Content warnings for this episode include: Animal death (Heidi, Bert as usual), Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Birds, Gun Mention, Insects, Emotional Manipulation, Electrocution, Religious Violence, Burned Alive By The Church, Child Sacrifice, Cindy’s personality
Intro - Born of the Weather
You hold her hand so tightly it might break. You can barely hear her screams over the thunder crashing overhead. Lightning arcs across the sky in agonizing pangs, and a hurricane shakes the bones of your home, tries to force its way in through door gaps and window frames. You whisper words of encouragement, equally unheard in the storm. There is a final thrash, and the sky is black and white and electric blue, and then there is stillness.
A baby wails, and as it does, the smallest patter of rain descends on the roof. You fall to your knees by the bedside, and weep. You had hoped the child would be like you, and not like its mother. Your wife holds the baby, and the weather sings to them both, and you know it is not really yours at all. That small wet shape, whose cries echo the waves of rain outside, belongs to a dark library, a forest yet to be born that screams Hello From The Hallowoods.
Theme.
Right now, I sit in a church pew. The room beyond me is cavernous, and echoes with the songs of a choir. To one side of me sits a woman who has lost her son. To the other sits a woman who has lost her daughter. On the stage behind the preaching patriarch, there is an altar of black stone, and a piano that sits unplayed. The theme of tonight’s episode is Winds.
Story 1 - Let Us Pray
Mrs. Wicker lifted up her voice to sing. She had missed this—the way that a proper service made you feel closer to God, to your fellow believers. Not like the dull monotony of Fort Freedom, so much quieter without Bob’s angry rants. Forgive me my sins, lord, she thought. Please do not let this be my punishment but my salvation.
She held her tongue through the opening gauntlet of songs, a chorus without music, although there was a harmony of its own in the uplifted voices of the congregation.
“Welcome one and all,” said the Vicar, raising his hands as the last refrain came to a close. He was clad in a red robe today, and the stage was well-lit, an altar of what seemed to be obsidian behind him.
“We enter, as we step into this Hallowed church, into the presence of God. Lord, thou art the Deep, the Darkness, and the Dawn. A comfort in the deep waters of our tribulations, a guiding flame in the valley of the shadow of death, and the redeeming light of our morning, our rebirth, our new beginning. And as we step into your presence, we ask that you hear from your place of holiness our prayers. Members of our congregation, is there anything you wish to bring before the lord today?”
Several hands began to drift up, but Mrs. Wicker beat them to it.
“Mrs. Wicker,” the Vicar said, and extended his graceful hand to her from the stage. “Please, share what troubles you.”
She sighed, trembled, stood up and placed her hands on the pew in front of her.
“My daughter, Johannah, is missing,” she said. “I have tried to discipline her, but she keeps running away from home. Her brothers never watch her like they are supposed to, and… we have not been able to find her. We have combed the marshes nearby, but we worry she has gone into the forest. And Fort Freedom cannot travel freely here. Please, if you would, pray that she comes home. I don’t think I could bear it if she…”
Here she choked up, and cried silently as was her habit. The Vicar raised a hand.
“Of course,” the Vicar said. “And we are so sorry to hear this. There are many in this congregation who have gone through the terrible pain of losing a child…”
Here several people flinched, and it did not escape Mrs. Wicker’s attention. One of them was a fraught-looking woman with dark features in a velvet robe beside her. She wondered what title the woman held within the church.
“But we pray for Johannah’s return. Let us bow our heads,” the Vicar said. “Lord, thou art all-knowing and all-powerful. You have eyes in every tree in this forest, feel with every root. If the girl called Johannah is with you, please grant her safe passage. Usher her back to us unharmed. Grant this mother her darling daughter back, we beseech thee, and let the Church be your vessel. Amen.”
He looked up to the crowd, and the next few hands shot up. “And who else can we pray for today?”
The sermon was of the importance of sacrifice, a reminder that the lord’s gifts require a return, a signifier of commitment. What have I not sacrificed, Mrs. Wicker thought. I can only hope that all of this suffering is rewarded. Job, too, thought he was being punished, but it was only a trial of his faith—and I have had my share of trials.
