Ashes Beneath Hollowspire - Part 1

The road to Hollowspire twisted like a spine cracked too many times. Fog clung low over the dirt path, thick as breath on glass, curling between ancient trees that stretched like skeletal limbs toward a grey, overcast sky. Each step forward felt like trespass. The woods had long forgotten how to welcome strangers.

Vaelin walked at the head of the trio, boots silent despite the gravel and rot beneath. He moved with the same quiet resolve he always carried, a man made of decisions too heavy to shrug off, his cloak wrapped tightly to blunt the chill. Behind him, Elira adjusted her flame-hued mantle, the ash-thread embroidery catching what little light broke through the trees. Her copper-flecked eyes scanned the path ahead with alertness born from both instinct and arcane sense.

"It’s humming," she murmured under her breath. Her fingers twitched unconsciously, drawing half-formed sigils in the air. "Feel that? Beneath the soil."

Vaelin paused mid-step. He closed his eyes, not to listen, but to feel. He reached inward, not with the Remnant, not anymore, but through the discipline of memory and motion. There it was. A low, rhythmic thrum, not audible but present, like a heartbeat muffled in layers of stone. Familiar, but fractured. It crawled along the nerves like a song remembered in the bones rather than the ears.

"Spellwaltz," he said softly. "Or something trying very hard to echo it."

Tovik Redmire caught up with them, huffing lightly as he crested the incline. The halfling’s cloak was an unholy patchwork of color, riddled with hidden pockets, wine stains, and twin knife hilts stitched into place with mocking precision. He adjusted his scarf with exaggerated flair and offered a grin full of false cheer.

"Either this town has a subterranean orchestra in desperate need of rehearsal," he quipped, "or we’re about to tango with another eldritch ‘don’t-dig-too-deep’ scenario."

Elira chuckled, her breath misting in the cold air. "That would make it… what, the third this season?"

"Fourth," Vaelin corrected with a wry glance. "You’re forgetting the ghost masquerade in Emberstead."

"Ah yes," Tovik said, eyes gleaming. "Can’t forget my award-winning performance as Lord DuMonte’s tragic cousin."

They reached the final bend in the road, where the trees thinned and the landscape opened into a hollowed basin ringed by shale. Hollowspire revealed itself like a secret finally exhaled, an old mining town perched over a yawning scar in the earth. The buildings looked weatherworn and hunched, leaning on one another as though afraid to stand alone. Rusted lanterns dangled from crooked poles. Black smog curled up from short smokestacks like pleading fingers.

In the center of it all stood a single stone watchtower, jutting into the sky like an accusatory finger. It had no banners, no signs of activity, just presence. A reminder. Or perhaps, a warning.

As they entered town, the silence thickened. The people moved, but spoke little. Miners with soot-caked skin watched from doorways. Children sat in the dirt drawing shapes, rough sigils, into the dust with sticks. Shapes Elira recognized. Shapes she shouldn’t be seeing.

Vaelin felt the weight of memory pressing from beneath the town. Something old. Something listening.

At the inn, they registered under assumed identities. Vaelin played the scholar, Elira the cartographer, and Tovik, a gambling cousin with a fondness for pies and trouble. The innkeeper, a gaunt woman with eyes like ash-flecked glass, accepted their coin without comment. Her silence was not rudeness; it was ritual.

The room they received was sparse, but clean. A single window overlooked the mine shaft in the distance. Iron scaffolding wrapped around the mouth like a cage, trying to keep something in. Strange glints of light flickered in the dark beyond, too rhythmic to be torches.

Vaelin stood at the window for a long time, arms folded, jaw tight. “This place was built around more than just ore.”

Elira traced a sigil in the air, watching it dim and vanish. “There’s a rhythm beneath it. Old. Steady. It doesn’t want to be forgotten.”

“Which means someone tried to forget it,” Vaelin replied.

That evening, as the sky dimmed into a curtain of dull charcoal, they explored the town on foot. Market stalls stood abandoned. Tools lay untouched beside half-built scaffolding. And all around them, the sense of being watched, not by eyes, but by memory itself.

That’s when the mayor approached. Broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, with the slightly polished look of someone who’d risen from labor to leadership. He wore official colors, though his seal pin gleamed too brightly, too new.

“Evening,” he said, his gaze settling on Tovik. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

Tovik blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve grown,” the mayor continued with a nostalgic smile. “DuMonte blood doesn’t fade easily. You’ve your mother’s eyes. I remember you from Bracken Hollow. Don’t you?”

A silence fell between them like snowfall, soft, but smothering.

Elira tensed. Vaelin’s fingers brushed the hilt of his blade. Tovik’s face, normally a study in mischief and smugness, went blank.

“…Sure,” he said finally. “I remember.”

The mayor patted his shoulder gently. “Then you’ll know what’s at stake.”

He walked off, boots leaving no sound on the cobbles. Only a faint echo of that same buried rhythm remained in the air.

Elira turned to Tovik. “Bracken Hollow?”

“Never been,” he said quietly.

Vaelin didn’t look away from the retreating figure. “Then why does the stone think you have?”

A pulse rolled beneath their feet. Subtle. Musical. Like the ghost of a song trapped in the earth.

Like a story retold so many times it forgot where it started.

Hollowspire was more than cursed. It was remembering.

And memory had claws.