Honeyed fog that promises warmth and keeps none of it. Four girls drift forward, skirts like wind-tossed leaves, skin of porcelain, eyes like drawn steel. I freeze—then edge back. They are children, I tell myself, yet their gaze belongs to a later season: the harvest of reckoning. Folktales speak of spirits that wear innocence like a costume; here the costume is tulle. No smiles, only that shared resolve, as if the verdict on the intruder was reached before I arrived. The light beckons, but it lies. This autumn doesn’t whisper—it settles accounts.