(2025-10-31) The Lady In The Lake: Isla's Story

Details

Author:	Athena
Summary:	Isla Lenaire, hopeful writer, enters a local literary newspaper contest for a Hallow's End story contest, and wins third place for her entry "The Lady in the Lake," published on page 20 of the "Two Copper Review." Before she submits it, she has several readers of different enthusiasms who offer editing advice, support, and varying degrees of helpful comments, and in the end, she changes nothing. Dual Prompt Responses of GHOST STORIES and MY OWN WAY. 4k~ words of lurid sensationalism and wonderful commentary.
Rating:	T for Teen

Chain: Prompt Responses

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occasionally harsh sounding criticism

The Lady In The Lake
By Isla Lenaire

In woods so dark and deep that it was like the ocean below the waves, there was a castle built of obsidian.¹ It was a magical castle, and its occupant equally magical, a very great sorceress who could scry into all times, past, present, and future. Her name was Raven Ebony, and she had long hair the color of raven feathers of her namesake, a mother’s flight of fancy that ignored the ill omen of the bird of death.²³

At first, she had many servants and a large family, but the sorceress was difficult to be around, for she always seemed to know everything, and yet she often didn’t know what time she was in. Her magical powers kept her young, as everyone else aged, and grew fearful of her knowledge.⁴ You could never lie to the sorceress, or mislead her. One by one, they left her. The worst part was that she knew that they would, for she had foreseen it.⁵⁶⁷

The loneliness ate away at her, and the stars, the moons, and the sun in the sky were often her only companions who never abandoned her. She would scry into the past when there were still those she loved with her, but it was a bitter meeting to linger among them knowing how they left her.⁸ Instead, she would choose things she had seen before, even if she was alone in the moments, for beauty like a sunset or the leaves changing and falling.

One day, while she was at the lake by the castle, a place so black and lifeless that it made the waters a mirror⁹, she looked into the far future, and for once, she could not see it. There was something blocking the flow of time after a point. It was all black, black, black. Nothingness. Terrified of what this might mean, she stepped through time like a needle weaving in and out of cloth¹⁰, tracing back to the first day of the future she could see.¹¹

It was the day of Hallow’s End, the last moment she could see in her future was the last second before midnight, when the Day of the Dead began. There, the future stopped, and fear began. She raced back to her cold, barren castle, shuttering all the doors and windows, trapping out all the light until it was as dark inside as her future had become.¹²

But she couldn’t stop the future from becoming the present.¹³

The days crept closer, like unstoppable green ivy vines over cracked stone.¹⁴ Raven Ebony sat alone in her great big castle with all the drapes drawn, and thought of how the leaves would have changed outside, the wind thrashing through the branches. Hallow’s End began. For months, she had as sure as surrendered to the inevitable, afraid and paralyzed by it, but now that it was upon her, she surged up like a great wave of the sea, pushed by the velocity of the water and wind.¹⁵¹⁶

She rode out to the great still lake, and looked once more into the waters.¹⁷The waters reflected back nothing but that blackness. In that instant, rage overtook her. She slapped at the water. She kicked it in big furious stomps. She screamed and screamed until it hurt her lungs.

“I offer myself as champion,” a voice behind her spoke into the forest gloom.

Raven Ebony whirled, her hair glittering with perfect dewdrops of water. There in her empty woods stood a man, clad all in white it seemed, with pale skin and pale hair, and the coldest, sharpest ice blue eyes she had ever seen. His gaze was fixed on her like nothing else existed in all the world, a stare so intense that it felt like a caress.¹⁸¹⁹²⁰Despite his gallant words, spoken in a gravelly rasp, there was something dangerous and menacing about him, even standing perfectly still. She shivered, suddenly cold and hot.

“I don’t take your meaning,” she replied, the first words she had spoken aloud to another person in many years. She grabbed at her soaked dress, but could not take a single step closer, halted by some emotion too great to be described.

