THE HOLDFAST
Somewhere beneath the Hollow, at the lowest point of the sunken basin that marks Wilderwood’s heart, lies the vault of the Verdant Crown’s coven—the Holdfast. Every treasure hunter in the principality knows the stories. Few know that the witches who built it never thought of it as a treasury.
The coven served as guardians of the natural order, and over the centuries they gathered into the forest’s keeping whatever threatened that order: relics of power from an age when magic ran through the world like water through a stream, objects too dangerous to leave in careless hands and too potent to destroy. The gold and jewels came later, paid as tribute by kings and lords who wanted the witches’ favor or feared their displeasure. The coven stored the wealth with the relics and cared far less for it. The oldest songs describe the vault as a prison for things, not a hoard.
No reliable description of it survives. The songs agree it lies within or below the roots of the greatest tree in the Hollow, and that the witches grew it rather than built it, coaxing living wood into halls and chambers over lifetimes. Beyond that, the accounts scatter. Some describe a single chamber heaped to its ceiling with gold. Others describe a maze of root-walled galleries, each sealed by a different working, each relic held apart from the rest. No account describes the door the same way twice.
The stories of what it holds have grown with every telling. Border taverns speak of a mirror that shows the one who looks into it the hour of their death, a cup that never empties of wine, a blade that cannot miss, and a circlet of gold leaves said to have given the Verdant Crown its name. Scholars dismiss most of these as inventions. They do not dismiss all of them. Whatever the coven locked away, Morwenna the Ambitious judged it worth the world, and she knew its contents better than any living soul.
In the three centuries since the curse, few who have gone after the vault have reached the Hollow, and fewer still have returned. None has returned rich. Now and again a coin surfaces in a border market, stamped with no king’s face and bearing a leaf where the crest should be. The market folk call it Hollow coin. Merchants will not take it, beggars will not keep it, and anyone found carrying one tends to find the road ahead empty of company.
The Holdfast remains where the witches left it, untouched and waiting. The forest itself has become its guardian, and it guards the vault well. Treasure hunters say that everything has its price, and they mean it as encouragement. The border villages say it too. They do not mean it the same way.