They arrived at Marrow Hollow just after dusk, when the last light of day had bled out across the sky like a bruised halo.

  The trees here didn’t grow — they brooded. Gnarled trunks twisted inward, branches like withered hands clawing at one another as though ashamed of what they’d seen. The wind didn't whistle or rush. It whispered — dry and secretive, threading between gravestones cracked and sunken with age. Moss grew thick on everything, not a soft green, but a dead, pewter-gray — as if even lichen feared to thrive here.

  The path to the chapel was overgrown, but never truly lost. Declan had the uneasy sense that no matter where he stepped, the Hollow wanted him to reach the heart of it.

  "This place feels... wrong," he muttered, eyes scanning the warped trees and uneven mounds beneath them.

  Willow said nothing at first. Her face was unreadable in the dying light, but her body was tense — shoulders set, jaw clenched. She moved with purpose, but not confidence.

  "It should," she said eventually. "This is where the veil has thinned for centuries. Long before the Kings Horn. Before Hellen. Before this land had names."

  Ahead, the chapel stood like a monument to forgetting. Its steeple leaned like a snapped bone, and stained-glass windows stared out like blind eyes, their colors long faded to shadow. The door was ajar, swollen with damp and rimmed in rust. Carvings in the lintel above had once been holy — now they were gouged, marred into strange, inverted runes that made Declan’s vision blur if he looked too long.

  “Tell me that’s not blood,” he whispered, gesturing toward the symbols.

  “It’s not,” Willow said. “But it remembers blood.”

  Declan didn’t ask what she meant.

  Inside, the air was stale, heavy with the scent of mildew and the lingering ghost of incense — though the building had been abandoned for decades. Moonlight spilled through the broken windows in uneven bars, cutting the space into shifting prisms of gloom.

  Beneath the pulpit, a trapdoor waited — not hidden, but reverently displayed. A rusted iron ring sat in its center like an invitation. Willow crossed the warped floor without hesitation and pulled it open with a low groan of ancient wood.

  “Help me bring the components down. We need to begin the lens before the veil frays again.”

  They descended into the earth, candles flickering to life one by one along the circular stone stairwell — not by hand, but by proximity. Declan’s skin prickled with every step, as if the Hollow were watching, recognizing something in him he hadn’t yet named.

  The ritual chamber below was older than the chapel above — the walls carved with script that didn’t belong to any modern tongue. Bones were embedded in the mortar. Not arranged. Not honored. Just present, like sediment.

  Willow knelt at the center, unwrapping a silk bundle of tools: a silver bowl etched with moons and eyes, a waxed cord of woven hair and copper, a flat black stone that looked too smooth to be carved. Her fingers moved with the precision of someone preparing surgery.

  Declan helped where he could — lighting candles, aligning sigils with chalk. But even as he worked, his thoughts kept returning to the warehouse… to the thing that had reached across the veil.

  “How will this help us see what they’re planning?” he asked, voice low.

  Willow pressed the cord into the soil at four points, forming a square around the circle. “It won’t show us plans. It will show us resonance. The echoes of their preparations. Where energy is being pulled. Who is anchoring the next ritual. And when.”

  Declan watched as she placed the black stone into the silver bowl and poured in a dark liquid — not blood, but something thicker. It shimmered like oil, reflecting light in all the wrong ways.

  “And if they’re watching back?”

  Willow met his eyes. “Then we’ll know that, too.”

  She began to chant — not in Latin, not in any recognizable tongue, but in a language that made Declan’s skin crawl with its rhythm. The shadows in the corners of the chamber seemed to stretch, thickening like tar. The candle flames bent inward instead of out.

  And then… the bowl shimmered.

  Shapes rippled across the surface of the liquid. A spiral. A crown. A face half-swallowed in shadow — Braevers again — mouth moving in voiceless command. Then others: a woman with hair like coiled wire, a man whose eyes were burned shut, a young acolyte with blood smeared beneath each eye like warpaint.

  And finally — a place.

  The map formed in liquid reflection, bending space and scale: a marsh east of town, choked with cattails and bone-willow. Old stories called it Witch’s Hollow. Abandoned since the 1800s. Now — brimming with energy.

