Lucy was ten years old when she first noticed the footprints were wrong. She’d walked the forest path a thousand times—it connected her family’s cottage on the eastern edge of the woods to her grandmother’s cottage on the western edge, a journey of perhaps half an hour if you walked steadily and didn’t stop to examine interesting mushrooms or chase squirrels.
Her father was the village woodcutter, a strong man named Edmund who could fell a tree twice his height and reduce it to neat stacks of firewood before the sun reached its peak. Her mother Sarah tended their small garden and raised chickens that provided eggs for trade. Lucy had two younger twin brothers, George and Henry, who were seven and got into everything they shouldn’t. And then there was Grandmother Agnes, who lived alone in the western cottage and knew more about the forest than anyone in the village—which trees were safe to cut, which plants were edible, where the deer paths ran, and importantly, which parts of the woods to avoid entirely.
The forest itself was ancient. Oak trees wider than Edmund could wrap his arms around. Pine trees so tall their tops disappeared into mist on foggy mornings. Underbrush thick with ferns and brambles and small flowering plants that attracted butterflies and bees. In spring, the forest floor bloomed with wildflowers. In autumn, mushrooms erupted overnight in strange circular patterns. In winter, snow lay thick and undisturbed except for animal tracks. It was beautiful and slightly dangerous in the way all wild places are—beautiful because it was dangerous, and dangerous because it operated by rules different from the human village nearby.
The path Lucy walked connected the two cottages was well-established, worn smooth by decades of feet walking the same route. Lucy’s grandmother had walked it daily when Lucy’s father was young. Edmund had walked it visiting his mother countless times. Now Lucy walked it, carrying messages or food or just visiting because Grandmother Agnes told the best stories and always had honey cakes waiting.
Lucy knew every tree along the path, every rock, every place where roots broke through the dirt and you had to step carefully. She knew where the path curved around a massive oak that must be centuries old. She knew where it crossed a small stream over flat stones that were slippery when wet. She knew where it passed through a clearing where sunlight broke through the canopy and wildflowers grew thick in summer.
What she didn’t know—what nobody had ever told her—was that the path had memory. That it held onto traces of everyone who’d ever walked it. That under certain conditions, those traces could surface in ways that violated every sensible rule about how time and space should work (see the generated image above).
The Morning Everything Went Strange
It was a Tuesday in early autumn when Lucy first saw footprints that shouldn’t exist. She’d been sent to Grandmother’s cottage with a basket of eggs and fresh bread, payment for the yarrow root her grandmother had provided when Lucy’s mother needed medicine for a headache. The morning was cool but pleasant, with mist rising from the forest floor in wisps that dissolved as sunlight touched them.
Lucy had walked perhaps ten minutes into the forest, just past the big oak, when she noticed footprints in the soft dirt of the path. Clear boot prints, adult-sized, pressed deep into the earth. Nothing unusual about that—people walked this path regularly. Edmund checked on his mother several times a week. Village hunters passed through pursuing deer or rabbits. Travelers occasionally used it as a shortcut to the next village.
But these footprints were going the wrong direction.
Lucy stopped, staring down at the prints. They led from Grandmother’s cottage toward Lucy’s home. Back toward where Lucy had come from. As if someone had walked from west to east recently, heading away from Grandmother’s place.
That would be normal except for one thing: Lucy had walked this exact section of path yesterday, heading home from Grandmother’s. And she distinctly remembered these prints being here then, oriented the same way—pointing toward Lucy’s home, away from Grandmother’s. She remembered because they’d been fresh then, pressed into soft earth, and she’d wondered whose they were since she hadn’t seen anyone on the path.
So if the prints had been here yesterday, pointing this direction… they shouldn’t still be here today. Rain last night should have washed them away. Or they should at least be worn and weathered. But these prints looked fresh, pressed into earth that had been disturbed recently, as if someone had walked this way within the last hour.
And more confusing: if someone had walked from Grandmother’s cottage toward Lucy’s home this morning, Lucy should have passed them. The path was the only direct route. You couldn’t walk from Grandmother’s cottage to the village without using it unless you wanted to bushwhack through dense forest, which nobody did.
