HFTH - Episode 193 - Reunions

Content warnings for this episode include: Abuse, Animal death (many spiders), Self-harm, Violence, Kidnapping and abduction, Death + Injury, Blood, Spiders, Gun Mention, Strangulation/suffocation, Emotional Manipulation, Drowning, Bugs, Body horror, Child exposed to child-eating entity for science, mob violence

Intro - Still Sewn

You were friends. A doomed leader and a haunted psychic, a musician and a magician, an explorer of distant places. You shared laughter, and tears, and in the end a grim determination to save your species no matter the cost. You were separated first from your wives, your bandmates, your mothers, your best friends, when you bid goodbye to them for the last time. You were separated from each other, one by one, by death’s cold grasp, by icy depths and a black expanse and the hands of a witch who took only what she needed.

But you did not stay separated. You were painfully bound together, and the pieces of you were parted out and proportioned. Runes were written across each inch of your degloved skin; your bones were carefully chosen. The shape of you was designed as meticulously as the clothes you would wear. A thin black thread pulled tightly to draw you back from the grave, and set you to your greater purpose. You might have thought that was the end of it. But your assembly has never truly stopped. You have learned what love is, or think perhaps you understand it. You have learned what loss is and it is a sewn-shut wound. You have lost your eye but see more than you did before. You have lost your maker and found yourself. And in a way, you are still being put together piece by piece, as you walk to discover why the world has always been singing you Hello From The Hallowoods.

Theme.

Right now, I am in a former salt mine and current prison. It is not abandoned, and therein lies the trouble. It is home to many creatures, beings and phenomena that would be considered paranormal, and two girls who twist fate, and one who twists until nothing is left. The theme of tonight’s episode is reunions.

Story 1 - The Twisty Game

Penny Rescher stood beside her sister in the vault that had belonged to CPE-2, and tucked away the clipboard which held all of her documentation of the vault, up to the discovery of the hidden cell that had belonged to Mister Spiderfingers. Its glass had been splintered in a spiral as if carved with a thousand tiny marks until it had finally come apart—had it been chewed? Mechanical arms, laser arrays and the field projectors that were fixed on the corners of the enclosure were bent and warped, twisted out of place. Fighting against these implements while they were active must have taken years. But the power was off now, and they had been plunged into a deep black darkness.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” said Penny. “He only eats children.”

“Well, I’m a child at heart,” said Friday, and produced a flame, flickering in a rusty hooded lantern, and it cast a dull circle of light on the glass-sprinkled floor of Mister Spiderfingers’ room. Enough that the glass splinters shone like chandelier diamonds; enough that the open vault doorway back to the hall was a deeper pitch black than the rest of the containment room.

But as her eyes began to adjust, Penny could see a tall shape, standing several feet beyond the open doorway. His skin was as pale as the tattered white suit he wore. He was covering his eyes with the backs of his hands; his thumbs were pedipalps, with sharp-chewed nails. His long translucent fingers, which bent this way and that, wavering on each side of his face, imitated eight long wriggling legs. And his smile, black-lipped and full of tiny stolen teeth, and the long triangle of his smooth chin, were a bony abdomen.

And Penny was ten years old, and the facility was bright, shockingly white, and she was being led down the hall, toward a door she had not known was there, a door not visible from the glass wall of her containment cell.

“There’s someone else down here?” she said. “Someone like me?”

“That is to be determined,” said Mr. Raven, scuttling on one side of her. “Please refrain from asking too many questions.”

“Raven, I don’t…” began Mr. Writingdesk.

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Raven. “With her effects we should be completely safe. Unless you lack confidence in our ability to contain our subjects, in which case, you’ve chosen a poor occupation.”

“It’s not us I’m worried about,” said Mr. Writingdesk under his breath, and Penny’s brows furrowed, but then the hidden door was in front of them and it slid open. The room inside was large, dark grey concrete and a brightly lit white enclosure with a glass front inside, much like hers. She looked back to Mr. Raven and Writingdesk, unsure of herself, but they nodded her in.

