Before it bore the name Hollow Hill, the mountain breathed with older names, older voices. None spoken in the tongue of the newcomers. The people who once called it home knew the ridgelines not as boundaries, but as veils. Thin and shifting places where the world of men brushed up against something older, darker, and hungry. Five places, in particular, marked the boundary between this world and that other one. Places Mavis Crowder still walked alone, still fed in silence, still honored with blood when memory dared falter.
The mountain gave much to those who respected the old ways. Prosperity. Favorable harvests. Long lives. But it demanded payment. And it never forgot a debt.
That was before the outsiders came.
First it was the paved road cut through the hollow like a scar. Then came the Ledges. A luxury development gated and gleaming with modern, opulent homes, thrust like teeth into the side of the mountain. Their marketing promised silence, fresh air, independence. An "off grid paradise" built over bones and bargain.
They didn't ask. They didn't listen. They built right over the thinnest places.
Now, strange things crept back into Hollow Hill. Power flickers. Oaths unravel. People vanish. And those who thought they could tame the land have begun to learn that it was never theirs to command.