Despite being very much alive, my girlfriend took me on a hike through the mountains to show me not one, but two of my own graves.

It all started when I began noticing little red threads appearing on my fingertips. I was out for coffee with my girlfriend, at a cozy little café on the main street of our quaint mountain town. It was a normal day, like any other. We were hitting late autumn, when the leaves start to tan and redden, and the air gets that biting, chilly afterburn that makes a hot coffee hit in just the right way. And as I picked up my cup mid-sentence, I saw them. Little red threads stuck to my fingertips.

My girlfriend asked if I was okay; I suppose she’d picked up on my quizzical squint.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just have some red string on me.”

She gave a “huh”, and when she asked where they might’ve come from, I told her the truth: I had absolutely no idea. I hadn’t touched anything red. The chairs and table were made of treated iron. The cup was white. My clothes? Blue jeans and a black T-shirt. Puzzled, but unconcerned, I wiped the tiny strands off – they fell off quite easily – and continued on with my day.

But when we got home that night, shopping bags in hand, I noticed that they’d returned. I set our groceries down in our apartment kitchen and just kind of stared at my fingers like they were misbehaving. And again, she noticed, and said, “You probably have something in your pockets.”

Naturally, I emptied them out, and out came my wallet, phone, keys, and a lint-ball, but nothing at all that could produce red strings. She and I just shrugged it off and packed the food away, before climbing into bed for the night. And in bed, as we were cuddled up, I just couldn’t pay attention to the TV. Instead I just kind of stared blankly at the wall, thinking about the red fibers. My girlfriend can practically read my mind at this point, and with a squeeze she muttered sleepily, “Maybe you’re just coming apart at the seams.”

Now, she likes to joke around, and I get that. But that comment just felt really… weird. I’m a bit of an anxious person, so I chalked it up to overthinking and settled in to sleep. That night was a little rough. Weird dreams. I think her comment got to me, because I dreamt I had a red thread coming off of my right palm. It was all fragmented.

I dreamt it leaked from my hand. Spooled out to a dark void. It didn’t hurt, at least, I don’t remember it hurting. I just remember unwinding, little by little, until everything I was, had been pulled out along that red thread.

Suffice it to say, I felt pretty weird waking up the next morning. Oh, and the threads were there again, stuck on my fingertips and my palms now. After that dream, I could feel this pang of eerie discomfort stab at me. I launched out of bed and stumbled groggily to the bathroom to wash off the threads, which again, came off with ease.

At breakfast that morning, she could tell something was really wrong with me, I guess just from the slouch in my posture. So she took my hand and gave it a squeeze, and said, “You know, there’s a little trail we haven’t taken up the mountains yet. I hear it goes to a small lake. Want to go? Might make you feel better.”

As I let go of her hand, I noticed some red threads from my palm had rubbed off onto her. She noticed too. Wiped them off, stood, gave me that beautiful, toothy smile she has as if it just didn’t matter.

“When?” I asked.

“Whenever. Just let me know,” came her response, sweet as a songbird. Then, she fluttered away, leaving me to stare at the crimson fibers on my palms.

I figured I’d do my due diligence. Maybe it was some kind of medical emergency, though I had no idea what could make me secrete red string. Still, I typed my “symptom” into Google. And the results produced absolutely nothing of relevance, to my dismay.

I finished up at the breakfast nook and came into the living room, where my girlfriend seemed to have been expecting me, with this almost, I dunno, giddy? Eager? Smile. Wider and more excited than usual.

“You’re that excited to go hiking?” I asked.

And she giggled and chirped out, “I’m just really excited to show you this place. It’s really neat, I think it’ll help take your mind of things.”

My eyebrow twitched up. “You’ve been before? When?”

She just shrugged and said, “Oh, a while ago.”

I told her to let me think about it, and that I was going to go get some air. On the way out the door, I paused, and turned back to her.

Quite uncomfortably, I asked for the name of the lake. And she told me, cheerfully, its odd, almost nordic name. When I asked where it was, she seemed to dodge the question and said, “Oh, it’s a little trail outside of town.”

Baffled and disquieted, I thanked her and headed out.

I just kind of walked around that day. Something about her demeanor had shifted, this much was obvious. Usually, she was quiet, demure, and settled. This energetic glee radiating from her, I’d hardly seen it before. So I did the only thing I could think to do, and pulled out my phone to search for the lake. Once more, I had to brush off ever-multiplying crimson fibers from my sticky palms.

