The Hollow Light
Chapter 1: The Silence in Skarnes
Skarnes was the kind of village you only found when you were lost. Tucked between two fjords and hemmed in by the breathless rise of pine-covered hills, it rested beneath skies that often forgot the sun. The days were short and grey, the winters long and pale. Most outsiders never heard of it, and the locals preferred it that way.
It was the kind of place where doors remained unlocked but stories were not. The people of Skarnes believed in silence. It wasn’t that they lacked warmth—only that warmth was rationed, spoken through nods, and preserved in glances across narrow roads dusted with frost.
When Ingrid Aasen turned seventeen in the heart of December, something changed in the air.
She had always been quiet, a child who listened more than she spoke, her hair the color of burnt wheat and eyes too pale for comfort. The kind of girl who’d grown up reading sagas instead of scrolling through phones, always with her back to the fire, as if she feared what might reflect in the glass.
But in the week after her birthday, her mother, Liv, noticed she stopped sleeping.
At first it was small things—Ingrid would sit up in bed at odd hours, staring into corners as if waiting for someone to arrive. She would murmur things under her breath, words Liv couldn’t make out, not even in Norwegian. When asked what she was saying, Ingrid would only blink and say, “It’s not mine.”
By the third night, Liv found her daughter sitting outside in the snow, barefoot, her skin blue-tinged and eyes unfocused. The frost had bitten the edges of her toes, but she didn’t shiver. She just kept whispering: “It’s under the floor. It’s under the floor.”
The Aasens were not superstitious. Tomas Aasen, Ingrid’s father, taught chemistry at the school in Kongsvinger, a nearby town, and dismissed the old Sami stories as “cultural relics.” Liv had once studied folklore at university but left it behind to raise a family. Neither believed in ghosts or spirits, not really. But they believed in their daughter. And something—whatever it was—was wrong.
The local doctor found nothing. Physically, Ingrid was healthy: heart steady, lungs clear, blood normal. Psychologically, the town counselor recommended “urban overstimulation withdrawal”—a fashionable diagnosis that made no sense in a village with no mall, no cinema, and a single weak Wi-Fi tower.
Still, Ingrid’s condition worsened.
She stopped eating. Not dramatically—she would chew, and swallow, but the food would reappear, untouched, in the trash the next morning. Once, Liv found pieces of raw potato under her bed, half-bitten like a rodent had gnawed them.
She refused to go to school. And when Liv insisted, Ingrid wept—not from rebellion, but terror.
“They’ll smell it,” she said. “They’ll see the mark. I’m not hers anymore.”
By the end of the month, they had locked the knives in a drawer. Not because she had threatened anything. She never raised her voice. She never screamed. She never cried out in pain.
But the silence around her began to hum.
It was not only her behavior, but the house itself that seemed altered. The lights flickered in short bursts. The wood stove hissed without logs. The basement door, which had never shut properly, now stayed locked from the inside. Tomas tried to remove the bolt but found it rusted over within a day. He said it was the moisture.
Liv did not answer. She had begun to dream of bells. Bells in the snow.
One morning, just after New Year’s, Tomas left for work early, scraping frost from his windshield in the dim blue light. Ingrid sat at the kitchen table, unmoving, hands folded like a church statue. Her breath fogged slightly in the air. The temperature had dropped again overnight.
Liv placed a bowl of porridge in front of her. Ingrid didn’t blink.
“I heard you speaking again last night,” Liv said softly. “To someone.”
Ingrid tilted her head. “It wasn’t someone. It was the river.”
“There’s no river near us.”
“There is. Beneath the house. Where it froze with her inside it.”
The spoon clattered to the floor. Liv hadn’t dropped it—she had gripped it too hard, and it had snapped.
That evening, Tomas returned home with a priest.
