The Curse of the High Wind

The house stood higher than the land around it, as if it had once tried to lift itself free of what it had already claimed. Stone on stone, beam on beam, it clung to the hill's spine and watched the moor like a hawk watches a field. Wind worried its eaves day and night—never resting, never moving on. People said it was built there for the view.

They were wrong.

It was built there because the land wanted witnesses.

I was born beneath that roof, in a room that faced the open stretch of black grass and heather. My earliest memory is not of my mother's face or my father's voice, but of the sound the wind made when it slipped through the window frame—a low, restless breath, like something alive pressing its mouth to the cracks.

The High Wind did not howl. Not truly.

It listened.

On storm nights, the house answered back: timbers flexing, boards creaking, nails ticking like teeth. My nurse whispered prayers over my head and said the moor was full of spirits. My mother called it nonsense and shut the curtains tighter. My father stared out at the dark and said nothing, as if silence were the only way not to be noticed.

I learned young that naming is a kind of claiming. The first time I heard my name spoken by the wind, I was five—Elowen, a hush against the glass—so intimate it made my skin prickle. I ran from the window and kept my name close after that. I did not give it away easily.

And then Aldric arrived, and the High Wind learned his.

—

He was found the year the lower path vanished.

Winter had been too wet, the ground soft as bruised fruit. The shepherds complained the earth didn't hold their boots. My father said the hill was settling. The house said nothing, but its doors stuck in their frames and the latches rusted overnight.

One afternoon, the men came back from the moor with a boy in their arms.

He was small and sharp-boned, barefoot and bleeding, clothes torn as if the heather had tried to keep him. Dried blood striped his hands. Dark soil was ground into his skin deep enough to look permanent.

No one knew where he came from. No one asked too loudly. The house had a habit of answering questions in ways people did not survive.

They set him by the fire in the great room. My mother brought broth. My father stood over him like a judge. I watched from behind a chair, knees tucked to my chin, heart beating too fast.

The boy lifted his head.

The wind shifted.

Not louder—closer.

He stared at the window like the moor itself was calling him. When my father asked his name, he opened his mouth and for a heartbeat only the wind answered—one long inhale.

"Aldric," he said at last, like it hurt to put the word into the world.

The house creaked. The fire snapped. The wind exhaled.

Recognition tightened in my chest—not fear, but something older, inevitable. As if the High Wind had pinched a thread between two fingers.

Chosen, it whispered, and I knew it meant both of us.

—

We grew the way wild things grow: fast, tangled, half-feral in a world that wanted neatness.

Aldric did not play the village boys' games. He didn't laugh easily. He moved through the house as if he expected the walls to shift around him. My mother disliked him for his silence; my father tolerated him the way one tolerates a storm: with a wary eye and a hard jaw, pretending endurance is choice.

But the land adored him.

He learned the moor like a language he had spoken once and forgotten. He could stand on the hill with his eyes half-closed and tell you when fog would rise, when wind would turn bitter, when ground would give way beneath a careless foot. Animals watched him pass, heads cocked. Crows followed him from stone to stone like they were keeping count.

I followed him everywhere, because I could not help it.

The first time he took my hand, it wasn't gentle. It was urgent—like he feared if he didn't hold on, I would be torn away. When our palms met, the wind stilled so suddenly the silence rang in my ears.

Aldric glanced up, startled. "Did you hear that?"

"What?"

He shook his head. "Nothing."

But his grip tightened, and we walked on.

When we fought, it was never about toys. It was about belonging.

"You don't have to do what they say," Aldric would hiss when my mother called me in.

"You don't have to live like a shadow," I'd snap when he refused to sleep under our roof.

"If I sleep under that roof," he'd say, eyes glittering, "it gets into me."

As if it hadn't already.

Afterward we would end up pressed together against the cold stone wall behind the house, breathing hard, foreheads nearly touching, the wind curling around us like a hand. I hated him for making me feel caged. I loved him for being the only thing that felt true.

And always the land listened.