“I have never known a lake to have been so unforgivably rude to anger a lady, but I cannot help but believe that it has, to see a lady thus reduced. So, I offer myself in her place, to duel the waters as best a man can.”²¹²²

Raven Ebony’s breast surged with guilt and remorse. “T’was not the lake that did me a disservice. I should not have been so hasty to blame it,” she whispered, tears running down her face tragically to mix with the maligned waters’ splashes on her clear skin. “I shall beg your pardon, and giveth you mine name in recompense.²³ Raven Ebony, I am called.”

The man did not move, as anchored to the land as she was within the lake, but his stillness was broken by a hand to his chest, where a handkerchief might be. He took none out, and although that air of menace remained, she could feel a yearning. “If it is I who has drawn out these tears, my lady Raven Ebony, then I am even more to blame than the lake. If I could duel myself, I would, but I would have no satisfaction.”²⁴

“No, ‘tis not you, either, but myself, and my own future that vexes me so,” Raven Ebony lamented tragically.

“Ah, as we are all beings caught within the web of fate. I once railed against my own, to no effect,” the man in white said.

Curious, Raven Ebony thought to try to take a step closer, and found she still could not. She shivered again, not from the cold but some other sense that cannot be written.²⁵“What fate was that, prithee tell?”

The man’s eyes seemed to burn with a pale blue fire, but only a metaphorical one, an illusion of the darkness to make the ice blue stand out. “On the day of my birth, a great sorcerer came to my parents’ side, and read my fate in the stars, a tale of woe.

‘In life, he shall know no love
Searching land low or above
In death, forgotten and forlorn
Only when true love sworn
Across the tattered veil
Will he truly begin his tale.’”²⁶²⁷

The words had the ring of prophecy. Raven Ebony felt them bind her in chains of memory, so that she could recall each and every single word despite hearing them only the once. She closed her eyes, letting the sorrow wash over her.

When she opened them, the man was gone, and with it, that binding. She ran out of the lake, searching for any sign of him, but there was none at all.

That night, she dreamt that someone was calling her name, demanding and bitter as too strong morning tea.²⁸ It struck fear in her breast, one that lingered when she woke.

All day she tried to stay inside, but some power compelled her to leave her obsidian castle and travel once more to the lake.²⁹ Gripped by some inner voice whispering so quietly she could not make out any words, but only a need, she waded into the lake. The sliver of moon in the sky shed only a tiny light into her dark woods, but it was enough to bring out the beautiful colors of her hair.³⁰³¹

“Have you and the waters reconciled then?” he asked, and she felt she had known he would be there.

“The waters, yes. But not that which they tell me of mine fate. You said you railed against your fate, unsuccessfully. Wilt you tell me this tale?”

“There is little to tell, but that it is true. All my life, I have neither been loved, nor able to love. Though the sorcerer claimed he did nothing but read what was already written of my story, it has always been to me more a curse, damned from birth to follow this terrible fate.”

Once more, Raven Ebony wished to turn around, to walk towards him, and yet she could not. This time, she could nearly feel the physical shackles that bound her, dark tendrils of shadow that kept her in place.

“Yet you railed against it, curse or prophecy?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “For so many years, I believed I could defy the stars.”

“Do you still?”

Only silence answered, and in that silence the chains that bound the sorceress were released. She turned around, but she already knew he was gone again.

Another night, another calling, but the voice was not so harsh, even as it called for her as a command.

She awoke the next morning, with only twelve more days before her future vanished in darkness,³² and once more she found that she could not resist the urge to leave her castle with its magical wards and high walls to go to the lake. As she stepped into the waters, she spoke.

“Well? Shall you give me an answer?” she asked him.

“I believe that there may be someone in this world capable of rewriting the stories of the stars, but I have learned the bitter truth that I am not one of them,” he replied, a growl in his voice.

She barely felt the chains long enough to sense them magically before they were gone.³³

Another night, another calling, darker and harsher than before, as if driven by anger or impatience.

“I have looked into the future all my life,” she told him that night, as the moon shone brighter on the lake, casting her black robes with a white glimmer. “Never have I turned the scales of fate in all my years, but neither have I ever tried. I read the stories of the stars as your sorcerer did your own, and accepted them as immutable truth, for they were only stories of loneliness, and I believed I could bear it.” The words brought out tragic sobs, and she set her face in her hands.

