In the year 1791, a sect of religious exiles led by the prophet Elias Grin crossed the northern ridges into a valley untouched by cartographers. They were thirty-seven in number; men, women, and children cast out from their former settlements for heresy, accused of blood rites and communion with "the veiled one." Elias, gaunt and wild-eyed, claimed he had been chosen to lead them to a sacred place, a hollow where the veil between worlds thinned and the divine could be touched.
They arrived in early autumn. The valley was unnaturally quiet. No birds sang. The trees twisted upward like grasping hands, their bark slick and blackened. The soil was rich but smelled of iron and decay. A stream ran through the center, but its water reflected nothing. Elias declared it holy. He named the place Witherhollow, for it was a hollow that would strip away the false flesh of the world and reveal truth beneath.
They built in concentric circles, following Elias's vision: homes in the outer ring, communal spaces in the middle, and at the center, a chapel atop a sinkhole. The architecture mimicked spirals—doors, windows, even the paths between buildings curved inward. Elias said this was the divine geometry, the shape of revelation.
The first structure raised was the Chapel of Veiled Grace, built from stone quarried from a nearby hill, swallowed by fog and never found again. The chapel's altar was placed directly above the sinkhole, which Elias called the Mouth of Grace. He claimed it whispered to him in dreams, offering guidance and prophecy. The townsfolk believed him. They had seen too much to doubt.
Within days, strange things began.
Elias formalized his teachings into what he called the Spiral Doctrine. It held that the world was a lie, a surface stretched over rot. The spiral was the path inward—toward truth, toward the veiled god. Pain was purification. Sacrifice was communion. The deeper one descended, the closer one came to grace.
Rituals became common. Blood offerings were made weekly at the chapel. First animals, then volunteers. Elias claimed the god beneath required nourishment. Those who resisted were sent to the Lantern Marsh, a fog-covered wetland at the edge of town. They never returned. Sometimes, their voices echoed back through the mist, begging to be followed.
The town's orchard, The Hollow Orchard, grew twisted fruit that bled when bitten. One season, every tree bore a fetus instead of apples. Elias declared it a miracle. The orchard was never harvested again, but it continued to grow
The livestock refused to eat. Chickens laid eggs filled with black fluid. A calf was born with two mouths and no eyes. Elias called these signs of favor, proof that the veil was thinning. He preached that suffering was the price of revelation, and the people, desperate for meaning, accepted it.
Then the children began to change.
Three-year-old Lina Morrow spoke in tongues she had never been taught. Her eyes turned milky white, and she began drawing spirals in ash on the walls of her home. One night, she vanished. Her bones were found weeks later beneath the chapel floor, arranged in a perfect spiral. Elias declared her the first martyr of Witherhollow, and her parents were honored with a feast.
The town's well, Grin's Well, began to hum at night. Those who drank from it reported vivid dreams: spirals of flesh, voices from beneath the earth, visions of their own deaths. Some woke with blood on their hands. Others didn't wake at all.
Still, the town grew.
The orchard was planted in the second year of settlement, intended to be Witherhollow's lifeblood. The soil was rich—too rich. Seeds sprouted overnight. Saplings grew tall in days. The fruit came early, swollen and veined, hanging heavy like tumors. Elias Grin declared it sacred, the Harvest of Grace, and ordered that it be consumed only during ritual feasts.
But the orchard was wrong.
The apples bled when bitten. The pears whispered. One season, every tree bore a fetus instead of fruit—pale, eyeless things that pulsed faintly in the moonlight. The townsfolk burned the orchard in terror. It regrew overnight, thicker, darker, and humming with unseen life.
The midwife, Mara Thorne, was the first to understand the orchard's true nature. She had delivered every child born in Witherhollow, and she began to notice patterns—spiral-shaped birthmarks, children born with memories not their own, infants who cried in harmony with the orchard's wind. She kept records, hidden in a root cellar beneath her home, and began to suspect that the orchard was not feeding the town—it was breeding it.
Mara tried to warn the others. Elias denounced her as a heretic. She was cast out, sent to live in the orchard's edge, where the trees grew thickest. Her final journal entry read: "The fruit remembers. The children are not ours."
She vanished days later. Her home was found empty, but the cellar was filled with roots—twisting, pulsing, wrapped around her journals like fingers. The orchard had claimed her.
Her dwelling became known as Thorne's Hollow, a place where the trees grow unnaturally tall and the wind carries voices. It is said that if you sleep there, you dream of births that never happened—and wake with names you don't recognize carved into your skin.
The Spiral Grave was never a place of rest. It was a machine of descent, designed by Elias Grin to trap souls in endless orbit. Grin believed that death was not a release but a betrayal of the Spiral Doctrine. The soul, he taught, must spiral inward, shedding false identity until only truth remained.
So, he built the graveyard in a spiral, each grave a step deeper into divine revelation. No names. No headstones. Only bone markers etched with symbols no one could read. At the center lay the Eye of Grace, a pit lined with salt and ash, where the veil between worlds was thinnest.
But the spiral did not guide. It bound.
The dead lingered. Not as ghosts, but as echoes, memories bleeding into the soil, regrets looping through the air. Visitors heard voices that sounded like their own, recounting sins they never committed. Some left with grief that wasn't theirs. Others forgot who they were.
The Spiral Grave became a place of spiritual suffocation. A place where the dead could not forget, and the living could not leave unchanged.
Thatch was seventeen when Elias Grin chose him.
He was tall, quiet, and sharp-eyed, born to a family of stonecutters who had carved the chapel's altar and the spiral's bone markers. He spent his days wandering the orchard's edge, sketching the twisted trees and listening to the wind. He didn't believe in Elias's sermons, but he didn't speak against them either. He was a watcher. A listener. A soul on the edge of something.
Grin saw in him not purity, but potential. He called Thatch "the still flame", a boy who hadn't yet burned, but would never go out. He said Thatch had a heart that would not rot, a soul that would not rise. And so, he made him the Keeper of the Bound.
Thatch resisted. He refused the Spiral Doctrine. He tried to flee. But the forest twisted, the paths changed, and he returned days later, bleeding and silent. Grin took him to the Eye of Grace. There, in a ritual of salt, blood, and orchard fruit, he carved spirals into Thatch's palms and whispered a prayer that no one else heard.
From that night on, Thatch stopped aging.