She stayed until the crowd of robed acquaintances had dwindled out, the last handshakes and hugs of the Vicar dispensed, and finally they were left alone in the auditorium of the new chapel. The Vicar sighed, and removed the long vestments from his shoulders, laid the velvet robes across the altar. He wore a brown suit and vest beneath. He came to sit on the edge of the stage.
“I appreciated your prayer today,” Mrs. Wicker said, hands folded over her bible.
“Prayer is only half of it,” the Vicar said, and put his hands on his knees. “Your girl going missing in this forest is very serious, Kellyanne. How long has she been gone?”
“Four days, now,” Mrs. Wicker said. “And this morning there is a little snow…”
“Do not worry,” the Vicar said, and smiled softly. “We will take care of it.”
“I appreciate your spiritual support,” said Mrs. Wicker.
“The support I offer is more than spiritual,” the Vicar said. “Prayer is a start, but one must give the lord tools to use for his will. I understand that if you sent a truck of your men deeper into these woods, the Scoutpost would see your truce as broken. But we of the church are not similarly bound. We have many useful sorts in our congregation. They are setting out to get Johannah back as we speak.”
Mrs. Wicker could not find a word to say, and tried not to let the burst of elation in her chest make her hysteric.
“At what cost?”
“I’m sorry?”
“...so am I. I… No one gives anything for free, mister Vicar. It is a great effort to bring my daughter back, if she is alive. I expect you want something in exchange.”
The Vicar stared at her a moment, and shook his head.
“Oh, Kellyanne,” he said. “That is the difference between a church that only bandies words, and a church that serves its congregation. We expect nothing of you. We love you as you are. And we do whatever we can to help each other. What is good for the body of Christ is good for the church. You will never have to repay us for this.”
“I…” she said. “I am indebted to you.”
“If we are able to rescue Johannah from the grasp of death,” the Vicar said, “it is to God that you will be indebted.”
Interlude 1 - The Murmuration
You will not be able to see it; it is as quiet as the wind, as invisible as the radiation of the sun. You will only know that it is is near when you hear a rustle in the leaves, a growing whisper of the wind, as the trees and the forest floor lean towards you, you may see it in the sky—a waning fractal of light, sunbeams bent into prismatic reflections, a fold in the fabric of your reality. A Murmuration.
If it blows through you, you will watch as your hands turn to third and fourth dimensional angles, your chest folds in like a paper sculpture, as you split into fractured shards carried along in its disintegrating breeze.
The Murmuration does not much like screaming things like you, and you will live on to be annoying within its fractal nothing-space for eternity. So it resides largely in the Northmost, where it may float undisturbed by travellers. Please respect its privacy, and if you feel a wind from outside of your plane of existence coming on, run.
We go now to one carried by the wind.
Story 2 - Thundersnow
All her life, Olivier thought, she had been ordered to go harder, faster, better. To pull the weather down from the sky into blistering contact with the earth. To turn wind into hurricanes and hailstones into daggers. Turn electricity from a spark into a wildfire. She could not recall a time, now that she thought of it, when she had been told to lessen the damage, tell the weather to become lighter, reverse its dire intentions.
Which was partly why she was afraid to ask it to stop snowing as the light flakes fell on the outside of her tent, pattering like mice down the sides.
“Thanks for letting me borrow your coat,” Riot said. They had quietly decided to share a tent, and they huddled around the heating pad that Cindy had provided. Nimbus had gone out; Olivier trusted that the cat who had once appeared in Anderson Faust’s lab would come back of its own accord.
“I’m just glad you’re warm,” Olivier said. Besides the pad, Riot was wrapped in her coat, a sleeping bag, and Olivier’s cloud cloak, like some kind of warmth-devouring space worm. “Is this the first time you’ve seen snow?”
“There were a few snowy nights when I was with Clara,” Riot said. “But the time I remember the most was the one you made. You know. The night you…”
They both fell silent for a moment. Olivier chewed on the inside of her lip.
“How does it do that?” Riot said, watching a bit of the cloak she was wrapped in. “The clouds on it. They move. I’m not crazy, right? They’re always different.”
“If I told you it was magic, I’d get sent out of class,” Olivier sighed. She was in her shirt and a light jacket, and it was still too warm for her in the tent. She tried to ignore the smell of Riot’s boots. “But it pretty much is. The Weather is… it’s a person. Or a force. An entity.”
