Page Section Written 11/05/2025

GHULVORN

The Hollow Oath

Cold enters first. Not the cruelty of it, the clarity: bone-true, vow-shaped. You sit up in the Quiet Yard of Mournshale, where the wind refuses to speak above a murmur out of respect for what the stones are holding. Graves shoulder together like families. Some markers bear names carved deep; some hold only a tuft of hair tied in black thread; some are simply a circle of river rock where no body returned to ask for a stone.

Your breath smokes dull gray. It drifts longing toward the Oath Pyres banked along the yard’s far hem, ash heaped high but never cold, anger sleeping like a watchful dog. You stand and the ash stirs once, the way a friend moves when you enter a room and they’re not done with their sorrow. The cut across your breastbone is old and behaves. When you touch it, you hear your voice the way rock does: slow, non-negotiable. I will carry what refuses to lie down.

A funerary chord thrums through the soil, a bassline begun by ancestors and maintained by children stamping their feet in sequence. The sound makes the Yard feel larger than the city behind it and smaller than the oath inside your mouth. From a low table a Death-Reader lifts a sheet and lets it fold back over a face you once loved. They do it gently enough to insult grief’s appetite. They meet your eye and nod as if lending you a coat.

You kneel at a grave that has not yet decided whether it belongs to the person beneath or to you. Dirt granules roll like ball bearings under your thumb. Something taps twice under the soil and never again. You say the name of an enemy. The wind tries it on and leaves it behind. You say the name of a debt and it fits your tongue too well.

When you rise, the world rises a fraction with you. The line of pyres takes a breath. The cut across your breastbone warms without comfort. Your shadow thickens until it wears your shape like a suit. It looks left when you turn right. It steps forward when you’re still. It is not disobedience. It is rehearsal.

Beyond the Yard, a bell tolls the hour of a choice that was meant for someone else. The bell is wrong and you are right to hear it. Cold recloses around your lungs, not punishment but parameter. You are of the ones who make promises to absences and keep them.

When everything remembers you, will you remember yourself?

The ash settles, but not flat, and the first choice waits where the living and the faithful dead shake hands.