“What you have foreseen is not loneliness any longer?” The wind rustled in the trees, shedding orange leaves, one lone leaf drifting through the air to the sorceress.

“No, and yes,” she said. The leaf fell into her hand, and she used it to dry her tears.³⁴ “I look to my future, and I see it ending in naught but blackness, a great nothingness of the truest loneliness, to be alone and nothing. ‘Tis this I fear and dread, that drives such anger to assault an innocent lake, that all shalt be gone but I cast in this void.”³⁵

The longer she spoke, the more she secretly began to trace the edges of the invisible chains that bound her within the lake, though she said only the truth.

“By this reasoning, might it be that you will have no fear of what is to come, if you should know that you will not be alone?” he whispered, his voice like paper rubbing together in a quiet library.

Before she could answer, the chains were gone, and with them, the man in white.³⁶

That night, the voice called for her through her dreams, but it held a reassurance.

Nine more days remained before that fated darkness.³⁷ She not only did not resist the pull out to the lake, but she prepared for it, dressing in some of her best finery, a long gown that sparkled with every step, like wearing the stars in the sky on her pure ebony skin.³⁸

“Verily, ‘twould mine shivering heart be much steadied, if I could know anything at all within that uncertain future, but to know myself not alone within that unrelieved black, I would perhaps know happiness,” she told the man in white, facing the shore so she might look upon him once again.³⁹⁴⁰

He wore the same white clothes, his light skin glowing in the moonlight, his pale hair unmoving in the wind that tousled the leaves, and his frozen stare locked on her. “As I am all that stands to hear your plea, I am honor bound to offer myself as companion, if you should grant permission.”

Her breath caught, as trapped as her body within the lake, and once more she could feel the storm of hot and cold, longing and fear.

“You know naught of what I walk to, yet you would condemn yourself on my behalf?”

“I have never been loved, nor have I ever loved. If I am condemned, it was at the moment of my birth, and if I might offer myself now to the lady of the lake to ease her pain, I see not condemnation, but redemption.”

A single tear rolled down her cheek, and she watched as he lifted a hand from his side, holding it out to her, fingers gently curled. “If I could spare you these tears, I would. But I cannot even brush them from your face,” he whispered.⁴¹

She blinked, and he was once more gone.

That night, the voice that called her seemed tinged with sorrow, no more a command but a searching, a longing.

When she returned to the lake, she brought more than a beautiful dress, and beautiful jewels, but also a ward, something that might break any chain, strong enough to exercise any spiritual energy,⁴²⁴³ and she cast it into the lake, the light of the circle casting a glow under the waves.

But when she stood upon the ward, she felt something terrible within her like she was being ripped apart, a weakness that dropped her to her knees. Unable to hold herself above the water, she collapsed, her limbs slack as rope, and the world seemed to hold its breath with her. As she began to think she would drown, she felt the water of the perfectly still lake moving, the wind turning her over weakly, but enough so that she could gasp the cold air, and stare up at the half moon in the sky.⁴⁴⁴⁵⁴⁶

She drifted off the ward, and into the shallows of the lake, but she could not stand now, bound by invisible chains.

“Is the prospect of my company so vile that you should wish to end your existence?” There was a glacial edge of fury spoken so softly it cut all the deeper.

“I was not seeking death, but freedom denied me. Unbind me!” she shouted to the stars above them both!⁴⁷ “Let me leave this place and be closer to you.”

It was a long time before he spoke again, but she knew he was there, for so too were the chains.

“I cannot do as you ask, though it pains me to deny a lady’s request. I do not have the power, and yet what laws of heaven and earth I would break for you to have it,” he lamented, and then he was gone once more, and she was alone at the lake.

When she laid her head down to sleep that night, she did so with purpose, for as the voice called out for her, seeking and searching, she fought against a sleep’s ties to walk towards it.