  Willow gasped.

  “The final tether,” she whispered. “They’re going to birth it there.”

  The bowl went dark.

  Declan stood slowly, heart pounding. “Then we have to stop them. Before the veil gives way.”

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  Willow rose beside him, her face pale with resolve. “Yes,” she said. “But this time… we won’t wait for them to begin.”

  The marshes of Witch’s Hollow breathed with rot and memory.

  It was just past midnight when Declan and Willow reached the edge of the cattail-choked lowlands, moonlight silvering the stagnant pools that stretched out before them like glass eyes turned upward toward an uncaring sky. The air was heavy with the stench of decay — sweet and wet, like a wound gone soft with infection.

  They approached from the south, the long-forgotten logging road now a corridor of brambles and skeletal brush. Declan carried a knapsack of hastily assembled warding tools: iron nails, coarse salt, copper wire, and river stones inked with glyphs. Willow held a small wooden box close to her chest, carved with sigils that pulsed faintly beneath her fingers. Inside was what she called the counter-heart — a wardstone designed to destabilize and collapse ritual sites before they reached full resonance.

  "How long do we have?" Declan whispered, ducking beneath a dead branch as they neared the clearing.

  Willow knelt, pressing her palm to the damp ground. Her eyes fluttered closed. “Not long. The soil here hums. They’ve been feeding this place for weeks.”

  The clearing came into view like a stage unveiled — circular, sunken slightly below the rest of the marsh, ringed by blackened willow trees twisted into unnatural arcs. In the center: a flat altar stone, pitted with age, vines writhing around its base like serpents mid-slumber. The sigils carved into it glowed faintly — that same cursed ochre-orange from the ironworks.

  But the cultists hadn’t yet arrived.

  Declan moved quickly, planting wards at four corners of the clearing. Salt spirals. Hammered nails at the roots of the trees. Iron pins pressed into the altar’s cracks. Willow circled the stone three times, chanting low, her box clutched tight.

  When she finally pried the lid open, the wardstone inside shimmered like moonlight trapped beneath glass.

  “This will invert the ley flow,” she said. “Break the tether before it forms. No anchor, no summoning. Just silence.”

  “Then let’s do it,” Declan said.

  Willow stepped forward and placed the stone at the center of the altar.

  The reaction was immediate.

  The wind stopped.

  The frogs, the insects, the distant screech owls — all silenced, as if the marsh had been sealed in glass.

  And then — the ground shuddered.

  Not violently. Not yet. But deep. Wrong. As if something vast had shifted just beneath the surface.

  Willow’s eyes widened in horror. “No… something’s still channeling through. Something's already inside—”

  The altar cracked. A jagged seam split the stone down the middle, vomiting out a jet of cold mist that smelled like old graves and scorched hair.

  The air split open with a sound like tearing silk — wet silk — and light bled upward from beneath the stone, burning through their ward-lines like dry leaves.

  Declan stumbled back. “Willow, what’s happening?”

  “We were too late,” she whispered, voice trembling. “The counter-heart didn’t cancel the ritual. It completed it. We weren’t stopping the tether — we were the tether!”

  The clearing howled.

  A deafening, keening wail erupted from beneath the altar, shaking the trees, the sky, the marrow in their bones. The earth fractured outward, glowing veins splitting across the marsh in a spiderweb of ruin.

  And from the center — from the cracked altar now floating inches above the earth — the rift opened.

  It wasn't a hole. It wasn't even absence. It was wrongness — a tear in the fabric of space and spirit, yawning wide with the slow inevitability of an eye forced open. Through it came a pressure, a roar, a presence that saw everything — knew everything — and hated all it saw.

  Willow screamed a ward into the air, flinging salt toward the opening.

  It vanished before it hit the ground.

  Declan grabbed her wrist, pulling her backward as the trees began to bleed — sap running red, leaves shriveling and falling in unnatural spirals.

  "RUN!" he shouted.

  They didn’t argue.

  They tore through the marsh, stumbling, choking on the sour air. Behind them, the altar exploded in a pillar of violet fire, and the rift exhaled — not wind, but memory. Thousands of voices poured out, wailing, whispering, begging, blaming.

