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The Hollows

A tale from the Forbidden Lands

I. The Smell of It

They smelled it before they saw it clearly.

Wood smoke first, sharp and familiar. Then something earthier — dung, wet straw, the warm rot of a pigsty in morning sun. It was the smell of people living in one place for a very long time, and it reached all four of them at roughly the same moment, and none of them said a word about it, because there was nothing to say. They had grown up with that smell. They simply thought, until now, that it belonged to them as much as to anyone.

The Hollows sat in a shallow bowl of land where the river bent south, and from the ridge where they stood it spread out below them in the early morning light — rooftops of thatch and wood tile, a crumbling stone wall that ringed the settlement in a ragged circle, guard towers at intervals along the perimeter, their timbers grey and weather-split but still standing. A river ran through the center of it. Outside the walls, fields had been turned for spring planting, and a farmer moved along a furrow in a wide-brimmed hat while two boys trailed behind him, bending and rising in the rhythm of work that does not change.

To the northwest of the town, a hill rose abruptly from the flat land — too abrupt, too deliberate in its shape to feel entirely natural. The hill was mountain-like, dominating the village’s landscape. Its lower slopes were green, but the higher it climbed, the more the green gave way to bare rock and scrub, as if something about the summit resisted life. At its top, just visible, twelve dark pillars stood in a circle around something none of them could yet make out. The hill dominated the view not by beauty but by presence, by the sense that they were watching back.

Sten stood at the edge of the ridge and looked at all of it without moving. He noted the gates — east and south. The gaps in the wall where the stone had crumbled to knee height. The dock on the south bank with its flatboats tied up and its barrels stacked in rows. The mill on the north bank with its wheel turning. The people: the farmer in the field, a woman crossing the bridge with her husband and a child pressed close to her side, two men at the dock carrying a barrel between them.

He noted all of it and said nothing, because noting things and saying them were two entirely different actions at entirely different costs.

Osric stood beside him with the stillness of a man whose imagination had been working on this moment for years and found, now that it was here, that it was both less and more than expected. Less dramatic. More real. The town was ordinary — the same kind of walls, the same kind of rooftops, the same smoke from the same kind of fires — and yet full of people he had never seen and could not name, people who had been alive this whole time, living their ordinary lives, and none of them had ever known that Osric existed. That seemed, for reasons he could not immediately account for, remarkable.

Aldric looked at the Hollows with the open attention of someone who has not yet decided what to think. He was young enough that the sight did not carry the weight it carried for the older men. There were people here. They had things he did not know. He was curious, the way a craftsman is curious, practically, without sentimentality, wanting to see how they did things.

Vasilla had climbed a stone that gave her an extra foot of height and was shading her eyes with her hand, scanning the town with the focused pleasure of someone who had gotten exactly what they came for.

The voice, when it came, was loud enough that all four of them turned at once.

“You four look lost.”

A man in his early forties was walking along the riverbank a hundred yards to their south, heading toward town. He carried a freshly killed buck across his shoulders by the front and hind quarters, and behind him came two teenage boys stringing dead rabbits from their fists. He was broad-shouldered and straight-backed, wearing something like a scarf thrown over his coat, and at his hip was a sword. One of the boys carried his longbow — a longbow that would have required his particular set of shoulders to draw. He did not break stride as he called up to them.

“Welcome to the Hollows. Keep that child close until the stink of a stranger wears off. The people here can be a funny lot.”

He nodded once, not unfriendly, not especially interested, and kept walking.

Sten looked at Vasilla. Vasilla looked back at him.

“I don’t think they’ve seen many halflings,” Sten said.

“I gathered that,” Vasilla said. “I won’t take it personally.”

Osric raised his voice toward the retreating figure. “Is it all right if we follow you in?”

“I don’t expect you to catch up,” the man called back, without turning his head. “But yeah, come on in.”

He rounded toward the wall and did not look back again.

* * *

II. The Wall and the Three Skulls

The wall, up close, was less a wall than a suggestion of one.