She stepped in slowly, wrapped in her white poncho and tights. Her shoes tapped on the concrete floor and suddenly felt very loud. Her heart was open and full of excitement; nerves also. She so rarely got to leave her room, and it had been years since she talked to anyone but Raven and Writingdesk and herself. As she stepped into the vault, she got a better look at the occupant sealed in his glass case, identical to hers, although the surrounding room was darker and full of equipment. He was sitting cross-legged in front of the glass, long dark hair draped over his face and shoulders, and wore a white suit with tailcoats. As she came to stop several meters away, he raised a hand, and then pressed it against the glass. His fingers were extremely long, bent in more places than hers. She wondered what his face looked like; if he was frowning or smiling. She smiled and waved back.

“Hello,” said the man in the box. “What’s your name, you little beam of light?”

Penny glanced back to Raven and Writingdesk, and then again to the stranger.

“CPE-13,” she said. “But really Penny.”

“Hello Penny,” said the stranger. His fingers waggled against the glass, tapping their long ends. “My name is Mister Spiderfingers. I have a feeling we’re going to be fast friends.”

“I would like that,” said Penny, stepping toward the glass to see him better, although she noted tension from her guardians standing at the door.

“Me too,” said Mister Spiderfingers. “It’s been so long since I had a little friend. Most of my friends forget about me.”

“I wouldn’t forget about you,” said Penny, coming to a stop a few paces closer. He still had not looked up, but she was curious to see his face.

“That’s very sweet,” said Mister Spiderfingers. “You’re a sweet girl Penny. What’s your favorite game to play?”

“The guessing-card game,” said Penny. “Where you try to guess what’s on the card before they show it to you. Someday I’m going to guess one right. Do they ever play that one with you?”

“No, they never have,” said Mister Spiderfingers. “My favorite game is the twisty game.”

“The twisty game?” said Penny. “How do you play?”

“Raven,” said Writingdesk, at the back of the room.

“It’s simple,” said Mister Spiderfingers, and pulled his hand away from the glass. “You hold up one of your hands like this.”

He nodded to her, and she caught a glimpse of a wide smile visible beneath the hair for a moment. She held her hand up slowly.

“Then you take your finger with your other hand,” he said, and as he tilted his head she caught a glimpse of his eyes, and became lost in them—falling into the cloudy darkness, seeking the white light at the end of the long black tunnel where the spiders lived. She wrapped her other hand around her finger.

“Then twist,” said Mister Spiderfingers, and wrenched his finger backward, and a sickening crunch brought her back to the present. Except Mister Spiderfingers was not standing in the hall, and it was all the same deep black shadow.

“What’s wrong?” said Friday. “Did you see something?”

“Did you not?” said Penny, glancing to her. “He was there in the doorway. Just now. I… I’ve remembered something. I think I’ve seen him before.”

Something tickled the back of Penny’s neck then, and she swung her hand against her skin, felt thin limbs and wet juice flatten beneath her palm. Friday lifted her lantern, and Penny looked up; the ceiling was alive with shiny black spiders, like ink seething above, dropping down in long wet droplets, cascading on threads of silk. Penny choked; she felt as though she could not breathe, as though some heavy weight drove the air from her chest or perhaps all the space in her lungs was filled with crawling.

But Friday’s hand clamped around hers and pulled her forward, out into the hall as the spiders began to fall like rain in the room behind them, and Friday tossed her lantern in a long arc back at the vault door. It erupted in an spout of flame, pooling across the concrete floor and rising up in smoldering billows, and there was a hideous shriek as its brief clouds of orange enveloped the spiders spreading across the walls, the ceiling of the passage. And as Friday dragged her onward, Penny looked back; thought she saw Mister Spiderfingers, taller than he had been, ten feet at least, as a roiling many-spidered mist, eyes and body glowing with fire as he consumed its light, suffocated it.