Before I even got to open my phone, I noticed that the threads were creeping up my arms. I spat out a panicked “Shit!” and shook them off as violently as my heart did beat. Breathing heavily, I whipped my phone up and punched into the name “Lake Aefinligr”.

And I got a lake in Norway. We live in Colorado. There was no “Lake Aefinligr” in Colorado.

I went back home around mid-afternoon, only to find her getting our hiking items ready. Our poles, water, compasses, packs, all of it was in the car and ready to go. “Whoa,” I said. “It’s a little late to go hiking, don’t you think?”

And she gave me this starry-eyed look. It was inky, and animalistic. “No, I think it’s the perfect time. Come on, I’ll show you where the trail is!”

I… I was stunned, honestly. And yet I could just feel that “no” would not be an adequate answer here. I stared at her, jaw agape, as she crawled into the driver’s seat. I wanted to leave, to get the hell out of whatever this was. But I felt frozen. Stuck in the moment.

I don’t know why, or what compelled me, but eventually I just quietly sat in the passenger’s seat and stared emptily out the window as we departed.

I didn’t register much of the drive. I do know the fibers were getting intolerably annoying, replenishing themselves within minutes of being brushed off. And they were getting irritating too, like insects crawling up and out of my skin. Like I was an anthill, and they were the ants. I started scratching myself, and it just made it worse. It started to burn.

“Don’t do that,” she said, giving me this wry, owl-esque cocked-head stare. Like she knew something I didn’t. And I admit, I was too… scared to ask what the hell she meant, what she knew. I wanted to ask, before it was too late, but as we drove past the edge of town, I realized “too late” had come and gone. So I just pushed that dark, unsettling cold down and sunk into my seat.

The trail was fairly close by now. Out in the lush coniferous forests that ran up the mountainside, on an old dirt backroad just off the main highway, was a little pullout giving way to an unmarked trail. She parked here and, in a smooth and inhuman movement, turned her head to me with the biggest smile I’d ever seen on her lips. Huge. Hungry.

Unnatural.

My breath quickened, my palms grew clammy, the fibers sticking to me. “What… what is this?” I stammered.

Keeping that beautiful, frightening grin, she said in the most golden voice I’ve ever heard, “We’re going hiking, silly.”

I felt sick. Like I could launch my lunch at any moment. She scuttled out of the car in that just, animalistic way, hands pressed to the side as she ran around in glee to open my door. As it swung out, she dropped into this all-fours stance, dug her fingers into the pine-crusted dirt, and slowly stood tall, letting the dirt fall through her fingers and onto her face.

“You are freaking me the fuck out,” I snapped. And usually, snapping at her, which is rare for us, is enough to make her *cry*. But she just smiled. And smiled. And smiled.

“Grab your hiking pole silly!” she said, dancing away.

“No!” I cried. “This ends now. I’m going home, and you can come with me or not, I don’t care at this point. I need to get to a doctor, and so do you.”

And her dancing stopped immediately. She spun on her heel, standing on but one leg, and leaned forward with a sly, starving smirk. “You always say something like that. It never works.”

Ice. I felt ice, right through my heart, trickling down my veins to the pit of my stomach. I scowled and rushed to the driver’s side, where I punched the ignition, determined to get the hell out. The car did not respond. I hit it again. And the car simply sat quietly as if it’d been told to do so.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted her, leaning in with that, that look. “See?” she said.

I was sweating now, so badly it was getting in my eyes. And in the beads were little red threads. I wiped them away, smearing more from my palms on my face. My breathing grew shaky, and I just wanted to go home. I wanted to go home so badly. And like I said, it’s like she can read my mind, like she’s *in* my mind. I could feel her inside, reading, watching, poking, prodding, as she said, “We’ll go home soon. But first we should go see the lake.”

I let out the most pathetic, fearful whimper I’ve ever given. My knuckles were white around the steering wheel. My teeth clenched and ground to the point of squeaking. I even felt a tear leak out. I had never been so, so freaked in my life.

All the while, she was there, smiling at me, leaning in so close that I could smell her sweet breath.

Through quivering lips, I managed to push out, “You promise? You promise we’ll go home…?”

And she leaned further in, so close I could almost hear her heartbeat. Both of them. And she said, “As always. If you come with me, I promise.”

“Oh god,” I whispered. And she did the weirdest thing now, leaning up to my cheek and licking away a tear as it crept down my face. This wasn’t my girlfriend. Or maybe it was? Was or not, this was a predator. I’ve never felt like prey in my life before this, but now, I understood.

