THE HOLLOW

At the heart of Wilderwood, where the curse runs deepest, the land falls away into the place the goblins named the Hollow. The name is theirs, older than any the border folk use, and it has outlasted the rest. Goblin tunnels from the Alzion Mountains once reached beneath the forest’s eastern edge. The goblins collapsed them long ago, and raiders taken alive on the principality’s frontier refuse to speak of what they heard down there, whatever their captors offer. They will not cross the Hollow above ground either. Nothing else in the border country frightens a goblin so completely.

Few maps attempt the Hollow, and none agree. Those who have come near it and returned describe a vast, sunken basin, as if the forest floor had slumped inward over some great wound. The trees there grow older and larger than anywhere else in Wilderwood, their trunks black and twisted, and each leans toward the center of the bowl. Roots break the surface in long, pale arches like the ribs of something buried. Fog pools in the low ground as water would, thick enough to swallow a man to the shoulders, and it never burns off. No birds nest there. No insects sing. Sound dies a few paces from its source.

Before the curse, this was the center of the Verdant Crown, where its coven kept their halls and their vault. The oldest songs place the vault at the lowest point of the basin, deep beneath the largest of the trees, and they place something else below it. Every account of Morwenna’s bargain places the thing she bargained with beneath the roots at the forest’s heart, and every one says the dying witches bound it there. Whatever the witches built to hold it, the Hollow grew up around.

The border folk speak of the Hollow as more than a place. They say the Hollow takes, the Hollow remembers, the Hollow waits. Whether they mean the basin, the curse that soaks it, or the thing bound beneath it, no two scholars agree, and the villagers have never seen much point in the distinction. Almost everyone who has studied it comes to the same conclusion: whatever it is, it wants. It wants warmth, and life, and the living who carry them, and it has been patient for three hundred years about getting them.

The Hollow has rules, or behaves as though it does. The shades that gather in its fog watch the living but do not touch them, and folk who know the forest say they cannot, unless fear or folly invites them in. Travelers camped near its rim have heard a voice rise out of the basin, speaking from everywhere and nowhere at once, promising gold and glory to whoever will come closer. The trees lean in with it. Those who answer the voice are not seen again, and those who resist it say the pull lingers for days afterward, like the ache of an old wound in cold weather.

The Hollow has held its prisoners for three centuries: the spirits of the fallen coven, the Witch-King and his servants, the shades of every treasure hunter who reached for the vault and failed. The border villages have a saying for what happens to anyone who takes something from the Hollow, or tries. It is the one saying about the forest that everyone in the principality knows, and it is the last thing most of them ever say to a traveler heading in. The Hollow always collects its due.