I promise, this story will probably be no longer than three or four chapters! But I was just... inspired. I read the fairy tale the other day, and I couldn't resist.
No one went much near the old mill pond, and the path from the village had long given way to the whispers of trees, wind, and growing things. Things of shadow, things of deep green, things that hid themselves from mortal eye. The trail had all but disappeared under them, until few besides the deer and the badgers could show the way. But the old mill yet remained, cold and mortar-falling. The air there was chill, and the air flew for a mile around. The old mill had left the world as the forest had grown in; it belonged to the forest now, and the ghosts and the fey.
The pond lay beneath the mill, too many shadows and too much mist to reflect neither a drop of tree or mill. It was dark, it was mossy, it held its own secrets. Many from the village, the elders who remembered the pond, said it was haunted.
Spirits lurked about the mill and its pond. There were things there, things in the water, things in the trees. That's what the man said, the one who returned to the tavern the day after his son's birth.
"I saw it in there," the man said. "When I was passin' through, when I became lost. I saw the old mill."
"Murders happened there," Old Seth said from his corner. "I remember them, the night the miller went mad."
Most didn't believe Seth.
The man wasn't sure. He had seen what he had seen. "Murder, maybe, ghosts, maybe. I've only seen what lies in there, I don't claim to know what it is."
The fire crackled in the stove, freshly fed with wood. The man refused a mug of ale. "I became lost out there. I found the mill, or it found me. I was trapped in the marsh, and I lost the ring my beloved Jael gave me."
But the ring yet glinted on his finger. Every eye noticed that.
The man continued, dark eyes distant. "Then it appeared, a soaken corpse only alive, more beautiful than anything in the form of a lady."
Whispers and smirks began.
"She grabbed my arm, said 'What will you give for the ring?' I said whatever she asked. 'The youngest thing in your household', she replied."
His son had just been born. The woman that poured the ale gasped.
And the man rolled up his sleeve. The arm was soaked, and bruises like mud had formed there-- hand prints.
For a long time, no one spoke. Night was approaching, forcing its way through the windows until the fire glowed with more power than the stars.
"The nixie will never leave her pond," Old Seth advised softly. "Just don't let the lad near there."
There it was. The solution.
But the man couldn't forget the face he had seen.
And, near the old mill, the pond rippled without a breeze.