I took a deep, painful breath, licked my cracking lips, and nodded silently.

“Good,” she whispered.

She took my hand and pulled me out of the car. Neglecting all of our supplies, she pulled me into the forest as the night began to fall. Not once did she let go of me, nor would she let me let go. Her grip was iron, forceful, and demanding. In a way, it brought me a sick sense of safety in those dark, moonlit woods.

If there were any other predators out here, I did not feel afraid of them. For there was a much more serious predator holding my mind, casting twisted smiles back at me, singing, chanting in a ghostly tune without a care in the world.

It took maybe fifteen minutes of walking before we hit the lake. Small, nestled in the pines, soaking up the reflected moonlight on its still, black waters, it felt profoundly out of place. Just laying eyes on it gave me this… this wrong feeling. A sensation of unbelonging. A rare emotion I’d never felt before that seemed to blend unease, familiarity, and fear and warmth, all at once. It was silent here. No insects. No bird. No wind. Just me, and her.

And the threads that fell off me like red snow.

Looking around, I saw something else. Two stones, sitting upright at the edge of the lake, uncannily prominent. My girlfriend skipped and danced over to them, motioning me to follow with elegant fingers.

And so I did.

The writing on the stones was runic and old. They’d had to have been there for quite some time, though one was far older than the other. In the pale moonlight, they seemed honorable, venerated, ghostly.

“What are these?” I asked in a whisper.

“These are for you,” she said.

I paled. “What are you talking about?”

And she just tsked and said, “It’s part of the deal.”

I shot her a glare. “What deal?”

“The one you made the day you died, silly,” she said. “You wanted to live. Forever, like me! Your thread is mine, will always *be* mine. And so it goes.”

My heart dropped.

Before I could even ask what she meant, she grabbed my hand and held my palm out. There, dead center, was a small red thread that seemed to come from within my hand. It stuck up like a hair, waiting to be plucked. She pinched it with her forefinger and thumb, and to my horror, began to pull it out. Like sinew it came out, hot and stringy. It never stopped, never broke, just unspooled on and on and on.

And as it did, I felt weaker, more fragile. Hollow. Weightless. My breathing stopped. So did my heart. It was as though I’d lost the need for both. She pulled and pulled and pulled, dancing around the lake as she did so. The red thread danced with her, seeming to respond to her chanting, her glee. The longer it grew, the weaker I felt. And the more it unspooled, the larger the deer antlers on her head grew.

Soon they were massive and proud, strong and commanding. And woven between them like a spiders web was red, sinewy thread.

She danced around and around as I fell to my knees, the shore of the lake lapping at me lovingly, hungrily. She pulled, and pulled, and pulled, until I collapsed on the ground and stared emptily at the moon. My vision darkened, my emotions faded, and my senses dulled. Everything blackened. The sounds of her chanting, the light of the moon, the cold of the forest… all evaporated.

And the last thing I saw that night was her, standing over me, looking down with that wide, otherworldly smile, her massive antlers framing the moon perfectly. I wondered if I’d seen this before, twice now. If I’d see it a fourth time. And a fifth. I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here, or when. But I finally understood why. With a whispered though, I called out to remember.

And I fell into the void.

I’m sure this all sounds insane, but I, at least, am pleased to say that I did wake up in my own bed the next morning. Beside me slept my girlfriend, unhorned and peaceful. It took me a second to register where I was, but when I did, I shot up, breathed heavily, and looked around as if I’d never seen my own room before.

She stirred at this, and sat up with a sleepy smile. A normal smile. And she said, “Babe? You okay?”

I just, stared at her. For the longest time, I just silently stared. She seemed uncomfortable, shrinking under my gaze.

“Babe?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied. “Weird dreams, is all.”

But that was a lie. I hadn’t dreamt that night. And I knew that, that… whatever the hell that was at the lake? That was no dream. I don’t think she thinks I remember. But I do.

The rest of the day was… normal. We got coffee. Talked. Cuddled at night. And the whole time I just, pretended to not know. Pushed it all away. I’m scared of her, of whatever she is. But I think I’m tied to her in ways I might never understand. She isn’t human though, that’s for sure.

That night, I had a dream I was at the lake again. Only, I was here alone. Wandering, remembering. And this time, there were three headstones. The oldest, the second, and… the new one.

After breakfast the next morning, I slipped away to the bathroom. There, I searched for the meaning of “æfinligr”.

Turns out, it means: everlasting. Eternal.