Stone, old enough that the mortar had long since given up, the blocks settled into their own arrangements over the centuries. Rosebushes had colonized most of its length, growing thick and tangled over the face of it so that in places you could not tell where the roses ended, and the wall began. The hunter and his boys found a section that came to no higher than two and a half feet and stepped over it without pausing, the buck still riding the man’s shoulders. The four of them found the same gap and crossed it one by one. Vasilla accepted Aldric’s hand without complaint or thanks, which was, in its way, a kind of grace.

On the other side, the Hollows received them with the indifference of a place that had seen enough to stop being startled. A woman looked out of a shuttered window, and the moment any of them met her eyes, the shutters closed. A family crossing the bridge drew their child closer as they passed — not with hostility but with the instinctive wariness of people who had learned to keep the unfamiliar at arm’s length until it proved otherwise. No one ran. No one challenged them. It was, Osric supposed, better than they had any right to expect.

He chose not to say that aloud, on the grounds that it would make the ambush sound like a fair sample.

The buildings were familiar with their construction, but in different stages of attention. Some houses are well-kept, others have the look of places where repairs had been deferred one season too many until the deferral had become the condition. The town had survived three centuries, and survival was not the same thing as flourishing.

Across the river, a mill sat on the south bank with its wheel turning; a sign above it reads “Three Skulls”. Beside it, a little farther east, a second building faced the river with a dock running out over the water, flatboats tied at the pilings, barrels stacked in rows. As they watched, two men came out carrying a barrel between them, set it down, and went back inside.

“Dock and boats,” Aldric said. “There must be another settlement downriver.”

“More people,” Vasilla said.

“More strangers,” Sten said.

The sign on the second building read Three Skulls Tavern. They crossed the bridge and went in.

The door on the tavern had a hand-painted sign nailed to it. “No Dwarves!” None of them had ever met a dwarf — the tales existed, short and broad and skilled in metal, things of legend but not dragon-legend, the kind you believed had existed even if you had never seen one. Sten gestured for Vasilla to hang back, in case the distinction between halfling and dwarf was not yet established on this side of the river. Then he rang the bell, knocked, and the door swung open.

The interior was long and low-ceilinged, with a bar along the left wall, tables arranged down the center, and a fire pit where a pig was turning on a spit, the fat running off it and hissing in the coals. The smell of it was extraordinary. Two men sat at the bar, and a few others occupied tables, all of them turning briefly at the sound of the door and then returning to their business with the specific incuriosity of people who have made a policy of it.

Behind the bar stood a man who stopped Aldric mid-step. Short, broad-shouldered, wide-faced, with the kind of build that suggested a lifetime of lifting things heavier than most people ever touched. Clean-shaven. Eyes that moved to each of them in quick succession and then settled with a professional stillness. Aldric had read enough descriptions of dwarves to have formed a picture, and this man matched that picture closely enough to produce a moment of genuine uncertainty.

The man behind the bar caught the look.

“Come in, strangers,” he said, and gestured them forward. His gaze moved to Vasilla — a measuring look, a dwarf-or-not look — and then he said, “She’s not a dwarf, is she?”

“No, sir,” Vasilla said, stepping forward. “I am not a dwarf. I am a halfling.”

A pause.

“A halfling.” He considered this. “Didn’t know if halflings were real.”

“I assure you I am.”

Something shifted in his face — not warmth exactly, but the door to warmth cracking open. He said his name was Yawin — Brewmaster Yawin, said as one word, as though the title had long since fused with the name — and he ran the Three Skulls and brewed its beer and regarded both as serious vocations. He set four cups on the bar before any of them had asked, pulled the tap on a large cask, and filled each one with a care that a man gives to something he has worked hard to get right.

“First round is on Yawin,” he said. “You’re from out of town.”

“Are we that obvious?” Osric said.

“Everything about you is,” Yawin said, without malice.

