In the crooked, flour-dusted lanes of Briarwhite, there was a bakery that only opened at midnight.
Its proprietor, Harlan Vey, was a man with dough-knuckled hands and a face pale as unbaked bread. He worked alone, kneading his goods by the glow of a single black candle—the wick made from braided hair, the wax rendered from something unspeakable.
His specialty? The Last Loaf.
A grieving widow could bring a lock of her husband’s hair, and Harlan would bake it into a dense, dark rye. When eaten, the mourner would dream of their lost one—not as they were in life, but as they truly were in their final moments. A soldier’s last breath. A hanged man’s kicking legs. A drowned girl’s bursting lungs.
"Truth rises like yeast," Harlan would say. "Better to swallow it than let it choke you later."
The townsfolk called it mercy.
They were wrong.
One autumn, a woman named Mira Thorn (no relation to the woman from Duskwatch Hollow—or so she claimed) brought Harlan a vial of her sister’s tears. The loaf he gave her was stained red at the crust. That night, Mira dreamed of her sister’s death—but not at the hands of the fever, as she’d been told.
Her sister had been eaten.
And the thing wearing her skin still lived in Briarwhite.
When Mira confronted Harlan at dawn, his flour-dusted face split into a smile too wide for his skull.
"I don’t bake memories," he whispered. "I bake hunger. And now it knows your name."
The next night, the bakery’s ovens burned hotter than ever. The scent of roasting meat curled through the streets. And when the townsfolk woke, every mirror in Briarwhite was licked clean—except for faint, wet fingerprints around the edges.
As for Harlan?
They found him in the kneading trough, his body hollowed out like a risen loaf, his mouth stuffed with unbaked dough.
On the counter beside him sat one final, perfect Last Loaf.
No one dared touch it.
But sometimes, when the wind blows just right, the bakery’s door creaks open—as if inviting someone inside.
To bake.
Or to be baked.
