Slippage
Ashford Military Hospital – November 28, 1974
It began with the clocks.
First the digital wall clock in the staff lounge—flickering, then stalling at 11:11. Then a nurse’s watch stopped completely, its second hand twitching like a trapped insect. An orderly claimed his calendar lost an entire day. One of the patients in the geriatric ward spent the night speaking fluent Polish—he’d never left Kent in his life.
And the fog outside never cleared. It clung to the trees like cobwebs, refusing to burn off even under full sun.
In Room 3, Misha Levin sat in silence.
He had barely moved in twenty-four hours. He wouldn’t eat, and when they asked him questions, he answered with phrases that seemed to come from someone else’s mouth.
“She remembers everyone.
Every moment. She doesn’t forget like we do.”
“The fog’s inside me now.”
“You’re already there. You just haven’t realised it.”
The Institute Briefing Room – London
Elena paced in front of the whiteboard, her eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“There are escalating anomalies,” she said, clicking the slide projector. “Localized time slippage. Memory erosion. Electromagnetic disturbances consistent with previous fae contamination events. This isn’t just Misha—it’s the site.”
The grainy photo projected behind her showed an aerial view of Dungeness: the shingle expanse, the half-built ghost town of abandoned fishing cabins, the concrete sound mirrors like ancient sentinels.
“There’s a myth dating back centuries—‘The Fog Woman.’ Sometimes she’s a siren, sometimes a ghost, sometimes a fae queen. She walks the marshes. Calls to the lost. Promises what they need.”
Major Quinn leaned forward. “And what does she want?”
Elena looked up. “Not death. Not destruction. Company.”
Agent Clegg, half-listening at the back of the room, snorted. “A faerie femme fatale haunting a nuclear wasteland. You people really believe this crap?”
Quinn said nothing.
Elena stared at Clegg. “You saw the records. You read what happened to Mallory.”
Clegg holstered his silence like a weapon.
Then he said, “We should move Levin. Contain him. Dissect him if we have to.”
Elena snapped. “He’s not the cause. He’s the warning.”
That Night – Elena’s Apartment
She woke at 3:00 a.m. again, chest tight.
The fog was pressing against the window again, thicker than ever. She could see footprints in it—moving, stopping, standing just outside.
And then she heard it: humming. A woman’s voice. A lullaby, sung in a key that didn’t belong in this world.
She opened her eyes.
The photograph of Clara was gone.
But the feeling remained.
She didn’t just miss her sister.
She remembered losing her.
Military Hospital – 6:13 a.m.
Orderlies found a nurse sitting on the floor outside Room 3, staring blankly at the wall. Her watch was melted. Literally. Warped like a Dali painting. The air around her smelled faintly of salt.
Inside the room, Misha sat upright, eyes wide, muttering the same word over and over.
“Elena. Elena. Elena…”
She arrived forty minutes later.
He looked up and smiled like a child seeing his mother.
“She’s noticed you now,” he said.
Dungeness, hours later
Permission had not been granted.
She went anyway.
She took Misha.
He was calm in the car, humming to himself in Russian, fingers tapping patterns against the window. As they neared the marshlands, the fog grew impossibly thick, though the sun still glowed above it—like light trying to remember how to be day.
They pulled up near the old power station.
The ruins of Cold War listening posts slumped nearby—concrete bunkers with antennas like broken insect limbs. Out past the beach, the skeletons of boats sank into the stones. The sound mirrors loomed like ancient gods, blind and deaf.
Elena felt the pressure begin behind her eyes.
Misha turned to her.
“She’s close now. You can hear her too, can’t you?”
Elena nodded.
And then the fog swallowed the car.
Within the Fog
Time fractured.
Elena stepped out of the vehicle—and found herself on the beach. But not now. The air smelled of coal smoke. A Lancaster bomber growled overhead. She turned—and saw her father, much younger, in an old RAF uniform, writing in a leather-bound journal.
“Dad?” she whispered.
He didn’t look up.
She blinked—
And now it was Clara.
A girl of seven in a red coat, holding a stringless violin.
“Elena, come play,” Clara said. “You promised.”
She ran toward her—and the image shattered like glass.
She heard a gunshot.
Reality snapped back.
Clegg was here. Of course he was.
He’d followed them—alone, against orders.
Now he was screaming.
She found him a few metres off the road, bleeding from a wound in his gut, his pistol smoking beside him.
“Shot someone…” he muttered. “She was… she looked like… me.”
He stared up at Elena.
“I think I shot myself.”
And then the fog took him.
His body unraveled—not torn, but folded, as if into another moment. And then he was gone.
Only a watch remained. It was frozen at 11:11.
The Edge of the Realm
Elena found Misha kneeling in a salt circle, weeping.
“She’s going to offer it to you,” he whispered. “Everything you’ve ever wanted. She doesn’t lie. But it’s never what you think.”
Then the fog thickened into something almost solid.
The world turned quiet, like the inside of a cathedral. And she was there.
A shape within the mist. A face made of memory. A voice that spoke not in words, but in everything you’d ever regretted.
“You came so far,” the Woman said, her voice impossibly close and distant at once.
“I didn’t come for you,” Elena said.
“You did,” the Woman said, amused. “You don’t remember, but you did. And now you’ve found your way back. Would you like her again? Clara?”
She saw Clara standing beside the ruins, smiling, hand outstretched.
Elena stepped forward.
Then stopped.
“No,” she said. “I’m not here to stay. I’m here to trade.”
Silence.
“I offer you something,” Elena said. “Let Misha go. Truly go. Let this end. And in return… give me knowledge. Not fantasy. Not memory. Truth.”
The fog stirred.
The Woman tilted her head.
“Very well,” she said. “But truth has a price.”
“Name it.”
The Woman laughed softly, like water over glass.
“You’ve already paid.”
The fog collapsed.
Misha fell.
Collapsed in a heap, like a marionette with its strings cut.
He aged before her eyes—hair silvering, hands shriveling, skin turning paper-thin. His final breath came soft and grateful.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “I… remember.”
He died with a smile.
Elena knelt beside him.
In his hand, clenched like a final gift, was a slip of paper she hadn’t seen before.
Coordinates.
And a name.
Faylinn Defence Group 