And she wept uncontrollably as the light went out, and Friday’s voice echoed in her ears without meaning as they ran for the narrow staircase up to the floor above. She had almost never cried in her lifetime, and yet now it forced itself to the surface. She was far from childhood, and yet she wept like a girl with a broken finger; she wept like a girl who has been bitten, she wept because for the first time she wondered if all caged things should be set free, if there was anywhere in the world that Mister Spiderfingers belonged, and if he should be forever caged, how many of the others above should also be?

Like mother, like daughter, like warden, like prisoner, like Raven, like Writingdesk, like small black spider numbing gnawing drinking working its way under the skin, watching her suspended, hungry and hypnotic, running down a tunnel alone, towards a receding light, and all the darkness alive with legs.

Interlude 1 - Too Late

When my questioning at the hands of the Industry was complete, I was half-afraid to look back to the Hallowoods, for fear of what I might find. It was possible that perhaps no time had passed at all, and you were still dreaming exactly where you were before, and the Scoutpost was simply a fortification in a great sapling, picking up the pieces of their settlement, of their lives in the wake of the Instrumentalist’s fall and a war with Fort Freedom and an ill-fated journey to the arctic, reprised.

It was equally possible that you would be gone. Collectively. The forest only bearing the scarcest resemblance to pines, and the beings that dwelt there primarily Lolgmololg’s slimy children, and the strangest remnants of a kind that once walked and lived and loved upon the Earth perhaps left to see a sun they can no longer comprehend, bask in its warmth a few last years before extinction’s grasp tightens, and a mountain of ash where a great tree once towered over the forest. That you would have left without my notice. And I would have gone without bidding you farewell.

Although there was too, curiosity. For even in those days, perhaps there will be a little left of you? Will I still recognize you when you are long changed by the age, and your doom hastens? Will there still be some of your kindness, your courage in the face of oblivion, whatever infinitesimal things you think make you human? Will I still see it in your many-eyed and glorious and dying face?

We go now to one whose face is made of many pasts.

Story 2 - Early Frost

Leyland Blooms knew that life came in seasons. The dark and murky seasons before largely forgotten, leaves of memory beneath a blanket of winter snow. The rejuvenation, a reed burgeoning in an old husk, life beckoned to their scattered parts by the careful hands of Irene Mend, like Leyland a cultivator of life.

And then Irene’s season had been over, and her gardens left to wither, and they had been beckoned by a bell to go with their siblings after Solomon Reed, and to tend the bright gardens of his hollow estate. He liked a suburban-style yard, with grass trimmed short, bushes manicured. Control, above all else. Leyland by nature worked tirelessly. Long periods of waiting still, in the yard like a scarecrow, or waiting in the garden shed for another task.

Then Diggory, the unfinished, the youngest, had returned, and brought at last a cool autumn breeze to the suffocating summers of their time as Mister Reed’s gardener. And for a brief few months, they had all been together, and free. But it was not in Diggory’s nature to stay and tend a house or a garden in a city, in the same way that it was not in Leyland’s to walk across the earth to wage wars for the future. Or perhaps Leyland’s calling was to fight against a different kind of future; the cold of the winter, the glaring sun of the summer, the dry spell, the rainy season. And the Scoutpost had been transformed into a magnificent arbory, and there had been much to do.

While Mr. Menken had later arrived to study his vines and create strange flowers, it was Leyland who had quietly trimmed dead material, fed the tree’s roots, encouraged it to flourish even through the desperate seasons of the Barkbeetles. They had all been busy then, each in their own pursuits, or that was what they told themselves. They thought about their siblings often and saw them hardly at all. And then Diggory had, somehow, returned, but sometimes the rain arrives too late to save what has withered.

It was a hot season now, and brutally rainless, which had brought them here—to the crowd of thousands that milled across the muddy slopes of Lurch Lake, in the great root caverns beneath the city. They had only their bundle of gardening tools, and a weighty bag filled with samples of seeds. They wandered aimless among the residents of Scout City; there was nowhere to go except to be shoved this way and that by the crowd of people that closed them on every side.

