Before the chapel, before the bell, before the first name was written in blood, there was only fog.
It came not with storm or sound, but like forgetting. Slow. Soft. Final. It rolled in over the hills and swallowed the world. Trees died with their roots in the air. Rivers turned to sludge. Birds lost the sky. And people—those who had names once—wandered into the grey and did not return.
The Hollow was not always a place.
Once, it was a moment. A crack in the world where silence grew teeth.
They came running from all directions—those who had survived the thinning. No maps guided them. No road was the same when looked at twice. They fled on foot, in wagons, with nothing but smoke on their heels. Where the fog had passed, nothing grew. Where it lingered, things grew that should not.
The survivors did not speak of what they saw.
Only that they came to a valley, ringed by hills, where the fog paused. Not out of mercy.
But hunger.
And waiting.
They called the place Eldhollow.
They did not carve the name in stone. They did not mark it on any map. To name it too loudly was to call the fog back. So it remained a place of whispers, of glances over shoulders, of children born with silence in their blood.
The village was built by trembling hands. Thatch roofs, crooked fences, firepits that never quite warmed the bones. They planted crops in soil that shivered. They sang old songs with broken verses. They left offerings on the thresholds—bread, bones, teeth.
But still, the fog circled.
Each night it came a little closer. It coiled at the edge of the fields like a thing about to strike. Livestock were found dead, eyes gone, tongues turned to stone. Women woke screaming of mouths in the earth. A boy was taken from his bed and found three days later, hollowed out and filled with leaves.
And then the silence grew personal.
A man who had once been a priest spoke out against it. Called it superstition. He walked into the fog with fire in hand.
His fire returned.
He did not.
The villagers gathered. All of them. They lit torches that did nothing to warm. And they begged the air for mercy.
It answered.
Not with words.
But with invitation.
It was the elder, Mirren, who first spoke the terms. She was blind in both eyes, her face a map of old wounds. She stood at the edge of the fog and whispered:
"Will you take one of us, if the rest may stay?"
No voice replied.
But the fog pulled back.
Not far.
Just enough to make room for a grave.
No one knows who was first.
Some say it was a child born with no breath, given as an offering. Others whisper it was a man who had begun to change, whose shadow had no echo, whose teeth had grown too long.
The truth is lost.
Because they chose to lose it.
The Hollow thrives not just on death—but on forgetting.
What remained was the Pact: once every ten years, a name would be chosen. No explanation. No protest. The chosen would be given to the earth, buried beneath the hill beyond the village. Salt and stone would seal the soil. And the fog would stay back.
For a while.
They called it the Tithe.
Not because they gave willingly.
But because something older demanded it.
The chapel came after.
It was built atop the hill where the first body was laid, where the Pact had been made. The villagers dragged stones from the river and bones from the earth. They carved no crosses. They painted no icons. Just a bell tower, tall and crooked, and an altar made of petrified root.
The bell was never meant to ring.
Not by hand. Not by wind.
It would ring only when the Pact came due. Once every ten years, without fail. A single, shuddering sound like the world exhaling through old wood.
And always, always, the page in the ledger would darken.
A name written in red.
The Tithe.
Buried before sundown.
No prayer. No song.
Just a grave and silence.
Generations passed.
The fog remained.
It did not recede.
It did not attack.
It waited.
And the villagers obeyed.
Because they knew—when the bell chimed, the earth had spoken.
And those who spoke back were never heard again.
Some questioned. Quietly. Behind doors.
Why one child every decade? Why salt and stone? Why a bell that rings without touch? Who had made the Pact, and who keeps it?
But questions are a kind of light.
And light draws the dark.
So the questions stopped.
Because the roots limerc
Always.
Only one rule remained above all:
Never forget.
Because to forget the Tithe is to forget the terms.
And if the terms are forgotten...
...so is mercy