Lucy crouched down, examining the prints more carefully. Definitely boot prints. Adult-sized. Deep, suggesting someone heavy or carrying weight. The tread pattern was unusual—not the simple flat sole of village boots, but something with more design, ridges and patterns that Lucy didn’t recognize.
She stood up, confused. Maybe she was misremembering. Maybe these were different prints from different boots. Maybe someone had walked this way very early this morning, before Lucy started her journey, and she’d simply not encountered them because they’d moved faster.
She continued walking, paying more attention to the path beneath her feet. More prints appeared. All going the same direction—from Grandmother’s cottage toward Lucy’s home. All looking fresh. All with that same unusual tread pattern.
Lucy walked faster, unsettled in a way she couldn’t quite name. The forest around her felt different today. Too quiet. The birds weren’t singing as much as usual. The normal small sounds—insects, small animals moving through underbrush, wind rustling leaves—seemed muted, as if the forest was holding its breath.
When she reached the clearing where sunlight broke through the canopy, Lucy stopped completely. Because here, in the soft earth where rain collected and stayed damp, were more footprints. Dozens of them. All going toward her home. But these weren’t just adult boot prints—these were her own footprints. Her smaller boots, the ones with the left sole slightly more worn than the right because she tended to walk unevenly when tired.
Lucy’s footprints from yesterday’s walk home. Except they were going the wrong direction. They should have pointed toward Grandmother’s cottage—that was the direction Lucy had been walking yesterday. But these prints pointed the opposite way, as if yesterday Lucy had been walking from Grandmother’s toward home.
Which she had been. But the prints were turned around, reversed, showing her walking in the direction she’d actually traveled but oriented as if she’d been going the opposite way (see the generated image above).
Lucy felt her skin prickle with goosebumps. This was impossible. Footprints didn’t reverse themselves. Yesterday was yesterday, fixed and unchangeable. You couldn’t walk home and have your footprints show you walking the opposite direction.
Unless something very wrong was happening with the path. Unless the forest was doing something that violated basic rules about how reality worked.
Grandmother’s Warning
Lucy ran the rest of the way to Grandmother’s cottage, her basket bouncing against her hip, her breath coming fast with effort and rising fear. She burst through the cottage door without knocking—something she’d normally be scolded for—and found Grandmother Agnes sitting by the fire, knitting a shawl with practiced efficiency.
“Grandmother!” Lucy gasped. “The path—the footprints—they’re wrong!”
Agnes looked up with sharp eyes that saw more than most people’s. She was seventy-three years old, bent with age but still sharp-minded and capable. Her gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun. Her hands, though gnarled with arthritis, moved the knitting needles without hesitation. She looked at Lucy for a long moment, then set her knitting aside.
“Tell me exactly what you saw,” Agnes said calmly.
Lucy explained. The footprints going the wrong direction. Her own prints from yesterday reversed. The too-quiet forest. The sense that something was deeply wrong even though she couldn’t explain exactly what.
Agnes listened without interrupting. When Lucy finished, the old woman nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something she’d suspected.
“It’s happening again,” Agnes said quietly. “The path is remembering wrong. Or rather, it’s remembering too well and getting confused about what direction time flows.”
“What?” Lucy asked, completely lost.
Agnes stood up, her joints creaking audibly, and walked to the window overlooking the forest. “This path is old, Lucy. Older than the village. Older than living memory. It’s been walked by thousands of people over hundreds of years. And paths, when they’re old enough and walked enough, they develop… memory. They hold traces of everyone who’s ever traveled them. Usually, that memory is harmless. Just a sense of the path being well-used, safe, established.”
“But?” Lucy prompted.
“But sometimes, when conditions are right—usually in autumn when the boundary between past and present grows thin—the path gets confused. It starts showing footprints from different times. Yesterday’s prints mix with today’s. Last week’s tracks appear where they shouldn’t. And sometimes, the path shows footprints going backward. Not backward in space, but backward in time. Showing you where people will walk rather than where they walked.”
Lucy felt cold despite the fire. “That doesn’t make sense. You can’t see the future. Footprints are marks of the past.”
