What the water knows
Émilie had wandered far from any path she knew, drawn by something she could not name into a marsh where the air itself seemed to hold its breath. Pale lights drifted above the black water—patient, unhurried, as if they had all the time in the world to wait for her.
She knelt at the water's edge, though no one had told her to kneel. Beneath the still surface, faces looked back at her: old faces, calm faces, faces that seemed almost asleep rather than gone. They did not reach for her. They did not need to. She reached for them.
"Who are you?" she whispered, though she already sensed the water would not answer in words. Still, she leaned closer, fingers hovering just above the surface, caught between the fear of what she saw and the pull of wanting to understand it.
Something in her recognized something in them—not death itself, but the stillness after struggle, the peace that comes when fighting finally stops. She did not know why this called to her, only that it did, the way a half-remembered song calls to someone who cannot recall the words.
Her hand trembled. One knee sank deeper into the mud. She did not move away.
There is no explaining a haunting from the inside. Émilie could not have said whether the marsh had chosen her, or whether some quiet, unnamed part of her had always belonged there, waiting to be recognized. She only knew that when she finally rose and stepped back, something of the marsh's stillness came with her—and never quite left again.
Inspired by the chapter 'The Passage of the Marshes' from The Lord of the Rings