The surface of Lurch Lake was receding as, far across its surface, a crew of scouts filled buckets and passed them along to runners bearing them out to the flaming neighborhoods above. The green eyes of the Sleepers glowed like fireflies beneath the water, blinking at the mirror of the pond’s surface growing lower.

And then, suddenly, Leyland found themselves standing face to face with another who stood head and shoulders over the crowd.

“Cookery,” they said. The other Mendie was rounder and stockier of shape, wearing a pack laden with pans, although the knives in their apron were not as sharp as their razor fingers.

“Leyland,” said Cookery Potts, and the light in their white eyes changed from wide and fearful to something warmer. “Oh I am so glad to see you. What a frightful night!”

“I agree,” said Leyland, and smiled. “I was rather carried along by the crowd. I worried a fire might occur but this is far worse than I ever imagined.”

“Funny that this is what it takes to get any of us together these days,” said Cookery, scratching the back of their head.

“I suppose so,” said Leyland, looking out over the crowd, and spotted two more taller shapes, who in turn seemed to notice them and Cookery, and came moving slowly through the crowd towards them, shoving past families and guard scouts, artisans and tourists. Townsend Rhodes was the largest of them, stepping in gigantic boots, and Townsend was accompanied by the scrawny form of Floris Scrubbs. In moments the crowd between them had thinned out enough that Townsend and Floris stood close to Leyland and Cookery, gathering on the lakeshore.

“Townsend!” Cookery said, running over to throw themselves into a hug against the massive butler, which did not shake Townsend at all, and then gave a friendly pat to Floris, which was exactly the level of touch that Floris found acceptable.

“Hello, you both,” Townsend said, broad-faced and weary. “The entire city will have muddy boots to clean after this.”

“And muddy floors to polish,” said Floris, and smiled thinly despite their nervous composition—they always seemed slightly frayed when things were going poorly, which was often from Floris’ point of view. “Fancy running into you both—I had wondered if when the trunk started emptying if we all might be rather in the same boat.”

“It has been too long,” said Cookery. “But everyone has just been so busy, it seems. Or hard to find.”

“Things changed the day Diggory left,” Leyland ventured. “It was hard on all of us, I think. For some more than others. The city has changed so much; it has been hard to find our new places in it.”

“Speak for yourself,” said a fifth, and there was Huntington, wearing a gilly jacket of thick black grass, a black morass from which peered that stern and angular face, hands with their bladeless trigger fingers at their sides. “Some of us have gotten along just fine.”

“It is important to observe the rules for a sense of purpose, duty,” Floris began.

“Hunting is in my nature,” said Huntington, plainly. “Makes no difference if they like it or not.”

“Quite right,” said Stitchery, whose approach Leyland had not noticed. They were met with a particular pang inside, like the tearing of roots as a clump of weeds is pulled from the ground. It had been years since they had seen Stitchery, and even longer since all of the original six were together at once. Stitchery put their needle-thin bladefingers together.

“Fire drives even the most reclusive insects out of their burrows, it seems,” said Floris.

“How have you been, Stitchery?” said Huntington. “Still obsessing over the past, or have you worked all that out?”

“I have been well, thank you,” said Stitchery, smiling in turn. “What about yourself? Any luck in elevating yourself beyond your brutish baseline?”

“Please, let us not fight the very minute that we are all…” Cookery began, but then a glass bottle collided with the back of their head. Six of Irene Mend’s creations turned, and found themselves ringed in by a densely packed crowd, and Leyland paid attention for the first time to what the crowd was saying.

“You caused this!” a woman screamed, slinging a handful of mud and gravel at Floris, which spattered over their clean white apron.

“Where’s the pig-man?” said another, and a wooden board swung in front of Townsend’s face.

Immediately Huntington’s knives were splayed, but Leyland reached over; the crowd was bristling, backing them against each other.

“Easy, Huntington,” said Leyland. “Peace, Floris. Excuse me, what is this about?”