Sten lifted his cup and smelled it before he drank — habit, the same care he gave to anything he put in his body. It smelled like beer the way good beer smells, which is to say it smelled like almost nothing else. He drank. It was the finest thing he had tasted in two days of travel, and possibly the finest beer he had ever had, though he acknowledged his basis for comparison was thin. He drank again and said nothing, which was as close to a compliment as Yawin was likely to get from him.

He brought the pig out, and they ate, and while they ate, he talked. The mist had been gone a year and a half here — a few months longer than for Oakenheart. Long enough to send people out and get some of them back. Long enough to start thinking about what it would mean to trade. He had the dock ready, the boats built, the beer that would sell itself. The only thing standing between him and commerce was the woman who ran the town.

“Who charges taxes?” Osric asked.

“The old witch that runs the town,” Yawin said. He set down his cup. “Miss Palmer.”

He said the name the way people say the name of a storm — not with fear exactly, but with careful neutrality that means fear is somewhere underneath. She would not let trade happen until she controlled its terms, and her terms were not ones Yawin was willing to meet. He said he planned to deal with her. He said it once without clarifying, and the conversation moved on.

Vasilla, who had been watching the room warm to her since she sat down, asked whether Yawin might want entertainment. He told her that if Hollows needed anything, it was cheering up and offered to cover their food and drink in exchange for a few songs that night. She looked at the others with the poorly concealed delight of someone who had been waiting for exactly this invitation, and agreed before anyone could object.

She walked into the center of the room and began to play, and the Three Skulls, which had been occupying itself with the low-grade inertia of an afternoon without much to occupy it, stopped and listened. Heads turned. Chairs shifted. Yawin leaned back against the bar and nodded. Sten, Osric, and Aldric sat with their ale and the complimentary pork and found that they were, despite everything, fine with this.

* * *

III. The Bells

They noticed the bells on the second pass through town.

Walking north across the bridge with the afternoon tilting toward evening, Osric saw them: iron bells, one to a building, mounted beside every door without exception — in the residential lanes, on the commercial buildings, on the fence posts at the edges of property lines. Small, unornamented, hung on simple brackets. Not decorative. Functional.

He had taken them for doorbells.

The town square opened before them — a broad space with a well at its center, a gazebo-chapel to one side, and to the north a two-story half-timbered building with painted lanterns on its sign. The sign read Dead Man’s Hand. Below that, in fresher paint, the word Inn.

“Charming naming convention,” Vasilla said, looking up at it.

“Three Skulls Tavern, Dead Man’s Hand Inn,” Osric agreed. “I wonder if there’s a theme.”

To the northeast, visible over the rooftops, the old cemetery spread away under the shadow of the hill — overgrown, untended, its markers lost under decades of unchecked growth. And above it, at the crest of the strange, spiked hill, the twelve dark pillars in their circle. From here, they could see the obelisk at the center, crumbling but distinct.

The innkeeper’s name was Olm. He was a large man in all dimensions, with a shaved head and a towel over his shoulder and an apron that had seen considerable use, and he waved them in with the practiced hospitality of someone who had recently decided to be in the hospitality business and was not entirely certain how much traffic to expect. The common room smelled of fresh paint and pork. The rooms were available. The dormitory cost three coppers a person. Aldric slid a silver across the bar and received seven copper coins from a man who looked at each coin as though confirming it was real.

When Osric asked about the bells, Olm explained with the easy nonchalance of a man describing the weather. The dead walked at night. Had done so as long as anyone could remember. The bells were the mechanism by which the living and the dead maintained their arrangement: ring the bell, say the phrase — “I am here to walk in peace with the dead” — and they would leave you alone. Mostly. There were pranksters, he added, by which he meant the dead, who occasionally took an interest regardless. The thing to do was ignore them and keep walking.

“If you are inside,” he said, “you are with the living, and you are fine. Outside at night is their territory.”

A silence settled over the table.

“The dead walk,” Aldric said, slowly.

“They do,” said Olm, in the tone of a man confirming that yes, it does tend to rain in spring.

