatever the stones have written, it's already begun."
Geillis's expression hardened. "Then I'll make certain I'm on the right side of it."
She turned and vanished into the dark, her cloak fluttering like smoke.
In the silence that followed, I felt the forest shift, the energy raw, restless, alive. The stones' hum deepened, resonant with warning.
I pressed my palm against the earth and felt the pulse of something greater than myself, fate, perhaps, or the weight of a story being rewritten.
The ripple had begun when I arrived, but now it spread wider, faster.
Claire's presence. Jamie's near death. My silent interventions.
All of it was binding, weaving, twisting into something I could no longer control.
And now Geillis,with her hunger for prophecy and her fear of me, had seen enough to start the storm.
Back at Leoch, the air had changed.
Servants spoke in hushed tones of strange lights in the glen, of voices whispering through the wind. Claire felt it too, I could see it in the way her eyes darted to the windows at night, sensing something just beyond reach.
One evening, as she tended a child's fever, the candle beside her flickered violently, though there was no breeze.
She whispered, "Elara?" before she even realized she'd spoken my name aloud.
I froze.
For a heartbeat, I almost answered.
But before I could, the door burst open, Geillis standing there, eyes burning, a smile too wide to be kind.
"Strange things happen around you, Mistress Beauchamp," she said softly. "You attract ghosts."
Claire laughed nervously, unaware of the double meaning.
But I saw the way Geillis looked into the corners of the room, into me, and I knew then: this was no longer a secret war of shadows.
It was a collision waiting to happen.
That night, I returned once more to the glen.
The stones glowed faintly under the moon, whispering in a language older than human memory.
I touched one, and the hum rose beneath my fingertips. a heartbeat, ancient and knowing.
The vision came again.
Geillis screaming as fire consumed her,
Claire at the circle, torn between two worlds,
Jamie's blood staining the earth.
And through it all, my own voice whispering from somewhere beyond time:
"You cannot save them all."
The air split with thunder. I fell to my knees, trembling.
When I lifted my gaze, I saw a figure standing among the stones, neither spirit nor flesh.
It was me.
Older. Worn. Eyes hollow with knowledge.
She… I… looked down at me and said, "Every myth demands a sacrifice."
Then she was gone.
The next morning, Geillis left Leoch for the village, to prepare her next "gathering."
Claire watched her go with suspicion, sensing danger but not knowing its shape.
I watched too, hidden in the archway, and understood that the threads were tightening, prophecy, jealousy, destiny, all converging toward the fire.
And as the bells tolled and the mist crept low across the moors, I whispered to the wind:
"Let her not fear me, only what I bring."
The stones answered, a low hum, almost like a warning sigh.
For in awakening my myth, I had awakened theirs.