Pastor Lukas Hauge wasn’t from Skarnes. He had arrived just a few months earlier, assigned by the diocese to help fill the pews of a chapel that stood more often empty than not. He was young, tall, clean-shaven, his face too smooth for the stories that flickered in his eyes. He had been polite to the villagers, distant but kind, and no one had reason to mistrust him.
Still, when Liv saw him step through the door, she frowned.
“We’re not that kind of family,” she said under her breath.
Tomas grunted. “And this isn’t that kind of illness.”
Lukas sat down across from Ingrid, who was still at the table, her plate now covered in bits of dirt and fingernail clippings. No one knew where they’d come from. Liv had cleaned the kitchen top to bottom that morning.
“Hello, Ingrid,” Lukas said. “May I sit with you?”
She didn’t respond. Her hands were folded again. But her eyes flicked to him.
“Why are you here?” she asked. Her voice was soft, a whisper through a tunnel. “You left the others behind.”
Lukas froze.
“What others?”
Ingrid smiled. It was slow, unnatural—like her mouth had forgotten how.
“The ones that died in sand. You carried them on your back and still forgot their names.”
Lukas stood so suddenly his chair tipped.
He left the room.
Liv followed. “She’s just sick—don’t take it personally.”
But the priest’s hands were trembling. “I never told anyone about Kandahar. Not in this town. Not even the bishop knows.” His voice cracked.
Liv stood very still.
From the other room, they heard a low humming.
Lukas took a breath, and stepped back inside. Ingrid was rocking now, just barely, back and forth, back and forth.
He stepped closer.
“Do you know what you’re saying?” he asked.
She stopped rocking.
“I’m not the one saying it,” she said, still smiling. “She is.”
“Who?”
“The one who watches from the well.”
Lukas’s face darkened. “What well?”
Ingrid turned her eyes toward the window. Snow was falling again—thick, heavy flakes like ash.
“The one behind the chapel.”
Later that night, after Ingrid had been given something to help her sleep and laid in bed with the door ajar, Lukas drove alone through the dark to the chapel at the edge of town.
The church was a wooden structure, centuries old, its paint stripped by time and wind. A simple steeple, no bells. The graveyard behind it was overgrown and tilted—old stones bent like crooked teeth in the frozen ground.
Lukas walked the perimeter, his boots crunching the snow. The wind was oddly still.
Behind the chapel, where the ground sloped down into a wooded hollow, he found it.
A stone ring—half-collapsed, dusted in snow.
A well. Dry, long abandoned. Its mouth was sealed with an iron grate bolted over the opening.
The wind shifted.
He leaned over it. Listened.
Silence.
Then—
A breath.
A long, hollow exhale, from deep below.
Lukas staggered back, eyes wide. He reached for the small cross beneath his coat. It felt colder than ice.
A whisper followed.
“I can see you, soldier.”
Please visit https://drlal.se
Chapter 2: The Drowning Eyes
Pastor Lukas Hauge didn’t sleep that night.
He had returned from the chapel well past midnight, clothes stiff with frost, breath still fogging in the air even after he lit the old iron stove in the rectory. But no heat reached his bones. He sat in the armchair until dawn, listening—not to the wind outside, but to the silence inside.
It had changed.
The house no longer creaked the way old houses do. It was too still. Too watchful.
By morning, he decided: he had to go back.
The well behind the chapel had been sealed, yes—but the iron grate showed no signs of rust. No rot in the wooden frame. Someone had maintained it. Recently.
But who? And why?
He needed answers. Not from the Church. From the people who remembered Skarnes before it forgot itself.
And that meant one person: Einar Ulvstad.
Einar lived on the outskirts, in a half-collapsed cabin tangled in birch and snow. Everyone in Skarnes called him den siste vokteren—the last watcher. No one said it kindly. Some joked he was more moss than man. Others said he’d once been a priest himself, defrocked for heresy after claiming the forest had a mouth.
Lukas didn’t care about the gossip. He only cared about the well.