“This isn’t their city!” a woman cried, leaping to the top of a wagon, and suddenly the crowd was upon them, and Huntington’s claw flashed out at a man who was driving at them with a broken shovel, still useful as a sharp iron-tipped stake. And as soon as the sands of Lurch Lake were watered with the blood of a Scout City resident, Leyland knew that something had changed between them and their city forever. That was the way of seasons; sometimes the frost came suddenly, and early, and put to death the flowers still in bloom.

Marketing - Welcome Back

Lady Ethel Mallory

If you’re part of my happy dreaming family, you might be wondering—why should we welcome you back to become the savior of the Botulus Corporation, when you were already a marketing executive for it before? What will you do this time that you couldn’t have done for us before? Or is this merely some educated game to seize power again? Well, let me tell you.

The time I spent in the world outside was important. It is a vicious world, and one filled with violence and horror. But it forced me to realize more than I ever had before just how essential the work of the Botulus Corporation is. We are the future. We are what remains of the true-blooded American. The Botulus Corporation is supposed to remain a bastion of safety, of security, of peace, of hopeful dream against the evil of the world.

I realized that more than ever when I was out there. I was injured. I lost my closest friends. I endured the hardship and when I returned, it was with the knowledge that I had to make Botco even better. And so ever since I have been honing the technology that Botco provides, improving its experience, building new systems that will allow us to thrive where Botco’s management has already given up hope. And I cannot wait to see you again, when you choose to join my Prime Dream 2.0. You can find us, if you look for us. We are in the Prime Dream. We are here, and Botco’s stagnant old security cannot shake us. Come join the future. Come join the Mallory dream. You might even find your family, your loved ones, already here, in an even better paradise…

Story 2, Continued - Early Frost

Paradise is not a term I would take to any place where the voice of Lady Ethel Mallory can be heard.

We return now to Leyland Blooms.

Things moved slow in the ensuing moments for Leyland. The man, backing away, cursing. The long cuts Huntington had opened in the side of his face, swelling with streams of blood. The roar and shriek of the crowd reaching a fever pitch around them. People screaming, teeth bared in the firelit darkness of the caverns. And Leyland recognized their faces, and did not recognize any, all at once. The people that surrounded them were ones who had rarely spoken but been frequently seen, people who had passed under Scout City’s gates while Leyland worked, or wandered through the green parks while they trimmed the bushes and trees. People who had waved to them, or smiled and nodded politely, and received a nod in turn. Received a flower, handed out without a word. And yet this ferocity, the snarls of their mouths, the panicked fear in their eyes, the thirst for blood to be paid tenfold for blood shed, they had never known before.

And then it all moved very fast. A rock was hurled from three rows back, and Leyland reached up to catch it effortlessly, but then those in the front row seemed to respond as if Leyland had seized the stone themselves and intended to strike. Leyland was thankful, then, that Scout City did not harbor firearms commonly, but the crowd bristled with javelins, a sharp walking stick, a torch lit and waving close enough to Cookery that it reflected in their pale eyes.

Leyland raised their hands, dropping the stone.

“Please, friends,” they began, but they supposed that Scout City only saw the sharp pruning-shear blades of their fingers, and a large piece of cobblestone or brick collided with their head from the side, and they fell to their knees in retreat, ran a fingertip immediately to the stitches. The black thread of their temple had been broken, and skin peeled away from where the seam had been opened. And then there were kicking boots aimed low for their face, and Stitchery, Floris were two feral animals above Leyland, hissing and claws splayed, daring anyone to reach out and lose a hand.

“Please, do not hurt them,” Leyland said, but was no longer sure who they were talking to.

“Back the hell up,” a voice blared out over the tumultuous ocean of the crowd, and there was the squeal of a loudspeaker’s feedback. “You heard me. Move it!”

A stillness fell over the crowd, and the javelins and torches pulled back to leave the six of them in a ring on the beach, back to back with each other, caged animals with sharp claws.

Through a parting in the crowd, they could see a stout woman, short grey hair buzzed on the sides, and she was familiar to Leyland. Bern Keene sat in a wheelchair whose large wheels were half buried in the muddy bank; her wife, Violet, stood behind the chair, shivering and frail in her overlarge yellow jacket and hat, and yet her eyes were fierce and full of rage. Violet was usually the speaker, the diplomat, and yet it was Bern who held the battered megaphone.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“The monsters are all working together,” called a woman from the top of a wagon; one of the Coda, Leyland thought, by the pin that she wore. “Driving us out of our homes!”