“So there’s a weatherman?” Riot said.
“I think it’s really too vast to have a gender…”
“It was a joke,” Riot said. “You know how when people watch TV in movies, there’s always someone on the TV to say what the weather is, even though you can just look outside?”
“Downing Hill doesn’t have TV’s,” Olivier said.
“Right. I keep forgetting that,” Riot sighed. “So this weather-person made you a cape?”
“It wasn’t for me,” Olivier said. “I’ve seen it. The Weather. My friend Friday cut me with this rock once. You can see the scar right here, if you look close.”
“Oh yeah,” Riot said. “There it is.”
“I don’t even know how to talk about it,” Olivier said. “It was beautiful. It wasn’t just rain or lightning. It was storms on other planets. Heat and cold on a cosmic level. The eye of Jupiter.”
“Sounds pretty trippy,” said Riot.
“It helped me understand myself better. Understand my potential,” Olivier said. “I wasn’t the first, you know. To have a gift from the Weather. Others did before, and sometimes they made things with those gifts. A flying broom. A cloak that reflects the sky. It was in Downing Hill’s collection. The Director gave it to me as my acceptance gift.”
“And it lets you fly and stuff?” Riot said, and wriggled in her cocoon of fabrics. “If I wear it can I zap people? That’d be fun.”
“The flying I do myself,” Olivier sniffed. “It’s mostly just pretty. And you look pretty in it.”
Riot’s face was already red from the cold, so it remained the same color.
“Or handsome,” Olivier said. “You know. Whichever kind of compliments you prefer.”
She was interrupted by Riot rolling over like a caterpillar to be nose-to-nose with her.
“You overthink things too much,” Riot smiled, and kissed her a few moments before pulling back.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Still getting used to this?”
“It’s not that,” Olivier said. “There’s just a lot on my mind. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect this trip to be easy, but it’s so much more stressful with Cindy here. Isn’t it? Imagine if it was just us and Percy and Diggory, like the road trip.”
“Is that why you’re stressed out?” Riot said, and raised a dark eyebrow. “Because of mean old Cindy?”
“It’s part of it,” Olivier grunted. “She only cares about destroying this heart. She reminds me of the Director. And I can’t help but feel like I’m going back. Stopping the end of the world is exactly what Director Blackletter was training all of us to do. What if somehow, even though I got thrown out of the library, I’m still part of her plan? What if she’s still using me as a weapon, just like Anderson, just like Cindy?”
“Hey now, cloud girl,” Riot said, and a hand emerged from the coat to poke Olivier’s chin. “Come back down to earth. You’re doing this because your friends are all here, and because you want to, and because you get to share a tent with your hot girlfriend.”
She pinched Olivier’s cheek, and Olivier smiled, and kissed her forehead in turn.
“Sure, babe,” Olivier said. “How could I forget.”
She heard a rustle outside, and looked up to the outside of the tent.
“Diggory?” Olivier said, and sat up, got a respectable few inches away from Riot. “Is that you?”
There was a shape, Olivier realized, pressed against the outside of the tent. Six feet across; a gnarled palm, five fingers as long and thick as tree boughs, the points of sharp claws. A black hand in the tent fabric.
And then the claw snapped shut, and their tent was pulled hurtling upward into the air as Riot screamed…
Marketing - The Storm
Lady Ethel:
I am currently in…
Presently I’m…
It’s awful outside!
I’m crossing through a forest and there is a storm coming down right as I was setting up to…
*gust of wind picks up*
My hat!
*sounds of stomping through forest*
Anderson, Oswald, come with me, I… I only have so many hands…
*sound of leash snapping*
No! Anderson! Come back to me Anderson!
Come back!
*Lady Ethel cries, defeated*
My pet, my little fly is gone…
I’m going to try again when it’s…
Story 2, Continued - Thundersnow
They say god has a sense of humor. I certainly do.
We return now to Olivier Song.
Olivier could not see what abducted her, as she was inside a camping tent being pulled into the air like a sack of meat, heating pad and boots and Riot’s sword in its sheath all tumbling around together, and she crashed into Riot as the ground disappeared from under them.
There was shouting from their friends below as the tent flew upward, and Olivier struggled to right herself, and then the tent bounced, flipped, and twirled as if strung at the end of a tether.