He found Einar chopping wood shirtless in the snow, steam rising from his back. The man was wiry, grey-bearded, with eyes like old water—dark and full of things that don’t move on the surface.
“You’re the new one,” Einar grunted. “The one who preaches to empty pews.”
Lukas stepped closer. “I need to ask about the well behind the chapel.”
The axe stopped mid-swing.
Einar lowered it slowly.
“You saw it?”
“I heard it.”
Einar’s jaw twitched. He picked up a coat and shrugged it on with difficulty, his arms stiff.
“She never left, you know,” he said. “That’s what the stories don’t say.”
Lukas frowned. “Who?”
Einar looked at him hard.
“The drowned girl. The one who sang under the water.”
Meanwhile, at the Aasen household, Ingrid had changed again.
She no longer whispered or cried in sleep. She simply lay there, eyes open. Staring.
Tomas tried to pretend it was nothing. He cleaned the house obsessively, played the radio too loud, argued with Liv about who should watch her. But he wouldn’t enter her room. Not since the night before.
That night, he’d gone in to check on her.
She was sitting upright. Awake.
He smiled—nervously—and said, “Hey, sweetheart. You feeling any better?”
She turned her head slowly toward him.
And he saw them.
Her eyes.
They were full of water. Not tears. Actual water—rippling and glassy, as if he were looking through the surface of a lake. Her pupils floated like drowned coins.
“Papa,” she said. “She’s behind you.”
He spun.
No one.
But when he turned back, Ingrid had lain back down.
And her eyes were dry.
He hadn’t told Liv.
Back at the cabin, Einar poured them both coffee. It tasted of smoke and something older.
“Long before your Church came,” he said, “the land had its own names. The river had a name. The forest. Even the wind. People spoke to them. Prayed to them. Sacrificed when they had to.”
Lukas narrowed his eyes. “What was the well used for?”
“Containment,” Einar said flatly. “It was a seal.”
“On what?”
“On her.”
Einar handed Lukas a small object wrapped in cloth. Inside was a faded photograph. Early 1900s. A group of children standing beside the chapel, faces pale in the black-and-white image. But one girl—at the edge—was looking away from the camera.
Her face was blurred. Not by age, not by time.
It was as if something refused to be seen.
“That’s Solveig,” Einar said. “The drowned girl.”
“I thought she was a myth.”
“She was a choir girl. Lovely voice. But she changed. Started humming songs no one had taught her. The priest tried to bless her. She bit his hand and screamed in three voices. Eventually, they held her under the river until the bubbles stopped.”
Lukas blinked. “They killed her?”
Einar nodded. “And sealed the well. But she didn’t die. Not properly. Not all of her.”
He looked Lukas dead in the eye.
“She clings to girls who can hear her.”
Lukas returned to the Aasens just before sunset.
Ingrid was still in bed, but different. Stiller. Her mouth was slightly open, lips moving without sound. Liv sat beside her, eyes bloodshot from exhaustion.
“She’s been like this all day,” she whispered.
Lukas leaned in.
Ingrid’s breath was slow. Almost… tidal.
“She’s not talking,” he murmured. “She’s singing.”
He placed his ear closer—and heard it:
A lullaby, impossibly soft, barely audible.
It wasn’t Norwegian. Nor Latin. But it had rhythm. Form. Something haunting. Something remembered.
Then Ingrid’s hand twitched.
And she said, louder: “He’s next. The one with the hollow cross.”
Lukas felt something cold slide down his spine.
His cross. The one beneath his shirt.
He pulled it out.
The metal had turned black.
That night, Liv stayed up late reading old records in the town hall archives. Tomas watched over Ingrid. Or tried to.
Around 3:00 a.m., the baby monitor crackled—though they had no baby.
It was Ingrid’s room.
The static hissed, then whispered.
“Don’t… forget… me.”
He rushed upstairs.
She wasn’t in bed.
The window was open. Bare footprints led out into the snow.