“Usually yes,” Agnes agreed. “But this path doesn’t always agree with ‘usually.’ When it gets confused about time, it shows all the walking that’s ever happened and ever will happen on it, all mixed together. Past, present, and future footprints all visible simultaneously. And to someone walking the path, it looks like prints are going the wrong direction because they’re seeing tomorrow’s journey mixed with yesterday’s.”
“Is it dangerous?” Lucy whispered.
Agnes turned from the window to look at her granddaughter seriously. “It can be. People have gotten lost on this path when it starts showing future footprints. They follow prints thinking they’re going the right direction, but they’re actually following someone who hasn’t walked there yet, and they end up somewhere unexpected. Time on the path gets slippery. You might walk for what feels like ten minutes and arrive hours later. Or walk for an hour and arrive ten minutes after you left. The path stops obeying normal rules.”
“What should I do?” Lucy asked. “How do I get home?”
“Don’t follow any footprints,” Agnes said firmly. “Don’t trust what you see on the ground. Walk the path by memory—you know every tree, every turn. Trust your knowledge of the physical path, not the marks on it. Keep your eyes on the trees and rocks and landmarks that don’t change. Footprints might lie, but the forest itself stays honest.”
Lucy nodded, trying to remember this advice. Don’t follow prints. Trust the landmarks. Walk by memory, not by sight.
“One more thing,” Agnes added, her voice dropping lower. “If you see footprints that look like yours but slightly different—maybe the same size but different gait, different wear pattern—don’t follow them under any circumstances. Those are prints from other possible versions of you. Paths you might take in the future, or took in pasts that didn’t quite happen. Following those leads to places where you don’t belong. Understand?”
“Not really,” Lucy admitted. “But I understand enough. Don’t follow strange footprints that look like mine. Got it.”
Agnes smiled slightly. “You’re a smart girl. You’ll be fine. Just remember—the path wants to confuse you. It doesn’t mean harm; it’s just old and doesn’t understand time the way we do. Stay focused on what’s real and unchanging, and you’ll get home safely.”
The Walk Home That Took Forever
Lucy left her grandmother’s cottage carrying an empty basket and a head full of warnings she only partly understood. The path looked normal at first—just dirt and roots and leaves, the same as always. But Lucy watched it carefully now, noticing things she’d missed on the way here.
More footprints. Everywhere. Some fresh, some old, some impossible to age because they looked simultaneously new and ancient. Boot prints and bare feet and animal tracks all mixed together. And they went in every direction—some toward Grandmother’s cottage, some toward Lucy’s home, some at angles that suggested the walker had been moving through the forest perpendicular to the path even though thick underbrush made that impossible.
Lucy remembered Agnes’s advice. Don’t look at the footprints. Look at the landmarks. She fixed her eyes on the trees, on the big oak that marked the halfway point, on the rock formation that looked like a sleeping bear, on the stream crossing where flat stones provided a bridge.
She walked steadily, not hurrying but not dawdling. The forest was still too quiet. That bothered her more than the strange footprints. Forests should have sound—wind, birds, small creatures rustling through undergrowth. This silence felt like held breath, like anticipation, like the moment before something important happened.
Lucy had been walking for what felt like ten minutes—she should be halfway home by now—when she reached the big oak. But something was wrong. She’d just passed the big oak ten minutes ago. Or at least, she thought she had. She remembered walking past it, remembered the way its massive trunk blocked the path so you had to veer slightly left to continue.
But here it was again. The same tree. Same position. Same everything.
Lucy stopped, looking around in confusion. Had she somehow circled back? Walked in a loop without realizing? That didn’t make sense—the path was straight here, no branches or curves that would lead to a circular route.
She looked down at the ground despite telling herself not to. Footprints everywhere. And there, clear as day, were her own boot prints. Small, slightly uneven, the left sole more worn than the right. Walking away from the oak, heading back toward Grandmother’s cottage.
But Lucy hadn’t walked back toward Grandmother’s. She’d been walking steadily home. These prints showed her going the wrong direction—or rather, they showed her walking in the direction she’d actually traveled, but time-shifted somehow so it looked reversed (see the generated image above).