He told them other things: the spires on the hilltop had not been visited in two generations; the chapel served the town’s religious needs; the best provisions could be had from Vik the gamekeeper, whose building was just across the square. If they wanted Miss Palmer, she would find them — he said her name with the same weighted neutrality as Yawin had, from which the four of them drew their own conclusions.

He also asked Vasilla, with careful diplomatic uncertainty, if she was a child.

“No, sir,” she said. “I am a halfling.”

He nodded, reassessing. Then he leaned across the bar and told her, quietly, to make it very clear to the man at the Three Skulls that she was not a dwarf. Before going inside. To preface it.

“We have met Master Yawin,” she said.

“Then you know,” he said. “And do not call him a dwarf. He is one, but do not call him one.”

* * *

IV. The Hill

It was five hours before dark, and the hill had been watching them since they arrived.

That was not a rational way to describe a geological formation and its cluster of stone pillars, and none of them said it that way. The absence of a prohibition is a kind of invitation in a place where prohibitions seemed to be the primary mode of communication.

The path was barely a path — a memory of one, overgrown and indistinct, the maintained world of the Hollows stopping abruptly at its foot as though by agreement. Five or ten feet up, the grass gave way to bare rock and did not return. Nothing grew on the upper slope. No vines, no moss, no shrubs finding purchase in the cracks. The twelve pillars that rose above as they climbed were uncarved and unmarked, natural-looking yet unmistakably deliberate, the way something can look as if it grew there while still being clearly placed.

Aldric reached the top first and walked the circle slowly. The obelisk at the center was weathered but still legible. When he brushed away the dirt from its face, the symbol beneath was clear — a worm consuming its own tail, the uroboros, the mark of the god Worm, ancient and patient, the deity of cycles, the earth, and what the earth eventually received.

Osric recognized it. He stood looking at it for a long moment.

“A shrine,” he said. “An old one. Fallen out of use.”

“Nobody has been up here in two generations,” Aldric said. “But someone keeps the path clear enough to climb.”

The woman appeared on the path before any of them heard her — older, moving with the deliberate economy of someone who knows exactly how much effort she has left. She carried a cane. She was already talking before she reached the top.

“Get away from that. Who are you and what are you doing up here?”

They began to comply and explain simultaneously. She was not interested in explanations. The shrine was not for them. The hill was not for them. If they were staying in the Hollows, they could get a room and keep to it, and the rest was none of their concern.

Sten, who had been watching the town below and cataloging exits during this exchange, said nothing. He had been watching her since she appeared. She had not been passing by. She had come up the hill the moment she saw them near the obelisk, moving directly and with purpose, which told him she had been watching the square from somewhere above it. He put that away for later.

They went down. She stood at the top of the path until they were well clear.

“She said it was not for us,” Vasilla said, at the bottom. “Which means it is for someone.”

Nobody disagreed.

In the chapel-gazebo by the well, Aldric found four carved obelisks: the worm, the screaming face that old stories called Wail, the flowing mark of Flow, and a skull he recognized from childhood tales told to keep children indoors — the Night Walker, the thing that came out of the mist for those who wandered. No raven. Not anywhere in the chapel. In a world where Oakenheart had prayed to Raven and Worm for three hundred years, the complete absence of the Raven felt like a statement.

“This town has an obsession with death,” Osric said.

“Given what walks here at night,” Sten said, “that seems reasonable.”

* * *

V. Eland

They spent the remaining afternoon in the dormitory at Dead Man’s Hand, which had eight beds and no other guests.

Aldric worked on Sten’s bow — the nick in the string from the shot days ago, the gear slightly off since. He sat by the window with his tools and his careful hands and fixed it, and when he was done, it was better than it had been. He was good at fixing things. The other gift, the one in his palms that glowed cold in the dark, was still showing him its shape.

The others slept. Vasilla did not sleep — she composed. The Ballad of Sten the Merciless was coming along well: the first verse, a bridge, and something approaching a chorus, with a meter that felt like something moving across open ground. She hummed it quietly and did not share it, because Sten was in the room and some songs were better unveiled at the right moment.