Something within the dream broke, a tie so fragile that it could not withstand the change, and she woke knowing something was wrong.⁴⁸

That day, there was no compulsion to go to the lake, but still she went, rushing out in her plain house clothes, even before the night fell. She waded into it, but to no avail. Something was missing, some ephemeral thread that had snapped when pulled.⁴⁹

For five more nights, she dreamed only of a faint voice, desperate and pleading, calling for her, and she was alone in the lake.

Until the day of Hallow’s End, the last day before her fate.⁵⁰ She clad herself in her finest dress, the one that she had expected to be a wedding dress, and she went to the great, still lake of darkness, though it still held none of the connection she had felt.

She summoned up all her vast power, and cast it into the lake all around her, to look not for her past, her present, or even her future, but for him, the man in white. The world seemed to tremble, as lightning streaked the empty sky to strike the lake.⁵¹⁵²⁵³

With mere minutes left before her future ended, the tie was rebound, the anchor dropped, and there he was, the man dressed in white on the shore. There was still that sense of menace, a feeling that speared her with fear, but now there was more, a pained longing, and he dropped to his knees like a paladin in prayer.

“I had grown to believe I would never see you again,” he said in words that trembled. “That I would not keep the promise I had made to myself to go with you into that darkness, to never leave you alone, and a gentleman never breaks a promise.”⁵⁴

The sorceress could not break the chains that bound her in the lake, and this time she did not try. Instead, she held out her arms for him.⁵⁵

“Then come to me now, for I stand upon the precipice of my future’s end, and though I must part the veil of life itself to do so, I wouldst do so for this, for you. Be unbound, my fair love, and know that I have broken your fate, as I love you, in defiance of all the stars that tried to decree your story as unchangeable,” she called.⁵⁶⁵⁷

The man in white rose up, his tears shimmering in the full moon’s light, aglow with the most powerful magic in all the world: love. He walked to her like a husband to the altar of marriage, and at long last, he embraced her. “I swear on my own honor, I love you, Raven Ebony.”

As the seconds ticked away to midnight, he lifted up the veil over her face as she had lifted the veil of time, and kissed her at the apex of the Day of the Dead, sealing their union for all time.

No one ever knew what happened to the young prince Galahad,⁵⁸ cursed by a sorcerer at birth to never know love in his life, who disappeared on the first of November, in his prime. Some told the story of how in the days of Hallow’s End he had gone often to the place by the empty and broken, long abandoned obsidian castle where a great still lake once stood, staring out into the empty crater, calling a beautiful name over and over: Raven Ebony. Raven Ebony. Raven Ebony…^59606162

Originally published on page 20 of the Two Copper Review (a literary newspaper), third place winner of the Young Writers Hallow’s End Contest, followed by a brief biography.

Isla Lenaire is a young lady of House Esprit-Fallon, originally of Lordaeron. She hopes to be a writer when she grows up. She much admires the romance genre. Her favorite season is spring, but she also enjoys autumn. Hallow’s End is her fourth most favorite holiday. For Hallow’s End, her favorite tradition is the gathering of sweets. She has asked that the proceeds from her winnings be donated to the event “Paws for Pumpkins,” which she intends to attend.

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Footnotes

1. Avrenne Note: One could not build a castle out of obsidian, as it is not rock, but volcanic glass, and is brittle and amorphous, with a conchoidal fracture breakage not suitable for building applications, though it can be used for objectives that require a sharp edge.

2. Finley Note: Pfft. Wow. I hope you can hear my eyes rolling from here.

3. Sintha Note: Positively shivers, darling!

4. Sintha Note: Awful!

5. Finley note: If she could see the future like that, it implies that everything is fated, which we know for a fact that it isn’t, and if she knew it was coming, she could have done something to avoid it

6. Priscilla Note: This is so sad, Isla! What a tragic concept. I love it. =)

7. Sintha Note: Tragic!

8. Sintha Note: Tragic!!

9. Avrenne Note: Even lakes not occupied by a great deal of natural life are still affected by other outside sources, such as the wind, and a body of water that large will not remain still for long, while a pond might be capable of such inactivity from life within, unless the climate is suitable for mosquitos, and then there will be ripples.