Lucy’s head hurt trying to understand this. She decided to follow Agnes’s advice more strictly. She closed her eyes for a moment, visualizing the path from memory. Big oak. Then a slight downward slope. Then the rock that looked like a bear. Then the stream. Then more level ground leading to the clearing. Then the final stretch home.
She opened her eyes and walked forward, refusing to look at the ground. Just at the trees, the slope of the land, the fixed landmarks that couldn’t lie about time and direction.
The walk felt wrong. Distances seemed stretched or compressed. What should have taken five minutes felt like half an hour. Or maybe it was the opposite—maybe half an hour passed in what felt like five minutes. Lucy couldn’t tell. The light through the canopy wasn’t changing the way it should, wasn’t tracking the sun’s movement through the sky in any predictable way.
She reached the stream and crossed it on the familiar flat stones. Looked back and saw her own footprints in the soft mud of the bank—but they showed her approaching the stream from the opposite direction, as if she’d been heading toward Grandmother’s cottage rather than away from it.
Lucy forced herself to keep walking. The landmarks were right. She was going the correct direction. The footprints were lying, showing time reversed or sideways or confused. But the actual physical path, the trees and rocks and geography, that was reliable. That couldn’t be changed by whatever temporal confusion affected the path’s memory.
Finally—after what felt like both ten minutes and three hours simultaneously—Lucy saw the edge of the forest ahead. Saw her family’s cottage through the thinning trees. Saw the clearing where her father chopped wood, saw the chicken coop, saw smoke rising from the chimney where her mother was cooking.
Lucy ran the last distance, bursting out of the forest and into familiar space. Her mother looked up from the garden, surprised.
“Lucy! That was quick. You’ve only been gone fifteen minutes.”
Lucy stared. “Fifteen minutes? But I walked to Grandmother’s, visited, and walked back. That should take at least an hour.”
Her mother shook her head. “You left quarter past the hour. It’s half past now. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty at most. Are you feeling well, dear? You look pale.”
Lucy looked back at the forest path. It looked normal from here—just a dirt track leading into trees, innocuous and ordinary. But she knew better now. Knew that the path held memory and got confused about time. Knew that walking it could compress or expand duration in ways that made no sense.
“I’m fine,” Lucy said, though she wasn’t sure that was true. “Just… the path felt strange today.”
Her mother gave her an odd look but didn’t press. There was work to do—there was always work to do—and Lucy’s temporal confusion wasn’t as important as harvesting vegetables before the evening dew made them wet.
The Path Remembers Everything
Over the next week, Lucy avoided the forest path. If Grandmother needed something, Lucy’s father made the journey. If messages needed carrying, Lucy volunteered to take the long route around the forest—a journey that added two hours but kept her safely away from the path that didn’t understand time properly.
But she couldn’t avoid it forever. Eventually, circumstances required Lucy to walk the path again. Grandmother had sent word that she’d twisted her ankle and needed help with chores for a few days until it healed. Lucy’s father was away buying supplies in the larger town. Her mother couldn’t leave the younger twins unsupervised. So Lucy had to go.
She prepared carefully. Filled her pockets with stones from the garden—physical objects she could drop along the way to mark her actual position, creating a trail that was definitely from today, not yesterday or tomorrow. Brought a piece of string to tie to trees, another way of marking the present moment. Told her mother that if she wasn’t back in two hours—real time, measured by the sun—to send someone after her.
The path looked innocent in morning light. Just dirt and trees and dappled sunlight. Lucy stepped onto it with her basket of food for Grandmother and her pockets full of marking stones.
The footprints were still wrong. Still going every direction. Still mixing past and future and possible alternate versions of people who might have walked here or might walk here eventually. Lucy ignored them, focusing on landmarks as Agnes had instructed.
Every hundred paces, Lucy dropped a stone. They weren’t special stones—just ordinary rocks from her mother’s garden. But they were from today, placed by Lucy right now, and they couldn’t be time-shifted because she was watching them happen. They created a trail of present-moment markers through a path that had lost track of when things occurred.
The walk went more smoothly this time. Maybe because Lucy knew what to expect. Maybe because she was better at ignoring the temporal confusion. Maybe because the path itself was having a calmer day, its memory settling into something closer to normal.