“Ollie!” Riot called.
“It’s okay!” Olivier called back. “I’m going to try and open that door…”
She lunged upward, and managed to seize the tiny zipper, dragged it down. The night air blasted in, and immediately in the opening she’d unzipped there was a frozen face with frosted eyes peering in. Olivier shrieked, and lifted her hand; flung a bolt of blue light from her fingertips into the dead thing’s skin. It did not respond; only swung away from the door.
“Try to get up,” Olivier said, shaken. “I’ll see what’s going on!”
She pulled the weather into her grasp, focused on the wind at her ankles, her hands, and rose upward a few feet to escape the tent, held herself in the opening.
The beast was a Wandering Night Gaunt, she had no doubt. A huge eyeless head with an ear-to-ear grin of jagged teeth, a flared nose, giant batlike ears. Antlers like rakes stretched out from either side of its head.
Their tent was suspended from one antler, twirled precariously from a support strap that the beast had looped around a horn. They were not alone. Remains of other tents, campers tangled on their own chains and fishing lines, animals and parts of animals, swung together in the flying snow. We’ve just been added to the pantry, Olivier thought.
Olivier looked down to the ground below; amid the trail of black hoofprints that led through their camp, her friends were shouting as they rolled out of their own tents. Not just at the beast that Olivier was being carried away by, but at the forest around them.
There were more Night-Gaunts, Olivier realized, huge dark silhouettes fading in from the flurry of snow, as black and jagged as the pines at first glance. The moon was hidden behind the clouds, and they had lit no fires; only the glinting light of a few camping lanterns distinguished the forest from the night sky, and drifting clouds of snow streaked past her.
Far below, Cindy set down the odd backpack she often carried, and began removing objects from it—glints of silver that she assembled with swift precision. A long barrel, a scope. A sniper rifle of sorts, Olivier thought. She aimed it up to point in Olivier’s direction, and Olivier regained her sense of urgency.
“Cindy’s going to shoot us down,” Olivier called down, where Riot was wrestling free of her sleeping bag.
“Don’t do that!” Riot said, and reached for her sword. “They’re a herd. If you make one angry they’ll all be on you. I thought I covered this!”
“Cindy!” Olivier shouted down, and waved. If Cindy could hear her from sixty feet up in the snow, with Hector shouting and Percy shining like a night light, she did not show it. But the huge leering maw of the Night Gaunt tilted, and its antlers with it, and a massive claw came soaring up towards her.
Olivier leapt free of the tent, went hurtling down into the expanse of snow. For a moment, she briefly caught up with the pace of its fall—the snow was stationary around her, only the ground was rushing up too fast.
Lift, Olivier thought, and the Weather lifted her free of gravity, wind contorting to slow her momentum and turn her fall into a rise, dodged past the huge claw of long hairy talons.
Light, Olivier thought, and white-blue arcs of electricity leapt from her fingertips to crawl along the ground, flare upwards in front of Cindy’s scope. Cindy screamed and covered her eyes, and Olivier launched back up towards the sky.
But each sound they made—Cindy’s cry, Hector and Jonah shouting at each other, a seagull crowing—drew the Night-Gaunts closer through the trees.
The eyeless beast, fully sixty feet tall, with Riot’s tent suspended from its antler, lunged towards Olivier with a clawed hand the size of a Downing Hill dormitory bunk. She flipped up past the Night-Gaunt’s fingers, tumbled upwards into the snow, and righted herself in the frigid wind.
She had no cape. No Downing Hill Public Library Card. No more grades or tests or rewards. But she was Olivier Song, and the Weather sang to her. Not because she had gone to Downing Hill, but because she had been born with a kiss from the sky.
I have no teachers, no parents, she thought. But I still have you.
Olivier lost her propulsion, floated in freefall over the forest as her momentum waned, and the horizon was shrouded on each side by white.
She reached out a hand in each direction, and closed her eyes, and felt for something unlikely. She felt for thunder.
The first rumble sent shivers down her spine; the second caused a shudder in the Night-Gaunt below her. The creature with Riot’s tent hung on its antler opened its jagged maw, and a hundred teeth flashed in a silent scream, too high for her to hear.
