A short story for the liminal days, inspired by the name of a country lane we saw on a road trip to East Yorkshire…

They call it Yule, the heathens and the old ones. The days when the world lingers in the in-between, the liminal, neither fully in the light nor wholly surrendered to the dark.

The solstice had come and gone, but the nights were still long and starless, the kind that clings to your skin and whispers in your ear.

It was on one such night, between Christmas and the New Year, that I found myself by Eel Mere. Alone. Unwise.The place has a pull to it, or so they say. The old folk whisper that it’s no ordinary water. That it breathes, that it sees.

That it remembers.

I’d laughed at them once, with the arrogance of youth and city living, but now I wasn’t so sure. Not after what had happened to Derek.

We weren’t close, Derek and I. He was family, yes, but not the sort you’d miss at Christmas dinner. Still, when he vanished, a fishing trip gone wrong, they said, I felt something stir in me.

Guilt, maybe. Or something else.

He’d been last seen at the Mere, and I was here to find him. Or to make sense of what couldn’t be made sense of.

The wind bit hard as I stood by the water’s edge, pulling my coat tight against the chill. The reeds swayed in slow, mournful rhythms, their tops crusted with a frost that sparkled under the pale light of the moon.

The Mere itself was blacker than pitch, still and silent, like a waiting predator. I told myself it was just a pond, a glorified puddle carved out of the moorland, but my gut said otherwise.

It was Yule, after all. A time of endings and beginnings, when the veil between worlds was thin. Anything felt possible.

I leaned closer to the water, the mud sucking at my boots, and cupped my hands to light a cigarette. The flame flared bright for a moment, and that’s when I saw it..

movement beneath the surface.

Just a flicker, a glimmer, like fish scales catching the moonlight. But there were no fish in Eel Mere. Everyone knew that.

I exhaled slowly, smoke mingling with the cold, and told myself it was nothing. A trick of the light, a ripple from the wind. But then the hum began.

It was faint at first, a low, resonant vibration that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn’t the sort of sound you heard with your ears, but felt in your chest, in your teeth. It grew louder, more insistent, until it seemed to drown out everything else – the rustling reeds, the whispering wind, even the sound of my own breath. Gone.

My heart hammered against my ribs, and a primal part of me screamed to run. But I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I stayed, staring at the water as the hum built to a crescendo. And then, with a sound like the tearing of fabric, the Mere split open.

A column of light shot up from the centre, green and sickly, twisting and writhing like a living thing. It illuminated the surrounding moorland, casting strange, flickering shadows that didn’t match the shapes that made them. My legs buckled, and I fell to my knees in the freezing mud, unable to tear my eyes away.

From the light, shapes began to emerge. Long, serpentine forms that glided through the air as though swimming in the currents of some unseen sea. Their bodies glistened with a wet, iridescent sheen, and their eyes, if you could call them that, were endless voids, blacker than the night itself. They weren’t creatures. They weren’t even alive, not in the way we understand life.

They were… fragments.

Echoes.

Pieces of something vast and ancient that existed far beyond the Mere, beyond this world.

The hum shifted then, becoming something almost like words, though they weren’t spoken aloud. They filled my head, pressing against the inside of my skull, a language older than time. I understood them, not in the way you understand a sentence, but in the way you understand a storm or a fire.. an instinctual knowing that defies reason.

We are the watchers.

We are the old blood.

The wheel turns, and we awaken.

I don’t remember standing, but suddenly I was on my feet, stumbling toward the light.

It wasn’t pulling me.

I was going willingly.

I wanted to understand, to see, to touch whatever lay at the heart of the Mere. My hand stretched out, fingers trembling, and the moment they broke the surface of the water, everything changed.

I was no longer by the Mere. I was… elsewhere. A place of endless black, punctuated by pulsating green lights that moved in patterns too complex to follow. Shapes drifted around me, immense and unknowable, their forms shifting and fracturing like shards of glass caught in a whirlpool.

The hum was everywhere now, a chorus of voices that spoke as one, telling me of things I couldn’t comprehend – cycles of death and rebirth, of worlds created and consumed, of a hunger that stretched across eons.

And then I saw it.

The source of the hum, the thing that had stirred from its slumber beneath the Mere. It was vast, coiled like an endless serpent, its body studded with glowing patterns that shifted and changed as I watched. Its head… or what I thought was its head… turned toward me, and I felt its gaze pierce through me, laying bare every thought, every fear, every secret I’d ever held.

You are chosen, it said,

though its voice wasn’t words but a feeling, a certainty that echoed through my very soul.

The wheel turns. Prepare…

And then I was back.

On the shore of the Mere, gasping for air, the light gone, the water calm once more. The dawn was breaking, painting the moors in shades of grey and gold. But I knew the darkness hadn’t passed.

Not really.

Something ancient had awakened in the Mere, and it wasn’t finished with me.

Yule is a time of endings and beginnings. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that the real beginning was yet to come.