“Look what they did,” said a second, going to aid the bleeding man, gesturing to the ribbons of his bloodied face, pressing a rag to still the flow of blood.

“Paul, you wouldn’t’a gotten cut if you weren’t poking Huntington there with a stick,” said Bern flatly. “Get some pressure on that, you’ll pull through. If they’d been trying to kill you you’d be dead.”

“They’ll kill us all if we let them,” a wavering voice cried from somewhere further back. “You brought them here!”

“Bullshit,” said Bern, and raised her voice. “Listen. I’d killed thirty-nine rotted things in the name of survival when a stranger named Diggory Graves dragged a kidnapped girl named Riot Maidstone back to the Scoutpost. I’ve looked death in the eyes and I’ve put a crossbow bolt right through the center, time and time again. And I know half of you have never hurt a thing in your life. I’ve killed. I’ve fought. But when Diggory’s life was in my hands, I looked at them and I just saw someone. A person. A person who came to the Scoutpost like any other, looking for shelter, looking for friendship. And since then, each ghost or revenant we’ve invited in, they’ve worked to make this place a home, just like anyone else. You’re pointing your sticks at fellow Scout City residents, and you should be ashamed.”

The crowd was still, uncertain, while deeper currents moved.

Leyland rose, and noticed a face they knew, and spoke out.

“Lonelle,” they said, extending a hand to a woman with thick dark braids, an administrator of Scout City’s parks. “How long have I tended gardens for you? You know me. Do I hate Scout City? Do I hate you? Am I violent by nature?”

“How many of you have eaten meals which I made for you with nothing but love in my heart?” said Cookery, stepping forward a bit from the circle. “Had a pair of shoes repaired by Townsend, a home cleaned by Floris, clothes made by Stitchery? Are we not your friends, your neighbors? I have lived each year in Scout City happy for a community I loved, was happy to serve, for a place to call home. Is this not our home as much as it is yours?”

And something began to happen, Leyland observed. Javelins lowered like the petals of a blooming flower, and an unexpected warmth swelled in the crowd, drowned out and made small the currents of bitter cold, which were for a moment shamed to silence. The crowd began to thin, backing away not in fear but in regret, shifting to fill other shores. But there were some that lingered, to make sure they were each alright, Violet and Bern among them. The blood of the man named Paul lingered in the muddy tracks, and was lapped up by the waters of Lurch Lake, swirled across the surface until it was taken out into the darkness and dispersed. And in some way, in some season, the frost relinquished its grip on the branches, and began to thaw.

Interlude 2 - Old Haunts

It is a difficult thing, dreamer, to return to this building, this council. I had sworn many times that I would sooner die than cross through these gates again. And yet, as I travel the dark stone halls of it, there is no vitriol. Only regret, perhaps. And memory.

They are strong doors. Doors that can contain a god, when closed. In the central meeting chamber. I did not spend long inside. It did not take them long to destroy him.

Ah, but those are old tidings. I have seen Marolmar again, if only in dream. Been so close to his spirit, to his resurrection. Holding him, and holding off the spring.

Now I am faced with a question—I have come to understand him completely, in ways I did not before. His nature I have made peace with. But what of mine? What remains of me, and who have I come back to, in this place? Does the Nikignik who runs wild in the universe and spectates the petty fragments of life even know Nikignik, Eyes of the Council of Heavens?

We go now to one who is hesitant to return.

Story 3 - The Weather Calls

“No,” Olivier said. “I can’t.”

And yet the Weather beckoned.