—

By the time we were twelve, the villagers had a story for Aldric. Foundling. Devil-child. The house's curse given bones. They crossed themselves when he passed. They never met his eyes.

Aldric pretended not to care, but he began to watch people like a dog watches a gate—quiet, tense, measuring distance to escape.

One evening I found him in the stable, face pressed to a horse's neck like he was trying to breathe through another living thing. When I spoke, he flinched.

"You can't hide in here forever," I said, trying for teasing and failing.

"I'm not hiding," he said. "I'm waiting."

"For what?"

He stepped close enough that the lantern flame wavered. "For you to decide," he said, voice rough. "Whether you're mine—"

My throat tightened.

"—or whether you'll let them take you."

I wanted to promise him everything. Instead, I whispered, "I'm here."

Aldric's expression twisted—relief and fury in the same breath. "Here," he repeated. "For now."

It wasn't an accusation. It was prophecy.

—

The offer came when I was sixteen.

A man from the lowlands arrived with polished boots and a mild smile. Rowan Harrow. He spoke of cities where streets were lit at night and houses that did not whisper. He spoke of warmth, music, clean air—of a future that didn't require bracing your shoulders against weather.

My mother softened like someone had warmed her hands. My father watched Rowan as if weighing him.

I looked out the window. The heather moved like dark water. The wind pressed at the glass, quiet and intent.

That night I found Aldric on the far rise where the grass thinned and the soil went black.

"You can go," he said before I spoke.

The words were flat. That terrified me more than anger.

"Aldric—"

"You'll want it," he said, staring past me. "You've always watched the road like it's a promise."

"You're wrong."

His laugh was harsh. "Am I? You read about places you've never seen and look at me like I'm keeping you from them."

The wind began to rise.

"Come with me," I whispered, though I didn't know where with me could be.

He recoiled as if I'd offered poison. "I can't," he said, and it wasn't refusal. It was fact. "It won't let me."

A gust cut between us, cold as a knife. I tasted blood where my lip split.

Aldric's eyes locked on mine, desperate. "If you leave," he said, voice low, "don't come back."

"Why?"

His mouth worked like the wind had filled it. "Don't listen," he managed. "When it calls you."

Behind him the moor answered with a long, satisfied sigh.

—

On the morning I left, the world was unnaturally still. No wind. No birds. Silence sat on the hill like a heavy hand.

Rowan waited by the carriage. My parents stood rigid in the doorway. I walked to the rise where Aldric always stood.

He was there, carved out of stormlight. He did not come closer. He did not call my name. He lifted two fingers—half wave, half command.

Go.

I turned away.

That was my first mistake.

For days afterward I felt the hill behind me the way you feel eyes in a dark room. The air in the carriage stayed too cold, as if the High Wind had slipped a finger beneath my collar and refused to let go. Rowan spoke—reassurances, the names of towns we passed—but his words skidded off me. I watched the horizon until the house disappeared, and even then I kept watching, waiting for the instant relief everyone promised would come when you escape.

It never did.

That first winter in the lowlands, a storm rolled in off the sea. People complained about the weather and pulled their coats tighter. I stood at the window, shaking, because the gusts sounded almost right—almost the High Wind—close enough to make my mouth taste like iron. For one terrible heartbeat, the glass fogged beneath my breath and a whisper slid across it:

Elowen.

I staggered back. The room was warm. The fire was steady. Rowan called my name.

But the wind outside did not move on.

—

The lowlands were quiet in a way that felt polite. Rowan's rooms smelled of soap and bread. Windows opened without a fight. Nothing breathed against the walls at night. For a while I mistook that for peace.

Rowan was kind. People said I was lucky. I smiled when I was supposed to. I learned how to live in fabrics that didn't itch. I learned how to speak of my childhood like it was a story with a neat moral.

But some nights, I woke gasping, certain the air had thickened around me. I listened for the High Wind and found only silence—which, over time, became its own cruelty.

Then the dreams began.

At first it was the hill under stormlight. Aldric turning his face away. Then it became the moor swallowing him slowly—ankles, calves, knees—while he stared at the road as if expecting to see me.