She reached Grandmother’s cottage in what felt like the right amount of time—perhaps thirty minutes, which matched her internal sense of how long the walk should take. Agnes was sitting on her front step, her ankle wrapped in cloth and elevated on a wooden stool.
“You made it,” Agnes said, relief evident in her voice. “And you’re here at the right time, which means you walked the path correctly. Well done, child.”
“I dropped stones to mark the present,” Lucy explained, showing her grandmother the remaining rocks in her pocket. “To create a trail that couldn’t be confused with past or future.”
Agnes smiled. “Clever. That’s exactly the sort of thinking you need for dealing with the path when it gets confused. Physical actions taken right now, witnessed as they happen. Those anchor you to the present and keep the path from pulling you into other times.”
Lucy spent the day helping Grandmother with chores. Fetching water from the well. Gathering vegetables from the garden. Feeding chickens. Sweeping the cottage floor. Normal, grounding work that existed firmly in the present moment.
As the afternoon light started slanting toward evening, Lucy prepared to walk home. Agnes stood at her cottage door, watching Lucy step onto the path with a worried expression.
“Remember,” Agnes called after her. “Don’t follow prints. Trust landmarks. And Lucy? If you see anything truly strange—footprints that go in circles, or backwards, or straight up trees—don’t investigate. Just walk faster and focus on getting home.”
Lucy nodded and started walking. She’d collect her marking stones on the way back, picking them up one by one, using them as confirmation she was walking the same route she’d walked this morning.
The first stone was where she’d left it. The second. The third. Each one a small anchor to reality, to the present, to the specific journey Lucy had taken that morning. She picked them up and returned them to her pocket, feeling reassured by their presence.
But when she reached the halfway point, where the big oak grew, something was different. There, in the soft earth, were footprints Lucy had never seen before. Not boots. Not human feet. These were something else entirely—long and narrow, with claw marks at the tips, pressed deep into the earth as if something very heavy had walked here.
And these prints went up. Not forward or backward along the path, but vertically, as if whatever made them had walked straight up the side of the oak tree, defying gravity entirely.
Lucy remembered Agnes’s warning. Don’t investigate strange footprints. Just walk faster. She quickened her pace, eyes fixed firmly on the path ahead, refusing to look at the impossible prints on the tree trunk.
But as she walked, she heard something behind her. Footsteps. Definitely footsteps. Following her. Matching her pace. When she walked faster, they walked faster. When she slowed, they slowed.
Lucy looked back. Nothing. The path was empty. But the footsteps continued, clearly audible, getting closer.
Then Lucy understood. The path wasn’t just showing footprints from different times—it was making audible sounds from different times. She was hearing someone who had walked this path yesterday, or would walk it tomorrow, or was walking it in some parallel now that existed alongside her own. The sounds were real, but they belonged to a different temporal layer than the one Lucy currently occupied.
“You’re not here,” Lucy said out loud, as much to reassure herself as to address the invisible follower. “You’re somewhere else. Some other time. You can’t hurt me because we’re not in the same moment.”
The footsteps stopped. Lucy waited, holding her breath. Then they started again, but moving away from her now, growing fainter, as if the other walker had decided to go in a different direction.
Lucy exhaled and kept walking. She found her remaining marking stones—fourth, fifth, sixth—collected them, and pushed toward home. The edge of the forest appeared ahead, and Lucy ran for it, bursting out of the temporal confusion into her family’s clearing where time behaved normally and footprints only went one direction.
Her mother was hanging laundry. “Perfect timing,” she said. “You’ve been gone exactly two hours, like you predicted. How’s your grandmother?”
“Her ankle’s better,” Lucy said, not mentioning the impossible footprints or the sounds of time-shifted walking or anything else that would make her mother worry. “She’ll be fine in a few days.”
The Path Teaches What It Knows
Lucy couldn’t avoid the path forever, and gradually she grew accustomed to its temporal quirks. She walked it twice weekly, visiting Grandmother and helping with chores. Each journey taught her something new about how the path held memory and confused time.
She learned that mornings were better than evenings—the path seemed calmer, more connected to the present, when daylight was strong. Evening walks sometimes stretched for hours, or compressed into minutes, or looped back on themselves in ways that made Lucy arrive home before she’d left.
