The village of Eldhollow had no name on any map, no mention in any book, and no visitors for a hundred years. Not since the last Tithe.
It sat at the end of a forest path that had long forgotten how to lead anywhere. Trees leaned inwards as if conspiring, their branches thick with black moss and birds that never sang. The air was damp year-round, tasting of iron and root rot, and the sun only ever filtered in as if through a dream, pale and shapeless.
The village itself was small—three dozen homes of lichen-covered stone and leaning timbers, all built in a slow spiral that pointed toward the chapel at its center. Eldhollow had no inns, no markets, no taverns. It had only the chapel. And the bell.
The bell that never chimed.
It was an ugly thing—rusted, cracked down one side, suspended in the crooked tower like a tooth in a rotten jaw. There was no rope to ring it, and the villagers did not speak of it, did not look at it, and certainly did not climb the tower where it hung. It had been there as long as anyone could remember, as long as the village had endured, and perhaps longer still.
It rang only once every decade—by itself—on the morning the earth asked for blood.
Jonah was ten when he first heard it. He remembered the silence just before, how the wind had stopped and the birds had vanished from the trees. Even the insects had gone quiet. Then, a single sound: low and wet, like a groan torn from the world's spine. It didn't echo. It didn't fade. It simply was, thick and certain as breath in your ear.
He had been in the garden with his sister, Veil, pulling up early carrots. The ground trembled beneath their knees. Birds scattered from the trees. Then the bell rang, and Jonah dropped his harvest.
Veil didn't speak. Her small hand reached for his without looking, and together they turned toward the chapel.
Their mother wept in the doorway when she saw them. Not just tears—sobs that bent her in half, that clawed out of her like something trying to escape. Jonah didn't understand why. He thought she was afraid the bell would take him. He thought maybe it had.
His father said nothing. Just went to the cellar and brought up the ledger.
It was an old thing, bound in hide that looked too pale to be cow or deer. Its pages were yellowed, crumbling at the corners, and none of the ink inside had ever faded. The ledger was kept under lock and key—only opened once every ten years, when the bell told them to.
The Tithe was never questioned. The rules were older than memory, older than language. Every time the bell rang, one name would appear. Written in red. Inscribed not by hand, but by the veil.
No one knew exactly what that meant. Some said it referred to the thin wall between the waking world and the one beneath. Others believed the veil was a being, a watcher in the roots, older than saints or sin. All that mattered was this: the name appeared, and the chosen child would be taken to the hills by sundown.
Buried alive beneath stone and salt.
The grave was dug by men robed in grey. The child was given no shroud, no rites, no prayers save one—the Binding Hymn. Only the elders were allowed to speak it, and even they did so with shaking voices. The words had weight.
And no one ever returned.
Jonah didn't understand. Not then. He watched the ledger from a distance that year, peeking through the slats in the cellar door as his father turned the pages with gloved fingers. The red ink crawled in slowly, letter by letter, forming the name of someone he didn't know—a boy from the outer ring of homes, pale and quiet, whose family packed up and left the day after the burial.
The village did not speak of those taken. Not aloud. They became echoes, hushed absences in sentences. Chairs that stayed empty. Names that turned to dust in the mouth. Jonah remembered asking about the boy, and how his father's eyes had gone far away.
"It's not cruelty," his mother said, later that night, as they scrubbed the blood from the garden tools. "It's obedience."
Jonah didn't understand then.
Not until the year his sister's name appeared.
But even before that, the village changed in small ways after the bell. Doors were locked more tightly. Meals were eaten in silence. The chapel stayed open day and night, candles guttering like gasps in the drafty nave.
Jonah had nightmares after that first bell. Always the same: roots crawling over his skin, into his mouth, his ears, his eyes. The feel of dirt in his lungs. A hand pressing gently on his chest, lowering him into the dark.
He never saw the face.
He started drawing things he didn't understand—spirals, mostly, and the shape of the bell. Once, he sketched a tree with no leaves and dozens of small white shapes dangling from its branches. His mother burned that one in the hearth.
There were no games that year. No laughter in the streets. Only the heavy ticking of time. Waiting for the next ten years to pass. Waiting for the veil to hunger again.
Some said the Tithe was a covenant—that the land required blood to remain whole. That the fog beyond the trees would swallow the village if they ever refused. Others believed the chapel itself was the source of the curse, a wound in the world stitched shut by sacrifice.
But no one left. No one even tried.
You could walk the paths if you liked. You could pack your things and set off down the dirt road that curved eastward through the birch trees. But you'd never find another village. Never hear the sound of carts or the laughter of strangers. Just fog. Miles and miles of it. And the further you walked, the more the path twisted, until you found yourself right back in Eldhollow, footsteps trailing behind you like a snake eating its tail.
Jonah had asked his father once, why don't we leave?
And his father had said, "This is not a place you live in. It's a place that lives in you."
That was the year before Veil was chosen.