Ammie’s Departure Print

Moorfolk never spoke, well not like anything you would recognise anyways. They drifted through the peat bogs like ghosts in their animal masks, clothed in stitched-together rags colour of bone and rot, silent as water board tunnels they called home. Once, long ago, they had been workers, men and women abandoned by water board who dug too deep, who drank from the wrong cistern, who disturbed something in pipes on them moors. town forgot them when the machines and mills roared to life, and they in turn sank into moors, mute and dreamlike, appearing only when mushrooms bloomed and the mist thickened.

Ammie Thornwick sat amongst them, black hair falling across her patched black dress, seams all rough and crooked, like it had been put together in a rush from whatever scraps would hold. She had grown up in their silence, but now as she was older, something about her was restless… While moorfolk stared at flames, Ammie’s eyes wandered out into dark, down, down into smoke and chimneys of Harrowden.

That was about time when hares came. Three of them, black as shadow, with red eyes glowing like coals in heather moor mist… Hob twitched and hopped, full of mischief. Puddle crouched still by water, staring deep into reflections that showed things no one else could see. Loom trailed cotton threads behind him, as though he was stitching paths and futures only he understood.

Some say Ammie gave her blood that night, and that was how they came to follow her. perhaps the hares are witches trapped in beast bodies, waiting for someone brave enough to free them? Whatever the truth, Ammie rose from that fire, her family on the moors, her dress catching the wind, and walked away with the shadow hares at her heels.

The moorfolk did not move. They did not call her back. They only turned their heads as one, their masks catching the light, and watched her go.

Ammie began to run, her patched dress tearing at the seams, her hair streaming behind her. She was leaving more than the fire. She was leaving childhood, leaving silence, leaving the world the town had forgotten when the machines came… hares bounded with her, black shapes darting over wet peat, eyes burning against dark night.

Was she a traitor to old ways. or chosen to carry them forward? Was she running away from moors, or towards her own power? No one knew. But that night, Ammie Thornwick crossed from one life into another, and land itself seemed to shift beneath her feet, as if it knew she would never be same again.