It raised its giant hands to cover its radar dish ears as the thunder crackled. The scream was returned by one in the treeline, and another, and another, a silent choir against the lightning up above, flashing in the blizzard.
And then the massive herd began to retreat, silent and ponderous steps pacing through the pines.
“Ollie!” Riot called. She had clambered up to the mouth of the dangling tent, surrounded by a dozen swinging corpses. Her sword glinted in the streaks of lightning. “Catch me!”
She swung, and cut the strap holding her, and Olivier’s heart froze as the tent dropped like a stone, Riot inside.
Olivier sailed towards the tent, bent the wind around them both, tried to slow down the weight as they plummeted towards the earth, and she was surprised how swiftly the wind leapt to her aid, without a second thought. She held the tent in the embrace of the weather, let it roll to a stop as it reached the snowy earth of their campsite, and Olivier touched down to the wet earth, lay there for a moment, catching her breath.
Really it was not the effort that had exhausted her, so much as the rush of adrenaline. Lightning continued to flash in the sky overhead, rumbling softly in the blizzard. Olivier shivered; the Weather was trying to tell her something, although she did not know what.
“Couldn’t have let me down any gentler?” Riot grunted as she crawled free of the tent.
“What the hell was that?” Cindy screamed, and Olivier looked up to find the woman with her rifle shouldered, standing over her. “You could have blinded me!”
“You were going to mess everything up,” Olivier said, sitting up. Diggory and Percy approached now; Mort with his glinting red armor in the low lamplight. “I sent them all running. What were you going to do, gun down half a dozen Night-Gaunts?”
“I am the commanding officer on this expedition,” Cindy said. “You had no right to…”
“I have had it!” Riot said, and stumbled to her feet. “Olivier just did something awesome and you’re putting her down. She also just saved my life, which you didn’t seem to care about. You’re grumpy about your wife all the time, don’t you remember what it’s like to look out for someone?”
Cindy was silent like a teacher done with a class argument, and crossed her arms, turned to the rest of the group. “Is anyone injured?”
“Ah, no, but we have another problem,” Hector said, and walked up with Jonah in tow, his German Shepherd following at his heels.The sky had a bint of a tint to it, Olivier thought, like cloud over electric lights. It almost glowed green.
“It’s taken us,” Jonah said from behind him, eyes the same color. “I can feel it. The Northmost woods. We’ve arrived.”
Interlude 2 - To Love A Tempest
How does one love a tempest? One would think the garden of the end to be peaceful, long-suffering, serene. But he was different each aeon. I never knew what sort of story I would tell, if I were to tell one about him.
How he could spend centuries without leaving the barren confines of his workshop. Perhaps I would tell a story about a tortured artist, trying to build his masterwork at his own expense.
But other times he was as light and free as a newborn fawn, and he cared not for his work, only for time with me, for a thousand delights of life that the universe had to offer, hung on my every word. He thought not of tomorrow in those moments, and I tried to join him in that.
I stayed through the former times hoping for the latter ones, sometimes. Still at others he was the only one who really saw me, the only one who understood my plight. The only one who could have told a story of Nikignik. He found in me more value than a convenient hound to guard the gates.
And yet, because he saw me, his words hurt the more. You are too naive, Nikignik. Lost in your stories but knowing nothing of the universe. Never focused on the things that are important. I suppose in a way, he was right. Because as the hours grew long on his greatest work, I was not focused on what the Council of Heavens was moving to do, their secret conspiracies, the changing wind of their good graces. And now only stories of him remain.
We go now to one whose winds are also changing.
Story 3 - Coven Tales
The girl’s face was much like Friday’s. A little rounder, eyes a little larger. Her hair fell in two braids, like Friday used to wear hers. Perfectly captured in the delicate wisps of smoke that hung in the center of the room, and the outlines of the other witches sitting around her were only dark shadows in the haze.
“She’s beautiful,” Friday whispered. “Like a frozen flower. I had almost forgotten what she looked like.”
“Sofia was beautiful,” said Grandmother Briar. Her dress of embroidered vines shone like serpent scales in the candlelight. “She was much like you when I first met her. She had been identified by the Schwarzjaeger—witch hunters. So she fled Europe, came to Canada. We have always been sensitive to the arrival of new witches on our soil. I invited her to stay in my home soon after. She told me all about her life, and that she was pregnant. I told her she was having twins. She was happy, for a time.”
