Dancing the whole night through, laughing and accepting any drink handed to her. Her lips were sweet with mead, with the taste of sugary confections she couldn't name. Her feet ached as the sky started to lighten, as the sun started rising over the horizon.
The party seemed to vanish leaving her in a clearing, a ring of red and white toadstools surrounding her. Head spinning slightly from too much drink, from too much dancing and music that seemed to flow through her bones, she walked back to the path she'd been told never to venture from, a bit of advice she hadn't heeded that night, a bit of advice she had ignored. The village was different, larger, stranger. People looked at her out of the corners of their eyes, making her face flush as she tried to find her home, tried to find anyone who remembered her.
Decades had passed. She'd danced for decades in the clearing. Now, there was no one left who remembered her, remembered a girl they'd all decided had died, a girl with nothing left to her name save the tatters of silken strands gifted to her by one of her dance partners.
With those, she bartered, with those, she was finally welcomed to a small farm on the edge of the village, a farm where odd things happening, a dead girl returning, weren't the strangest things the farmer and his daughter had encountered. She worked hard, calluses forming on her hands. Her skin reddened in the sun, browning as the burn resided.
The farmer's daughter by her side, she learned everything she could, and when that same girl kissed her lips, she realized even if the world she knew was gone, she'd finally found herself someone to love, finally found a place she belonged.