No coat. No boots.
He followed them down the road, calling her name.
They led toward the chapel.
And the well.
Lukas arrived before Tomas.
He had been awake, praying, unable to close his eyes. The cross still lay blackened beside his Bible. When the silence twisted around his house again—that same watchful quiet—he knew something had happened.
He drove in a blur.
The chapel stood empty.
But the back door was ajar.
He ran behind it—and saw her.
Ingrid.
Standing barefoot in the snow, facing the sealed well.
Her mouth moved in rhythm. The lullaby again.
Lukas stepped forward.
“Ingrid—”
She turned.
Her eyes were full of water again.
But this time, the water moved—spun, like whirlpools in her irises.
She opened her mouth.
And a second voice—wet, sloshing, ancient—spoke through her:
“You should have let her drown properly.”
Then she collapsed.
As Lukas caught her, something heavy shifted beneath the well grate.
And the chapel bell—silent for decades—rang once.
By itself.
Back in the house, Liv stared at a photo she had never noticed.
Ingrid as a child, maybe five. Playing near the edge of the lake.
And beside her—
Another girl.
Same age. Same face.
But Ingrid never had a sister.
Liv touched the image.
The second girl wasn’t in focus.
Please read https://drlal.me/synchronicity-the-universes-hidden-language
Chapter 3: Echoes of the Fjord
The next morning, frost clung thick to the trees, brittle and pale as bone.
Ingrid hadn’t spoken since collapsing beside the well.
Now she lay in bed, unmoving, her breathing shallow but steady. Her skin had taken on a glassy pallor—as if her flesh, like her eyes, was becoming more water than blood.
Liv sat by her daughter’s side with clenched fists, flinching at every twitch, every shallow breath. The photograph she had found the night before—a forgotten image of Ingrid as a small child with another little girl—sat in her lap.
There was no name on the back.
And yet… she remembered something.
Not clearly.
Like a dream that had been scrubbed clean.
A second crib. A name that made her tongue stiff. A night when the power went out and someone whispered from the other room—
“Don’t let her take me.”
Liv stared at the photo.
The other girl didn’t look quite right.
Ingrid’s eyes sparkled with mischief in the picture. The girl beside her had a crooked smile, a blank stare—like she hadn’t blinked in a long time. A mirror image with the soul reversed.
Her stomach turned.
What was it Lukas had said?
“She clings to girls who can hear her.”
Was that what the photo showed?
The first time Ingrid heard her?
Or something worse?
Lukas didn’t go to the church that morning. He went to the fjord.
The river that snaked through Skarnes emptied into a fjord just east of the village—a dark stretch of water lined with steep cliffs and woods that had never been cleared. People rarely visited. Boats that drifted into the fjord often didn’t return.
It was also where Solveig’s body had been found over a century ago, floating like a drowned lily with her hands crossed over her chest.
The locals called that part of the water Mørkedypet—“The Deep Dark.”
The only structure there was a crumbling boathouse, half-buried in moss and graffiti. Lukas stepped inside and found Einar already there.
He wasn’t surprised. Einar didn’t sleep like normal people.
“You found her,” Einar said. “At the well.”
Lukas nodded.
“She’s attached to the girl. Speaking through her. And now the well’s reacting.”
Einar poured something dark into two tin cups. It smelled like pine and fire.
“She was never just a ghost,” Einar muttered. “She’s a memory that doesn’t want to fade. A song that loops when no one’s listening. She needs ears. And hearts. Especially young ones.”
Lukas sipped, eyes hard. “Why Ingrid?”
Einar pulled a worn journal from a canvas bag. “Because Solveig was her sister.”
Lukas blinked. “That’s impossible.”
“Not by blood. Not by time. But by echo.” He tapped the journal. “The Church calls them reflections—children born near sacred or cursed sites who carry fragments of something older. They’re not possessed. They’re… mirrored. Sometimes from other lives. Sometimes from the land itself.”