10. Priscilla Note: I like this simile! Very dramatic

11. Sintha Note: Every single one of your metaphors is divine.

12. Priscilla Note: Uh oh!

13. Sintha Note: The suspense!!

14. Otto Note: I like this.

15. Avrenne Note: Good use of correct physics for wave propulsion, though more details would make the whole of how it works mathematically much more clear.

16. Sintha Note: Divine!

17. Finley Note: Where did she get something to ride on? A horse? Who was taking care of the horse? In fact, where is she getting any of her food?

18. Finley Note: Have you been getting into the top shelf books again? You know you’re not allowed to read those.

19. Priscilla Note: Is this her future love? What a great entrance!

20. Sintha Note: !!!!!!!!!

21. Avrenne Note: The laws of dueling require that each party be equally armed, and of equal status, as well as the challenged accepting the challenge. I don’t believe that there could be a true duel within the regulations.

22. Sintha Note: So gallant!! The fairy tale lover and his impossible task!!

23. Sintha Note: Your language is dramatic perfection!!

24. Finley Note: I’ll tell you when you’re older. A lot older. Thirty years, maybe. Just cut the line out, Isla, trust me.

25. Finley Note: Are you just writing things like “cannot be described or written” when you can’t think of the word?

26. Priscilla Note: Searching land low or above…is she going to get around the prophecy because of the lake?! I’m so excited!

27. Sintha Note: Tragic!!!

28. Finley Note: Are you still upset about that? You said you wanted your tea like how Avrenne takes hers.

29. Finley Note: Where did the horse go now? Did the horse leave her because she left him at the lake the day before?

30. Priscilla Note: This is so lovely, Isla!

31. Sintha Note: Gorgeous!!

32. Sintha Note: Suspense!!!

33. Avrenne Note: As a mage, particularly a powerful one, if she has realized that she is in chains, the first thing she ought to try is to blink free of them. Few things can hold a mage, though they do exist.

34. Sintha Note: The symbolism!!

35. Sintha Note: Tragic!!!!!

36. Priscilla Note: Ooh, what would she have said?

37. Avrenne Note: We have skipped a day. She had twelve more days left, and she has met with the man twice, and so we are on day ten, not nine.

38. Sintha Note: Your descriptions are so rich!!!

39. Finley Note: Just call him a ghost already, Isla. “Man in white” isn’t as subtle as you think it is.

40. Sintha Note: The language!!

41. Priscilla Note: Aww…

42. Finley Note: Exorcise, for Light’s sake, Isla.

43. Avrenne Note: I do believe it’s meant to be “exorcise,” dearest.

44. Avrenne Note: Well done, this is correct for the moon phase based on an earlier description, though we are still a day ahead.

45. Priscilla Note: Uh oh!

46. Sintha Note: Oh no!!!

47. Sintha Note: Divine!!

48. Priscilla Note: Oh no!

49. Sintha Note: Oh no!!

50. Avrenne Note: We are now missing four entire days from the original count, or three days from the modified count of the dropped day from the nine day mention.

51. Finley Note: If the next line isn’t how she was then thoroughly electrocuted, I’m telling Avrenne your tutors need to go over basic electrical properties again.

52. Avrenne Note: I have informed your tutors that it would be best to perhaps review electrical and conductive properties again.

53. Sintha Note: The gorgeous drama!!

54. Prisiclla Note: Do you mean “would not be able to keep”?

55. Sintha Note: Darling I am hugging my pillow!!!

56. Priscilla Note: Oh! Is she going to take his place?

57. Sintha Note: Swoon!!

58. Avrenne Note: Oh, is his name inspired by Lord Elohad Ference?

59. Finely Note: Okay, I’ll admit. You got me.

60. Avrenne Note: I find this entirely reasonable, given how often the mage scryed into the future without regard for restraint. Mages who do not restrain their powers have a history of tearing holes in the fabric of time, and I hope that many young mages read this appropriately as a cautionary tale.

61. Priscilla Note: What a twist! Isla, this is sweet and sad and spooky! I love it!

62. Sintha Note: Oh my gosh I have chills, Isla!!!! CHILLS!!!!!!!