The scene changed; the smoke that permeated the room billowed into different shapes as Grandmother Briar spoke. Friday could make out dark shapes running through the haze, caught in the light of the fire.
“But not for long,” Friday said.
“I took in whoever I could find,” said Grandmother Briar. “There were dozens in our coven by then. But some of our members fell into our rabbit-hole with hands on their heels. Bad Americans who file magic away like paperwork. And the great inquisition, the Church of the Hallowed Name.”
“Was I there for that?” Friday whispered. “I barely remember it.”
“The day the black rains fell, our witches were weak. Overwhelmed. We are each of us connected to this world in some way, and its pangs carried through into us. You and your sister, with her head of red hair, you wouldn’t stop crying. That was when they struck, our enemies. All at once. Our coven was scattered. They hunted us down like animals. Many fled. Many were not able to escape. I urged Sofia to stay inside, that I would try to protect us, but she said she could not risk you two. She said that as long as you both were with her, she was lucky. And so she fled.”
“What happened to her?” Friday whispered.
“How you arrived at Downing Hill, I do not know,” said a woman wrapped in a shawl of raven feathers; her eyes were as black as a crow’s. “The Church of the Hallowed Name set fires in the forest. Burning us alive. You could smell the smoke for miles.”
“I… I can try to remember,” Friday whispered, and turned her palms upward to the smoke, breathed in the flame. Show me, she thought. Show me what I have seen. Show me where I have been. She flew back through the years spent lurking in Downing Hill, the classes and lectures, younger with each flicker of the fire, until the shapes in the smoke began to form.
A woman, screaming as the flames crawled across her, a hood over her head. The scent of gasoline was sharp in Friday’s nose. A man in heavy robes with outstretched arms, screaming holy words Friday could not understand. She screamed. She was six years old. It was good luck that she was not burned first. It was good luck that she was only made to watch. And then, a cascade of light, air formed into javelins, a man in a suit with colorless eyes. His hands sent ripples through the air, bent the smoke into odd patterns.
The people in the robes did not retreat lightly; they came at him with daggers of black smoke, and a wave from the priest tore the man apart; a shock rolled through the smoke of the room.
Don’t come close to me, she thought. I’ll hurt you without even trying. The same way I hurt my mother.
She was six, and the man held her close as he cauterized his missing leg, and in between screams he told her that it was going to be alright.
“Who is that man?” Grandmother Briar said. “The one carrying you? He has your mother’s necklace there…”
“Henry O’Connor. He’s a professor at Downing Hill,” Friday said, voice shaking, and she closed her eyes. “But it’s not him I’m looking for.”
She flexed her hands, watched the images peel back through the smoke. The shapes of sparse trees and rolling marshes flew past like fleeing ghosts…
“There,” Friday said. “That was the last moment I saw my sister.”
Not an hour earlier, a little girl with braids reached out as three men in suits pulled her away, some kind of electric collar around her neck. One man was small and stooped, one large and brawny, one as thin as a skeleton.
“Whoever they are,” Friday said. “I’m going to find them, and I’m going to hurt them. And if Penny is still alive, I will find her.”
There was a person, she realized, standing in the doorway, even though the assembly of witches was already gathered. She waved her hands, and the smoking images dissipated, a last picture of her sister dissolving into wisps.
The girl who stood in the doorway was older, her eyes more hollow, but she had freckles and thick red hair all the same, and she was wrapped in a grey cloak.
“You don’t need to worry about that,” said Penny, and smiled, tears in her eyes. “I found you first.”
Outro - Winds
Winds. Who can put a stop to the winds of change? To keep the world from singing of what comes next, to hold back the colder weather and the changing of the leaves?
I wish sometimes for a century, a year, a day without change. That I could wait for a little while and catch my breath, take in all that the past has given me. But with every moment, the future demands my attention, forces a new day and a new trial upon me.
We may not be so lucky as to have a moment’s peace, not when the storm gathers and billows in the sky overhead. I can not look to the past or I could lose myself in pondering it. Time has a hand upon my shoulder, and it guides me steadily into the uncertain future. With you as time leads us both, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting predictably for your return to the Hallowoods.
The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Fraught' and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more!