  The veil had been torn.

  Not just opened — wounded.

  Declan didn’t stop until they collapsed on the hill above the treeline, chests heaving, blood pounding in their skulls.

  Below them, Witch’s Hollow glowed — not with fire, but with awareness.

  The Hollow-born had not arrived.

  But the door was open now.

  And something was watching.

  The basement of the old dry goods store reeked of mildew and dust, but tonight it served as sanctuary.

  Declan sat on a wooden crate, his shirt torn and damp with marsh water, his hands wrapped in gauze that Willow had bound hastily while they ran. Across from him, Willow stood by a low table, her face pale in the glow of a single gas lantern. The silence between them was taut — not of disagreement, but of mutual dread.

  The others had just arrived.

  Kaelen, the former seminary student turned occult historian, lingered by the stairwell, rubbing a worn brass coin between his fingers. Nadine Wexley, Declan’s editor at the Hellen Gazette, paced beside the stacked crates, her mouth pressed into a thin line — too seasoned to scream, too furious to sit still. And Tobias Green, once the town’s chief librarian, now quietly infamous for the grim collection hidden in the sealed-off annex, leaned heavily on a cane carved with crescent motifs.

  “You tore open a rift,” Nadine said flatly.

  Declan’s jaw tensed. “We thought we were stopping the ritual. We didn’t know—”

  “You never know,” she snapped, cutting him off. “That’s the problem. Every time someone thinks they’re saving this town, something older comes crawling through the cracks.”

  Kaelen stepped in, voice calm but firm. “She’s right. But the damage is done. The question now is: how do we close it before something finishes coming through?”

  Willow finally looked up. “We can’t close it from this side.”

  The room went still.

  Kaelen frowned. “Explain.”

  Willow stepped forward, her voice even but hollow. “The rift at Witch’s Hollow wasn’t just a summoning site. It was a mirror. What we opened isn’t a doorway in the sense you’re thinking. It’s a sympathetic wound — a reflection of everything buried beneath Hellen. It bleeds into us, and we bleed into it. The Kings Horn didn’t just want to bring something through. They wanted to bind it to the town itself.”

  Declan’s voice was rough. “And now the binding’s half-finished.”

  Tobias nodded slowly. “So you’d need a reflection to close a reflection. A ritual in opposition. Something equal… and opposite.”

  Willow met his eyes. “Yes. A severance ritual. Not to banish — to separate. Permanently.”

  Kaelen exhaled through his nose. “You’re talking about an unbinding rite. Pre-split Ecclesiarchic magic. That’s nearly extinct.”

  Nadine crossed her arms. “And dangerous. If the anchor collapses mid-working, the rift could widen.”

  Declan leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Then we do it right. What do we need?”

  Willow ticked the list off on her fingers:

  “Three things.

  First — a new anchor point, outside the corrupted lines. We can’t work at Witch’s Hollow. The soil there’s soaked with too much grief.

  Second — something personal from the original binder. Someone who helped open the rift.

  And third…” Her voice faltered. “We need a willing vessel.”

  Silence.

  “A vessel?” Nadine echoed warily.

  “A living soul to carry the rift’s echo — even if only briefly — during the severing. It’ll act as a container, a lightning rod. The pain will be… immense. And if it fails—”

  Declan rose slowly.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Willow looked at him, stunned. “Declan—”

  “I was there when it opened. I kicked the hornet’s nest. I’ve got the footage. The blood. The fear. The rift already knows my name.” His voice grew steady, stronger with each word. “So we use me.”

  Tobias gave a small nod. “Then we’ll need to act soon. Before the Kings Horn realizes what we’re planning.”

  Nadine turned toward the stairs, voice tight with purpose. “I’ll lock down the Gazette. We’ll run a distraction — leak a rumor about a protest near city hall. Draw attention. Give you a few hours of quiet.”

  Kaelen began flipping through a worn journal already marked with dozens of tags. “I’ll locate a neutral site for the ritual. There’s a chapel ruin north of the old quarry. Untouched. Pure.”

  Willow turned back to Declan, her expression unreadable. “This will change you. The rift leaves residue.”

  He met her gaze without flinching. “Then let it.”