“You’re saying Ingrid is a vessel?”
“I’m saying she was chosen the moment her first breath fogged the window.”
Lukas closed his eyes.
A hollow cross. A silent chapel. A village that had forgotten how to pray.
The pieces were moving faster now.
“Then what happens if Solveig fully enters her?”
Einar looked away.
“Then the song begins again.”
Liv left the house that afternoon with the photo in her pocket.
She drove to the municipal records office, which doubled as the library. The records keeper, an elderly woman named Britta, greeted her with distant politeness.
“I need birth records,” Liv said. “From 2011.”
Britta narrowed her eyes. “Your daughter’s year?”
“Yes. I need to check something. I think there’s a mistake.”
Britta sighed, shuffled to the back, and returned with a bound register.
Liv scanned the pages. She found Ingrid Aasen listed on October 4th, 2011.
Weight, length, time. All normal.
But two entries up—same hospital, same doctor, same time of birth—was another name:
Iselin F. Holstad.
No parents listed.
Liv’s fingers trembled.
Holstad had been her family’s name before marriage.
“Who is she?” Liv asked.
Britta shrugged. “No one came to claim her. Abandoned. Probably moved. These things happen.”
“No,” Liv whispered. “They don’t. Not exactly like this.”
The photo grew heavier in her pocket.
It wasn’t a memory—it was a warning.
A reflection that never left.
That night, Ingrid woke up.
Only for a moment.
She sat upright in bed, eyes dull, head tilted slightly—as if listening to something distant.
Then she turned to Liv and said, “She’s underneath.”
“Who, Ingrid?”
“The one with no face.”
“Ingrid, baby, talk to me—”
“She’s cold.”
Ingrid turned her head slowly toward the wall.
“She’s digging through the water. She wants her voice back.”
Then she lay down.
And was silent again.
Lukas stood before the well under moonlight, alone.
The iron grate was bent at one corner. As if something had pushed up.
He could hear the wind brushing the trees, but it didn’t fill the air. There was a deeper sound now.
Wet.
Slow.
Like something breathing beneath stone.
He whispered the Lord’s Prayer.
Then a child’s voice—Ingrid’s—floated up from the well.
“She knows your name, Father Lukas.”
He stepped back.
Then a second voice, darker, rasping:
“And she knows the name you forgot.”
The chapel bell rang again.
Twice.
The next morning, snow began to fall.
Light at first. Then heavier. Sharp flakes like bone fragments spinning in the air.
Lukas arrived at the Aasen home pale and drawn.
Liv let him in without a word.
“I need to show you something,” she said.
They sat at the table. She laid out the photograph. Then the birth record.
“She had a twin,” Liv whispered. “They didn’t tell me. Or… they did, and I forgot.”
Lukas scanned the photo, then the record.
“She’s not a twin,” he said quietly. “She’s a reflection.”
Liv frowned. “A what?”
Lukas looked at Ingrid’s closed door.
“Some children are born carrying echoes of the land. Of things buried. Especially near cursed places.”
Liv’s eyes widened. “Like the chapel?”
“Like the well. Something chose Ingrid. Because she could hear her. Solveig.”
He hesitated, then opened his bag.
He took out a wax-sealed envelope and slid it across the table.
Inside was a torn page from a 19th-century priest’s journal. Written in looping script:
“The child sings in her sleep again. The song curls through the floorboards like smoke. The mirror shattered yesterday. She wept when I buried it. But not because it cut her—
Because it couldn’t hold her face.”
Liv’s hand trembled as she read.
“We have to save her,” she whispered.
Lukas nodded.
“We will.”
But outside, unseen in the snow, footprints led away from the house.
Small.
Bare.
Heading back toward the chapel.
Ingrid walked through the trees, her breath fogging the air but not from cold.
She was humming. The same lullaby. But slower now, fractured—like a record spinning in reverse.