In the dream I ran, but the ground thickened beneath my feet, dragging at me like hands.

"Don't," Aldric would say, voice rough with wind. "Don't come back."

Years passed. My parents died. The village changed hands. News of the hill came rarely, always wrong. Travelers said the storms were worse. They said the ground was bad. They said there was something out there on the moor—man-shaped, shadow-made.

When Rowan finally died—softly, kindly, nothing dramatic—the quiet in my house became unbearable. I realized I had spent a lifetime trying to be the version of myself the lowlands wanted.

And still, at the back of every breath, the wind waited.

So I returned.

—

The road back was nearly gone, swallowed by grass and stone. The closer I got, the sharper the air became, as if the land ahead had teeth. Clouds gathered like bruises on the horizon.

When I crested the final rise at dusk, the house stood exactly as it always had—higher than the land, darker than memory. Its windows were blank. The yard was choked with grass. The gate hung open like a mouth.

The wind rose the moment I stepped onto the hill.

It circled me. It tasted. It pressed close and breathed my name as if it had never stopped holding it.

Elowen.

Inside, dust lay thick as snow. The air smelled of cold stone and old smoke. The house watched me from every corner.

I moved through rooms that once held voices, following a pull I couldn't name. And then I heard it—not a voice, not quite: a low, steady drawing, like breath pulled through a wound.

Outside, the moor stretched—endless, dark, alive.

I stepped onto it.

The soil beneath the heather was darker than it had any right to be, almost black, and cold seeped up through my soles. The wind strengthened at my back, not to knock me down, but to guide me—firm as a hand between my shoulder blades.

Over the rise, the ground trembled.

Not thunder. Not movement of grass.

The land itself.

A shape rose from it, as if the earth were remembering how to make a body.

Stone and soil slid together in wet, grinding layers. Roots surfaced, twisting like veins. Bone gleamed for a heartbeat before darkness covered it again. Something like a hand formed from packed earth and splintered rock.

And in the center of it, eyes opened.

Dark as turned soil.

Aldric.

Except not.

He stood waist-deep in the moor, the land clinging to him like a second skin. His face was there—sharpened, hollowed, carved by years I had not witnessed. His mouth did not move.

He did not speak.

He didn't need to.

Understanding hit so hard my knees buckled. I sank into the heather, hands sinking into wet cold earth—and the moor welcomed my touch like it had been waiting.

He had never left.

He had never been allowed to.

The High Wind had taken what belonged to it and remade it into something permanent. Something roads could not steal. Something marriage could not soften. Something time could not untangle.

Aldric's gaze held mine, steady and merciless—not because I had gone, but because I had believed going meant escape.

The wind curled around us, thick with rain and iron. I opened my mouth to say his name.

The moor answered first: a deep rumble through the ground—pleased, possessive.

Aldric's hand—earth and bone—lifted slowly. It hovered, as if offering, as if warning. The wind pressed against my ear, intimate as breath against skin.

Ours, it whispered.

And I understood the cruelest truth of the High Wind's curse.

It did not bind souls because it loved romance.

It bound souls because it hated separation.

Some loves are not meant to survive choice.

Some places do not let you leave.

I looked at Aldric and felt the old thread between us tighten—frayed, stretched, but unbroken. It pulled at my ribs, my throat, my name.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, though the apology was too small for the years.

Something flickered in his eyes—softening, or memory, or the last human part of him still capable of recognition. The wind surged—gentler now, almost satisfied.

Behind me, the house creaked, as if settling its bones more comfortably on the hill.

I realized then the curse was never punishment. It was law.

The land chooses. The wind names. The house keeps.

The rain began to fall—cold, steady—darkening the soil around Aldric's half-formed body. The moor breathed under my palms.

And when the High Wind rose higher, carrying our names together at last, it was not a promise.

It was a warning, stitched into the weather for anyone foolish enough to listen.

Elowen.

Aldric.

The High Wind does not forgive.

It keeps.