She learned that rain temporarily cleared the temporal confusion. Fresh rain washed away all the time-layered footprints, leaving only traces from right now. Walking the path during or just after rain was safest, most reliably normal.
She learned that autumn was the worst time for confusion, especially near the equinox when day and night were perfectly balanced. Something about that balance made the path’s memory glitch more severely, mixing past and future and parallel possibilities into incomprehensible tangles.
And she learned that if you paid attention, the confused footprints could actually be useful. They showed you not just where people had walked, but where they would walk. If you learned to read them correctly, you could predict who would be on the path today, could avoid encounters you didn’t want, could time your journey to walk alone or with specific company.
Lucy became expert at reading the path. When she was twelve, a group of travelers came to the village asking for directions to Grandmother’s cottage. They seemed suspicious—too many weapons, too much interest in whether an old woman lived alone. Lucy walked the path ahead of them and saw their footprints mixed with ones that showed Grandmother’s cottage broken into, goods stolen.
Lucy ran home and told her father, who gathered other men from the village. They reached Grandmother’s cottage before the travelers did and made it clear that any attempt at robbery would be met with force. The travelers left, and Grandmother’s cottage remained safe.
“How did you know?” Agnes asked later.
“The path showed me,” Lucy explained. “I saw footprints from later today—or from today in a version where nobody stopped them. The path remembered a future that hadn’t happened yet, and seeing it let us change it.”
Agnes looked at her granddaughter with something like awe. “You’ve learned to read time itself, child. That’s a rare gift. And a dangerous one. Be careful how you use it.”
Lucy was careful. She didn’t tell people about the path’s temporal confusion—most wouldn’t believe her anyway. She just used her knowledge quietly, helping when she could, avoiding dangers she saw printed in tomorrow’s footsteps.
When Lucy was fifteen, her grandmother got sick. The kind of sick that doesn’t improve, that settles in bones and organs and slowly steals strength. Agnes knew she was dying and faced it with the calm acceptance of someone who’d lived a long, full life.
“Walk the path with me,” Agnes said one afternoon when she still had strength to leave her cottage. “One more time. I want to see it properly before I go.”
Lucy helped her grandmother onto the path, supporting her weight, walking slowly. The autumn sunlight was golden and beautiful, painting everything in warm tones. And the footprints… Lucy gasped.
The path was showing clearly for once, its memory sharp and unconfused. And there, stretched ahead of them, were two sets of prints. One set was Agnes’s—her distinctive uneven gait from favoring her twisted ankle all these years, the walking stick she used leaving marks in the soft earth. These prints went from her cottage toward Lucy’s home, then back, then toward, then back, thousands of times, decades of walking layered on top of each other until they formed a highway of memory.
And alongside those prints, growing from small child-sized marks to adult-sized, were Lucy’s footprints. Following her grandmother’s path. Learning from it. Eventually walking beside it as equal. And then—Lucy’s chest tightened—continuing alone. Walking back and forth, back and forth, carrying on the tradition of connection between the two cottages long after Agnes’s prints stopped appearing.
“You see it,” Agnes said softly. “You see what the path remembers.”
“I see you’ve been walking this path your whole life,” Lucy said. “And that I’ll keep walking it after you’re gone. The path knows our story. Past and future all mixed together.”
They walked slowly to the end, to Lucy’s family cottage, then back to Agnes’s cottage. Their last walk together. The path held the memory of it even as it was happening, layering it with all the walks before and all the walks to come.
Agnes died three weeks later, peacefully, in her sleep. Lucy inherited her cottage, as everyone had known she would. And she kept walking the path, back and forth, just as the footprints had predicted.
The New Generation
When Lucy was twenty-five and had children of her own—two daughters named Margaret and Anne—she taught them about the path. Not all at once, not with lectures or warnings that would scare them. Just gradually, through experience and observation.
“Look at the footprints,” Lucy would tell them as they walked to their great-grandmother’s old cottage, which Lucy now occupied. “Do you see anything strange about them?”
Little Margaret, who was six and noticed everything, said, “Some go the wrong way. And some look like they’re floating above the ground.”