Her eyes were glassy.
But not empty.
Occupied.
And as she neared the chapel, the snow stopped falling.
Because the trees had stopped moving.
And so had the wind.
It was as if the world was holding its breath.
Waiting for the next note in the song.
Chapter 4: The Mirror Tree
Snow clung in clumps to Liv’s boots as she and Lukas trudged through the thicket behind the chapel, Ingrid’s footprints visible ahead of them. Small, bare, staggered as if she were walking half-asleep—or half-someone else.
“She didn’t take a coat,” Liv muttered through chattering teeth. “She should be freezing.”
Lukas didn’t answer. He knew why she wasn’t.
Something older than weather was walking with Ingrid now. Something that had no pulse and no need for warmth.
The footprints led to the back of the chapel, past the broken window where Lukas had seen the eyes in the night. The snow seemed untouched beyond that point—like Ingrid had simply vanished. But Lukas saw something others wouldn’t. A disturbance in the fallen snow: the faint outline of a circle.
“Here,” he said. “She passed through.”
“Through what?” Liv asked.
Lukas pulled out a vial of holy oil from his coat and uncapped it with shaking fingers. He knelt and traced the circle’s edge.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the ground inside the ring shimmered—like heat above asphalt—before sinking inward. A hollow thud echoed beneath them.
Liv gasped as a stone hatch appeared beneath the melting snow.
Lukas pried it open.
Stale air wafted up, thick with the scent of old soil and… something else. Sweet. Like rot that had once been perfume.
A ladder descended into blackness.
They exchanged a look.
Then Liv climbed down first.
The air grew colder as they descended, but not in a natural way. It wasn’t the chill of winter.
It was the cold of absence.
The ladder led to a narrow stone corridor, barely lit by flickering candles—fresh candles, burning low.
“She’s been here,” Liv whispered.
The walls were lined with old iron sconces, but the stone was odd. Blackened in places, warped in others. As though it had been melted and reshaped by hands that didn’t care about symmetry.
They passed inscriptions in Old Norse. Lukas translated on the fly.
“He who speaks her name opens the veil.”
“What grows in the dark does not die—it waits.”
“Bind the child. Cut the root. Silence the echo.”
Liv shuddered. “What does that mean?”
“It means we’re in the right place,” Lukas said grimly.
The corridor widened into a subterranean chamber—and they stopped cold.
A single tree grew in the center of the space.
The Mirror Tree.
It wasn’t like any birch Liv had seen. Its bark was pale silver, glistening as though it had been dipped in ice. But its surface was wrong—reflective. Like thin glass or a warped mirror, each curl of bark catching light in unnatural ways.
And hanging from the branches—
—mirrors.
Hundreds of them. Tiny, child-sized, ancient and cracked. They swayed slowly, though no wind moved. Each held a faint image—not of the viewer, but of something almost like them.
Some had no eyes.
Some had too many.
Some were smiling. Others screaming.
“They called this the Cradle of Reflections,” Lukas said quietly. “It was buried after the burning of the old chapel. A place where the dead were remembered into existence.”
Liv stared, horrified. “You mean…”
“Not ghosts. Not exactly. But the echo of someone who died wrong. Someone the land couldn’t forget.”
Suddenly, Liv pointed. “There!”
A figure stood beside the tree.
Ingrid.
She was motionless, one hand touching the bark.
Mirrors rippled around her. Some showed her image, but altered: in a white dress, hair longer, eyes black. Others showed a second girl beside her—flickering in and out—smiling, mouth too wide.
Lukas stepped forward. “Ingrid!”
She didn’t move.
He reached into his coat for the prayer scroll.
But before he could speak—
The bark under Ingrid’s hand split open.
A black slit appeared, oozing sap like ink. From it, a voice bled out. High. Soft. And old.
“She’s almost ready.”
Lukas grabbed Ingrid’s wrist, pulling her back.