At dusk, they went out — Vasilla to the Three Skulls as agreed with Yawin, Sten, and Osric to escort her and satisfy their collective curiosity about what the night actually looked like. Aldric stayed behind to sleep.

Olm wrote the phrase on a cloth for them and explained that each of them needed to say it individually each time they stepped outside. Osric rang the bell and said it with the gravity of a man performing a ritual he respects, though he does not fully understand. Sten rang it and said it with the expression of a man who hopes this is superstition and suspects it is not. Vasilla looked at the bell, looked at the dark beyond the door, and rang it with the resigned pragmatism of someone who had faced worse indignities.

The night was quiet. No movement, no sound, only distant lamplight in windows and the creak of the Three Skulls sign across the river. They crossed the bridge without incident. Vasilla went in. Sten and Osric stayed on the porch to watch the dark and look at Yawin’s new flatboats, freshly hewn, the dock planking not yet water-stained. A man building toward something.

It was Sten who noticed the figure crossing the bridge.

No lantern. In a town with no streetlamps and a dark sky, the absence of a light was the kind of thing that registered before the mind had time to name why. They moved toward it. The torchlight found it at the south end of the bridge, and Osric, to his credit, did not step back.

The man — what had been a man — walked in workman’s clothes, the kind worn in a mill or a field. The left side of his face was still mostly present. The right was not. What remained on the right was bone and dried tissue, and the particular grey-brown of something that had been in the ground for some time. One hand still had flesh. The other was mostly two finger-bones, the rest presumably still somewhere beneath the cemetery.

It walked past them without acknowledgment, headed for the Three Skulls.

They followed at a respectable distance.

Inside, the thing moved to the bar. The other patrons shifted quietly, opening a space for it the way water opens around a stone — not suddenly, not with drama, just a small continuous adjustment that kept a radius of clear air between the living and whatever this was. Yawin came out from behind the bar with a tankard, set it on the bar in front of the thing, and stepped back.

The thing picked up the tankard with its two-fingered hand and brought it to what remained of its mouth. The ale ran down through the gaps in its face and pooled on the floor around its boots. It set the tankard down. The tankard fell. It turned and walked back out the door.

The room resumed its conversations within twenty seconds.

Sten and Osric came in. Vasilla, who had been playing through all of this with the focused determination of someone who has decided the show goes on regardless of the ontological status of the audience, finished her song and set down the lyre. She looked at Yawin.

Yawin looked back at her with the expression of a man for whom this is simply Tuesday.

“That was Eland,” he said. “Used to own this place. He was the miller before me.” He picked up the fallen tankard and passed it to the girl behind the bar. “Once or twice a month, he comes in. Spills the beer. Doesn’t tip.”

A pause.

“He doesn’t tip,” Osric said.

“Never once,” Yawin confirmed, with genuine grievance.

Vasilla ordered an ale. Sten sat down. Osric looked at the door for a moment, then sat down too.

Outside, somewhere in the dark town, a bell rang once — faint, perfunctory — and then the night went quiet again.

Vasilla played three more songs, and a coin or two found their way into the bread bowl. The fire burned low. By the time they walked back to the Dead Man’s Hand, the streets were empty and still, and the dead, if they were out, were keeping to themselves. The phrases were said at the bell by each of them in turn, and this time none of them treated it as a formality.

* * *

VI. The Mill

In the morning, they went back to Yawin.

They found him on the dock directing the movement of empty barrels, the same work as before, and he waved them toward the mill without breaking his supervision. Inside: the millstone turning, the smell of malted barley mixing with river air, one boy cleaning in the back, whom Yawin sent off to find Sally. He closed the door. He leaned against the grinding stone. He said:

“What would it cost me?”

The proposal was theirs: they would travel east, find whatever settlements lay down the river, make contact, and test appetite for trade. Yawin would provision them. The information they brought back would be worth more than coin.

Yawin listened to all of it. He said the information would be worth a great deal and that he was grateful he would provision them now in good faith. Then he said that none of it helped him. Because the problem was not finding customers. The problem was Miss Palmer.

