The Blade of Hollow Vale

They speak her name only in murmurs—Seraphyne. A name that once meant light, now a whisper passed like a curse from one trembling mouth to the next. She had not always worn the black gown that trailed like smoke behind her, nor had her smile always curled like a crescent moon over a battlefield. But the blade—that had always been hers.

The legend says Seraphyne was born beneath the eclipse that blanketed Hollow Vale in unnatural dusk. Her mother died screaming as she entered the world, and her father vanished into the thickets three days later, never to be seen again. Raised by shadows and silence, the child grew wild in the vale, her lullabies sung by wind and ravens.

The sword appeared on the eve of her twelfth year.

It was buried in the roots of the Old Yew, the cursed tree that no villager dared approach. But Seraphyne heard it singing. The blade called to her in her dreams, whispering truths about the world, about herself, about what waited beneath the vale’s soft soil. When she touched it, lightning cracked the sky. Her hair, already dark, turned black as pitch and began to slither like tendrils in a storm.

From that night on, no man could lie in her presence. No beast dared tread her path. She wandered into town just once, barefoot and smiling, dragging the silver blade behind her like a child’s toy. The butcher’s son, proud and cruel, called her names. She didn’t speak, only smiled wider.

He was found the next morning, grinning ear to ear. His jaw was broken, his tongue missing, his hands clutching a bouquet of dead roses no one could trace.

She became the myth beneath Hollow Vale’s breath. A curse. A secret. A warning.

Years passed, and the world changed—but Hollow Vale remained wrapped in her shadow. Travelers who wandered too far from the road sometimes saw her silhouette among the trees: tall, regal, eyes like voids, her blade shining beneath moonlight as though lit from within. Some returned. Most did not.

One autumn, a war broke out between the Eastern Houses and the Crown. Soldiers came, led by General Edrick Vallan, a man known for victory and vanity. He laughed at the peasants’ warnings. “A woman with a sword and a stare? I’ve slain men with dragons tattooed on their tongues.” His army camped at the edge of the vale.

On the third night, the fires went out on their own. The wind died. No owls hooted. No wolves howled.

Seraphyne stepped into the center of the camp, barefoot and beautiful, her gown whispering across the leaves like the last breath of a dying queen. Her hair moved in silent rhythm, a living veil of shadow. The soldiers froze, weapons in hand. She smiled.

They screamed for only a moment.

Come dawn, Edrick Vallan sat on his warhorse, facing his own camp, his silver armor polished, his throat slit clean. His eyes were sewn open. On his lap rested the sword—not hers, but his, wrapped in black silk, twisted into a bow.

She left his corpse as a message. The war turned in days. The Crown pulled back, whispering that they’d angered the Witch of the Vale. Hollow Vale was no longer a battleground—it was a border no one dared cross.

In the years that followed, Seraphyne became something more than legend. She was a threshold. Lovers dared each other to walk into her woods. Children played songs about her at dusk, not knowing they mimicked the notes of the sword’s call. A noblewoman once hired mercenaries to bring her Seraphyne’s blade. They returned mad—those that returned at all—babbling about an eye inside the metal, about being watched even in their sleep.

Still, some say Seraphyne isn’t a monster.

They say she keeps the sword not as a weapon, but a key. That it locks something far older beneath the earth, something she alone can contain. Others say she is that something—only clothed in flesh, a shard of whatever force slumbers under Hollow Vale. Her smile, they claim, is not cruelty but prophecy. It’s the grin of someone who knows the end, and greets it like an old friend.

A scholar once dared to interview her. He brought ink and parchment and no weapon. She allowed it, seated on a throne of roots inside the Vale’s deepest glen. Her eyes, he wrote, were endless, and her voice was like the hush before thunder.

“You are feared,” he said.

“Because I remember,” she replied.

“Remember what?”

“What the world was before words.”

When he left, he never wrote again, but painted—only one image, over and over: a tall, dark figure with hair like smoke, holding a sword forged from memory and moonlight. Her smile stretched wider each time.

As the world grew loud with machines and fire, Hollow Vale grew quiet again. Travelers vanished. Birds stopped nesting there. But on some nights, under waning moons, a figure can be seen walking the ridgeline—tall, in black, her blade dragging softly behind her.

And in her wake, the wind begins to whisper.

“Remember.”