“Very good. That means the path is remembering different times. This path is special. It holds onto traces of everyone who’s ever walked it. Sometimes those traces get mixed up, and you can see yesterday’s walk mixed with today’s, or even tomorrow’s.”
Anne, who was four and more interested in fairies than time, asked, “Are there ghosts?”
“No, sweetheart. Not ghosts. Just memories. The path remembers, and sometimes it gets confused about when things happened. So we have to walk carefully and pay attention to landmarks—trees, rocks, the stream—things that don’t change, that can’t be confused with different times.”
Lucy taught them the same lessons Agnes had taught her. Don’t follow strange footprints. Trust landmarks over traces. Walk with confidence in the present, and the path’s temporal confusion can’t pull you into other times.
The Top Scary Stories for Kids that Lucy told her daughters weren’t about monsters or demons. They were about a path that remembered too much and got confused about when. About footprints that showed futures that might happen or pasts that didn’t quite occur. About the importance of staying grounded in the present when reality got slippery.
And most importantly, Lucy taught them that strange and scary things weren’t always dangerous. The path’s temporal confusion had never hurt anyone—it just confused them, led them astray, made walks take longer or shorter than they should. Understanding strange things made them less scary. Knowledge was the best protection against fear.
Margaret grew up to become a village teacher, passing along knowledge of the forest and the path to new generations. Anne became a woodworker, following her grandfather’s trade, spending days in the forest among the trees that the path connected.
Both daughters walked the path confidently, reading its temporal traces, understanding its memory, using its confused footprints to avoid dangers and find opportunities. The path that had seemed so frightening when Lucy was ten had become familiar, understood, even trusted despite its strangeness.
The Path’s Final Gift
Lucy was sixty-two when the path showed her something that changed everything. She’d been walking to her cottage—she still lived in what had been Grandmother Agnes’s home—when she noticed footprints that made no sense.
They were hers. Definitely hers—she recognized every detail, every worn spot on her boot soles. But they showed her walking backward. Not backward in direction, but literally backward—heel prints where toe prints should be, toe prints where heel prints should be. As if she’d walked this path in reverse, facing where she’d come from rather than where she was going.
Lucy stopped and studied the prints carefully. This wasn’t temporal confusion. This was something else. The path was trying to show her something important, using the only language it had—footprints and time.
She followed the backward-walking prints carefully. They led off the main path, into underbrush that shouldn’t be passable. But when Lucy pushed through the ferns and brambles, she found they parted easily, as if this route had been walked many times before even though no visible path existed.
The backward prints led to a small clearing Lucy had never seen despite sixty years of walking this forest. In the center of the clearing was a stone. Not a natural stone—this was carved, shaped, marked with symbols in a language Lucy couldn’t read.
She approached the stone carefully. Touched it. Felt warmth despite the cool autumn air. And suddenly she understood.
This was the source. The reason the path had memory, the reason it confused time, the reason footprints mixed past and future and possibility. This stone was old—ancient beyond measure—and it had been placed here deliberately by people who understood time differently than Lucy’s village did. It held memory. It recorded every footstep, every journey, every walk that had happened or would happen or might happen on the path nearby.
And it had led Lucy here by showing her backward footprints—walking into the past to find the source of the path’s power.
Lucy sat by the stone for a long time, thinking. She could tell people about this. Could let scholars study it, priests examine it, maybe even break it or move it to end the temporal confusion. The path would become normal, would stop mixing times, would be just a simple forest track with no memory or strangeness.
Or she could keep the secret. Could let the path continue its confused remembering. Could preserve this strange magic that had been part of her family’s life for generations.
Lucy stood up, made her decision, and walked away. She covered the clearing’s entrance with brush, hiding it thoroughly. She told no one what she’d found. The path’s memory would continue, its temporal confusion would persist, and future generations would learn the same lessons Lucy had learned—that reality is more flexible than it seems, that time doesn’t flow in only one direction, that understanding strange things is better than destroying them.
Lucy died at seventy-eight, having walked the path thousands of times. Her daughters inherited her knowledge and her cottage and her understanding of how to read time-mixed footprints. They taught their children, who taught theirs, creating a lineage of people who knew the path’s secret and protected it.
