It’s been some time now, hasn’t it?
I suppose I should explain why that is.
I didn’t expect it. I had just stepped outside on a cool January night when a thick fog rolled in from nowhere.
And just like that, all the lights went out, all along the street.
Allow me to return to something I mentioned before I left. The note from my sister. Susan.
She said she’d met the Pale Maiden, that she’d seen through the Mists of Time. I myself had already met the Pale Maiden by the time I had begun telling my story.
Now, I have been within the Mists of Time.
I see why Susan called it that. It’s a place of eternal fog, everything hazy and cold. The ground is covered in countless artifacts of the past, books and CDs and pieces of paper. I tried digging at one point, and it never stopped going down. I have to wonder if perhaps the objects themselves are the ground.
There was nothing that ever belonged to anyone I know. I suspect it’s the same for everyone else who finds themself there. It’s a world where you find yourself surrounded by relics of strangers’ pasts, with the only hope of finding your own being a false one.
I’m afraid my story may not have a happy ending. I am going to try to get into a mental institution, for my own protection as much as anything else. If the Pale Maiden finds me once more, my disappearance may at least have a witness. And if it is all in my head, if my mind was so broken by the horror of my sister’s disappearance that it altered my memories and made me hallucinate being trapped in a world of endless fog, perhaps they can help with that.
If this fails, I don’t know what else I can do. I can only pray the Pale Maiden doesn’t take anything more from me.
I’m just so tired of trying to hold onto the past.
