The village nestled in the vale below Hollow End was a patchwork of slanted roofs and crooked chimneys, choked in the bones of morning fog. Smoke bled slowly from stone hearths, curling like incense above rooftops that had long grown weary of the wind. A narrow dirt road mud-worn and veined with cart tracks cut through the center of the hamlet like an old scar.

Gareth stepped into this muted world at dawn, cloak rustling faintly behind him. His boots pressed into damp earth, stirring the breath of moss and clay. The sky above hung like bruised parchment washed in the cold violet of twilight's last breath and the sun, veiled behind clouds, did not rise so much as it merely appeared… watching.

Shutters creaked shut as he passed.

A dog whined behind a gate, its body trembling with an instinct its owner could not explain. Children were pulled back by their mothers, muttering prayers that bore fragments of both scripture and superstition.

He approached the village square, where a lone chapel sat crookedly near an empty well. Its bell was rusted to silence.

A statue of Saint Barachiel stood headless in the garden, his sword shattered at the feet of weeds. The church bore strange burn marks long healed but never forgotten.

A man in a long brown coat eyes shadowed under a wide hat leaned on his cane near the cobbler’s post.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, without looking up.

Gareth paused. “Then where should I be?”

The man’s knuckles tightened over the cane. “The house. It remembers.”

Another, an elderly woman stirring ash outside her threshold, spoke without turning. “They say it breathes in its sleep. That it hears your voice… even in your mind.”

Gareth offered no reply. He only watched. The fog thickened. A crow descended onto the chapel’s steeple, its cry a dry rasp as if something had climbed inside it and forgotten how to sing.

Whispers coiled around Gareth like smoke.

They spoke of a priest who vanished after entering Hollow End in the year 1723, his Bible found in the woods pages blackened, waterlogged, and scribbled over with sigils no language could name the names

Of midwives who bled dry beneath the full moon, their mouths stuffed with feathers and teeth.

Of voices in the cellar, saying prayers that twisted like thorned vines through the skull.

And in every tale, the name of the house was never spoken. It was simply the hollow not because it was empty, but because something vast and ancient once carved itself into the land, and left that wound behind.

A thin man, a butcher with one dead eye, finally met Gareth’s gaze.

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“They buried it,” he whispered. “Whatever it was. Under the house. With rites not found in your Bibles or your grimoires.”

Gareth turned away, his jaw set but not in defiance. In hunger. In ache. There was knowledge here, forbidden and whispering behind the veil. And grief had long stripped him of fear.

As he returned to the path toward Hollow End, the wind stirred again soft and sour, like breath from an unseen maw. Behind him, the chapel doors moaned open slightly, though no one stood there. The fog deepened.

Back at the rusted gate, the sigils on the iron had begun to shimmer faintly in the morning light, as though warmed by his return.

He stepped through them, unafraid.

And beneath the earth, something began to stir.

The villagers spoke little during the day and nothing at all come dusk.

Cobbled streets ran narrow, winding between houses made of sun-warped timber and stones blackened by time. Shutters rarely opened. Children were kept indoors once the bells tolled seven. And somewhere between folklore and fear, Hollow End its edge like a scar on the map was never spoken of by name. They called it The Far Hold, or simply that place beyond the ash trees.

Their market was modest, a cluster of leaning stalls beside the churchyard, where merchants sold dried herbs, goat cheese, and candles dipped with salt and ash. But tucked among common goods were other things hand-wrapped talismans in black string, dried bones painted with ochre, and jars that held murky oils said to burn away spirits.

No one admitted to buying them.

No one admitted to needing them.

The priest, Father Merek, a gaunt man with ink-blotted fingers and a crucifix carved from ironwood, never dared preach past dusk. His sermons ended early. The chapel’s bell tower no longer rang at midnight, not since the blood moon of 1819, when it tolled thirteen times and the ground beneath the graveyard cracked open like a blister.

On the village’s northern fringe stood a watermill, its wheel stilled by rot. Near it, one old woman, blind in one eye, wandered at twilight, muttering old Latin prayers and clenching a rosary of teeth. They called her Mirra the Ash-Mother. Some claimed she once sealed a demon in the cellar of Hollow End. Others said she’d lost her sons to it. Either way, no one stopped her.

And still, through all the silence, the people watched the house.

Not openly. Not together.

But from cracked windows and behind sagging curtains, they eyed that rusted gate like it might speak.

Some said they heard it groan in the night.

Others swore that the scent of burnt myrrh and old blood would rise with the fog when no one stood near.

Fewer still whispered about dreams shared dreams of ash raining down and names being spoken backwards in the dark.

On the first Friday of every month, a circle was drawn near the well. Salt, rosemary, and charcoal were scattered across it, and the villagers avoided stepping over its mark. They called it the Binding. No one explained what it bound.

All they knew was this:

Every stranger that had entered the Hollow End house never stayed more than a season.

But this time, one had come not to visit... but to live.

And he had not asked a single question.

The Man Who Crossed the gate 

The next morning after the Binding, the fog had not lifted.

It clung to the crooked rooftops and slithered through the hedgerows like a veil of old breath. The village of Durn Hollow was half-asleep, but the crows were already perched like judges on the chapel spire still as gargoyles, watching.

And down the gravel path that no one used, past the ash trees where grass would not grow, came a man draped in a black coat its edges dusted from travel, its seams worn but precise. He walked with the silence of someone who had long since stopped listening for kindness.

Gareth Lorne.

His boots whispered against the dirt as he approached the house known only as Hollow End.

He carried no servant, no cart, only a single leather satchel strapped to his back, marked faintly with a burnt sigil a circle enclosed in thorns. A cane, carved from bone-white oak, hung from his gloved fingers though he did not limp. Around his neck, beneath the collar of his coat, glinted a charm old, twisted, metallic etched with indecipherable scripture that glimmered only when it caught the foglight.

As he neared the gate, the villagers who watched from their windows withdrew, one by one.

The iron gate of Hollow End stood crooked on its hinges. Rust laced its bars like old blood turned to dust. Strange symbols older than Latin, older than any living tongue were carved into the posts. Some had been chipped away by time, but others bled faintly beneath the surface, as though the metal still remembered what had been spoken over it.

The gate groaned as Gareth pushed it open. Not in protest… but in recognition.

He paused there, just for a breath, as the morning wind stirred the hem of his coat. Somewhere in the woods beyond the house, a night bird called out of place in daylight, out of rhythm with the hour.

The scent hit him next. A mingling of ash and iron, of something half-buried and wet with rot. It wasn’t strong but it was there, carried by the breeze like a memory refusing to be forgotten.

The house itself was no mansion, no sprawling haunted estate. It was a modest two-story structure with stone walls mottled by moss, and wooden shutters that sagged but still clung to their frames. Ivy crawled up one side, and a chimney belched faint trails of smoke as though the house had known he was coming and lit itself in preparation.

Gareth stepped forward.

The wind shifted. And for just a moment, he thought he heard something beneath it a voice. Not loud, not clear. But there.

A woman’s voice, perhaps. Or a child. A whisper carried through the leaves like breath over a keyhole.

He said nothing. He only smiled faintly. The kind of smile men wear when they see an omen and choose to walk toward it.

He had studied in Prague. Fought shadows in Kraków. Held the last page of the Apocryphon of Asherah in his bare hands.

And now, he had come here.

Not to banish what dwelled inside this house. But to meet it.