Chapter One: Here Hands Were Meant to Bury
The earth in Black Hollow never stayed quiet for long.
Even now, as she plunged her spade into the frozen soil, the whispers had already started—low, slithering things curling around the wind, threading into her skull. Sometimes they spoke in riddles. Other times in screams. Today, they murmured her name.
Seraphine.
She didn’t look up. She knew better than to answer the dead out loud.
The grave was shallow so far, only half-formed, but the bones beneath her boots told her she wasn’t the first to dig here. The Hollow didn’t waste space. One grave often layered over another, a bed of silence laid atop a memory of screams. Her hands worked on instinct: spade, turn, toss. Dirt clung to her skirts and fingernails, but she didn’t mind. The mess was comforting. Predictable.
Unlike her mind.
A voice—not hers—crooned softly in her thoughts. It sounded like a child, singing something old and tuneless. She blinked it away. Not now, she thought.
The sun was already slipping behind the trees, and mist had begun to settle at the edges of the cemetery. Grave markers leaned like drunk men. Crows lined the iron fence, watching her with heads tilted just slightly wrong.
Seraphine paused, resting on the handle of her spade. Her breath fogged in the evening air. Her arms ached. She was twenty-one, and already she felt like something ancient. Something carved from bone and regret.
She glanced toward the chapel ruins.
They loomed at the far end of the yard, a collapsed skeleton of black stone and ivy, rotted wood curling at the edges like burnt paper. No one entered it anymore. Not since the fire. Not since she was a child.
But lately, something pulled at her from beneath it. A hunger. A silence so heavy it made the air taste wrong.
“Seraphine”, the wind whispered again. Or maybe not the wind.
She grabbed her shovel tighter and shoved it into the dirt harder than necessary.
Her father used to tell her she had grave-digger’s hands. Strong. Calloused. “Built for putting things in the ground,” he’d said with pride, before he’d gone too quiet to speak at all. She’d buried him too. Just like her mother. Just like the others. And still, her hands kept digging.
That was all she knew how to do.
Bury the past. Swallow the truth. Keep the whispers to herself.
But the earth was getting louder. The voices more urgent. And her reflection in the darkened chapel windows had started to smile without her.
She dropped the spade.
Something beneath the ground shifted. Not metaphorically—physically. A tremor rippled through the soil, barely noticeable, like something waking up far, far below.
Her hands trembled.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
Something in the earth… wanted her.
And just like that, she felt it—her. The other voice. The one that always came with cold air and colder judgment.
“Honestly”, the voice murmured from somewhere deep within, “you never learn.”
Seraphine gritted her teeth. “Not now.”
“You’ve buried how many? Laid to rest how many monsters, mothers, and strangers? Yet one little tremor beneath your boots and you’re ready to fall apart?”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are, the voice cut in”. Calm. Crisp. “You’re too soft. Too scared. You always are when it matters most.”
Seraphine’s breath hitched. Her grip on the shovel handle tightened as if it could anchor her in the moment.
“There is something down there”, the voice continued, softer now. “Something old. And it’s looking for someone strong. Not someone who flinches at ghosts. Someone who can stand over it and not blink.”
The sound came again—from the chapel ruins. A dull pulse, like breath rising in stone lungs.
Seraphine stepped back.
And the voice in her mind straightened—she could feel it. Like the pull of a spine, the tilt of a chin. Always so poised. So perfectly in control.
“Let me speak to it”, she said. Not with need. Not with fear. But with absolute, unwavering calm. Whatever it is, it will listen to me. It always does.
Seraphine shook her head. “You always think that. You think everything bends for you.”
A pause.
“And you resent that it doesn’t.”
The wind shifted, catching her cloak, whipping her hair across her mouth. The trees whispered. The air had changed.
And deep beneath the earth, something listened.