She taxed everything that moved in and out of the Hollows. Until she was dealt with, no trade meant anything. And by dealt with — he said it quietly, with his back to the door, in a building he owned — he looked at each of them in turn.

The room was quiet for a moment.

“When you say dealt with,” Osric said carefully, “what precisely do you mean?”

Yawin spread his hands. He talked instead about the Rust Brother — a man named Sturkus, who lived two doors down from Palmer and whose allegiance in any conflict over the town’s leadership was unknown. If someone could determine where Sturkus stood, if Sturkus could be brought to back Yawin, then perhaps Palmer could be removed from power without violence. Or with it. He was flexible on the question. Two silver each if Sturkus could be won over. More, if the larger problem was resolved.

“And what are the Rust Brothers?” Aldric asked.

Yawin said the name quietly — Rust, another name for the Raven, or at least that was what the brothers called it. They were an order, old and widespread, who moved through the Forbidden Lands collecting tithes and exercising a kind of influence that was not quite political and not quite religious and entirely effective. Nobody crossed them. The previous Rust Brother here had been a bastard. Sturkus was merely unknowable, which in context was almost a compliment.

Aldric, who had learned at Oakenheart that Rust was another name for the Raven, said nothing. He looked at the grinding stone and thought about orders and names and how things changed over three hundred years, and what it might mean that the Raven’s devotees here called themselves brothers of rust rather than sisters of the sky.

They thanked Yawin for the provisions and said they would consider everything. He walked them to the door and told them the conversation had never happened. They agreed.

* * *

VII. Vik

The gamekeeper’s name was Vik, and they had already met him, without knowing it, on the morning they arrived: the broad-shouldered man with the buck on his shoulders who had told them to come on in without breaking stride.

He was cleaning that same buck when they arrived, working at a table outside his building with the ease of someone who has done this ten thousand times. He acknowledged them with a nod and kept working. The boy Yawin had sent with the tab stood to one side. Vik got what they needed without ceremony.

He was easier to talk to than most people in the Hollows, possibly because he spent most of his time outside it. He answered questions about the surrounding country without obvious suspicion — good hunting in the forest to the north, a settlement of some kind east along the river past the lake, the Hollows sitting at a junction where the river split both south and east, with towns likely along either branch. He had no maps. He had never needed them.

When Osric raised the subject of the town’s politics with the careful phrasing of a man not wanting to plant himself on the wrong side of a fence he doesn’t fully understand, Vik cleaned his knife and was quiet for a moment.

“Palmer wants to keep things as they are,” he said. “She kept them that way through the mist, and she sees no reason to change now. I understand her. Don’t agree with all of it, but I understand it.” He looked up. “Yawin wants to open everything up. I understand him, too. But he should pay his taxes.”

“And Sturkus?” Osric said.

Vik set down the knife. He picked it up again. He went back to work.

“The Rust Brothers have always been here,” he said. “Even before the mist, from what my grandfather said. They come and go. They take their tithe and mostly stay out of things. Sturkus more than most.” He paused. “He had dinner with Palmer last month.”

He left it where it was, and they picked it up and carried it with them.

Walking back through the square toward the eastern gate, provisions restocked, Osric looked at the others. The well sat at the center, the chapel-gazebo to its left, the Dead Man’s Hand to its north. Above everything, the spiked hill with its circled obelisk and its god that nobody had visited in two generations, but somebody was still watching over. Somewhere in the large house to the north, behind recently painted shutters, Miss Palmer had presumably been watching them since they arrived.

“I think,” Osric said, “that we should be on our way.”

“I have been thinking that since yesterday,” Sten said.

Vasilla looked back at the Three Skulls across the river, where Yawin would be starting the day’s work. She thought about Eland crossing the bridge without a lantern, and the ale running through the gaps in his face, and the four gods in the chapel with no Raven among them, and the word Rust and what it might mean that no one here used the other name.

She adjusted the lyre on her back so it would not clank.

They walked east.

Read Chapter 3 HERE