She stood on a jagged jut of rock by the shore, most of a mile away from the site where Abbey Saint-Loris had stood. She had been cut by sword, but more than anything torn and bruised by the fall, and exhausted by carrying herself back out of the maw of infinity. Blood and sweat stained her gardening fatigues. Up above, on the hillside, she could still see the walls and towers, the chapel spire of the Abbey, but it was transformed. Now, the abbey was pitch black against the red clouds of dawn, as black as ink, as black as nothing. No light separated the outline of its walls from its inner buildings, or from the hillside beyond, which was also tainted with eternity, slowly creeping across the ground, consuming, blackening.

She felt another pull; a gust of wind that almost carried her off her feet. It was thirty or forty feet from the bluff down to the surface of the Atlantic, and it crashed in white-tipped waves against the rocks.

“I haven’t searched enough yet,” she said, more quietly. “They could still be alive. Some of them must. I can’t be the only one who made it out.”

The voice that spoke was not the voice of the Weather, but a deeper one, and from beyond the edge of the cliff.

“Hello?” said Mort. “Who are you? Who are you talking to?”

Olivier looked up to see a person standing on the edge of the cliff. The silhouette was of a burly man, bearded, muscular, overalls and a fishing cap. However, he was rendered in a black mucus, and the bones of his body floated within the slime, and thick channels of it trailed down the side of the cliff beyond. It was Mort, she knew, although much larger than the small amount she had met in the jar that Hope carried.

“Oh,” said Mort. “Olivier. It’s you. I’m glad you’re alright.”

“Mort?” Olivier said, and dug her heels into the cliff as another blast of wind sailed around her. “Do you… not remember me? I met you a little last night. I was so sorry to hear how everything went. Are you aware of what happened? Is everyone else alright?”

“I don’t know,” Mort began. “Hope took a little of me to go sightsee, but until it comes back I don’t know what it’s doing. I hope it’s having fun.”

The skull and its wet black surrounding looked up to the chapel.

“I don’t think so Mort,” said Olivier. “They’re in trouble. There was a fight in the abbey last night. Something terrible has been set loose.”

And then there was a stronger burst, one that carried Olivier off her feet entirely, but Mort extended an arm, and caught her.

“Windy up here,” said Mort.

“Yes,” Olivier said bitterly, and although Mort stung to the touch, she did not leave his arm quickly. “The Weather… she’s calling me in a direction I don’t want to go. For all this time I’ve wanted nothing but to go back. To you, to everyone, to the Hallowoods, to see what was left. And every time I’ve tried to leave, she hasn’t left me. She’s kept me here, guarding this place. Protecting it. Now I’ve failed, and I need to pick up the pieces, to do what I can to contain this, to see who made it out, who is alright. Why is it now that she’s trying to carry me across the ocean?”

Mort, skeletal and oozing, was silent for a moment, and then nodded.

“You should go home,” said Mort. “If you can. I can take care of them. I’ll make sure they’re alright. They’re my family.”

Olivier shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said.

“I’ll see you soon,” said Mort, and then with the effort that Olivier might have expended to toss an apple across the Downing Hill dining hall, tossed Oliver into the air. And she was falling, uncontrollably, and the roiling black ocean was rising toward her, but then the wind carried her—it was a different flight than she had once mustered, guiding blasts of wind to send her flying one explosive burst at a time.

This was like swimming, guided by the wind’s own hand, and the tears she wept crackled with lightning as the azure heavens parted, and she was carried by a whirlwind of swirling blue into the red morning sky, and the shore of France that she had so often cursed receded, and thunder roiled overhead as if to tell the Hallowoods, tell the world that she was coming home.

Outro - Reunions

Reunions. It is not easy returning to a place where you spent your past, dreamer. Not only for the people that may still dwell there, and the relationships changed or unchanged with time. Or for the memories that live in the halls of it still. But because some ghost of you, some whisper of your past, a self completely detached and yet contiguous with the one who remains, still dwells there. Used to, and does, and always will. It is not the faces of the Council I fear the most, but my own, and what I might think of him, and what he might think of me. Would he be proud? Would he understand?

I hope so.

Until we meet again, dreamer, I am your loyal host Nikignik, waiting reunificatorially for your return to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Flotsam 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! Until next time, dreamer.... until next time.