Her eyes snapped open—white as snow.
“Father Lukas,” she whispered, smiling faintly. “You came back. Just like before.”
He froze. “What do you mean?”
“You stood here once. When the mirror cracked. When they tried to burn her out of me. But you didn’t finish the prayer.”
Lukas’s blood ran cold.
“I’ve never been here before,” he said.
“Oh,” Ingrid tilted her head. “But he has.”
She pointed past him.
Lukas turned.
The mirrors behind the tree rippled—and in one of them, he saw himself.
Younger. Drenched in water. Kneeling in the same chamber, chanting over a child bound in chains.
He stumbled back, shaking.
“No… that’s not…”
“You forgot her,” Ingrid said, voice now a blend of her own and another. “You buried the prayer with the child. And now she’s climbed back up.”
The mirrors trembled.
The tree groaned.
And then something began to push its way out of the bark.
A face.
But not a human one.
A child’s mask, wooden and warped, stretching the opening wider. The mask wept sap from its eyes and whispered through the cracks: “I remember your voice, Lukas.”
Liv screamed and pulled Ingrid back.
The air turned heavy.
Lukas threw the prayer scroll into the roots of the Mirror Tree and shouted:
“Et lux in tenebris lucet, et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt!
(The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it!)”
The mask shrieked.
Mirrors shattered in waves.
The bark sealed shut.
And Ingrid collapsed into Liv’s arms.
The chamber trembled.
“Go!” Lukas shouted.
They fled the Mirror Tree as it wailed behind them, glass exploding like thunder, sap spilling onto the floor like spilled oil.
They climbed the ladder just as the hatch slammed shut behind them.
Snow resumed falling aboveground, as if time had blinked.
Back home, Ingrid slept again.
This time, peacefully.
Lukas stood at the door, eyes sunken.
“I still don’t know what it is,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“She called it a mask,” Liv said. “Is that what Solveig was?”
Lukas shook his head. “I don’t think Solveig was ever real. I think she was a voice. A wound. Given form by memory, then fed by children who could hear her.”
Liv stared out the window. “Then what’s next?”
“She’s not gone. Only sleeping.”
He looked at Ingrid.
“She’ll try again. Through someone else. She always does.”
And from under the house, so faint it could have been imagination, a cracked voice whispered:
“Not gone. Not forgotten. Not alone.”
Chapter 5: The Other Voice
The winter deepened in Skarnes.
Two weeks had passed since Liv and Lukas found Ingrid beneath the chapel—since they faced the Mirror Tree and the masked thing that tried to claw its way through her skin. Since they sealed whatever it was… or thought they had.
Ingrid no longer heard the voice. Her eyes had regained their soft green hue, her laughter came easier, and she remembered nothing about the tree or what it had tried to show her.
But the quiet that followed was uneasy.
The silence didn’t feel like peace.
It felt like waiting.
The morning began like any other.
Frost etched the windows. The school bell rang late because the headmaster’s car wouldn’t start. Children shuffled in, red-cheeked and sleepy.
And in the far corner of the third-grade classroom sat a boy named Elias Grønli—small, pale, with an unbrushed mop of blond hair and wide, unblinking eyes.
He hadn’t spoken a word in three days.
Not to his teacher. Not to his mother. Not even to the family dog, who used to sleep at the foot of his bed but now refused to enter his room.
Elias just sat.
Watching.
Listening.
As if waiting for someone to finish a sentence only he could hear.
Liv first heard about him from one of her students.
“Miss Liv, Elias is being weird again,” said Karianne, a shy girl with freckles and a sheep-shaped backpack.
Liv blinked. “Weird how?”
Karianne hesitated. “He talks to… nothing.”
“Like imaginary friends?”
“No,” Karianne said. “Like… someone who’s standing right next to him. But nobody’s there.”
Liv tried to smile. “That’s not so unusual. Lots of kids—”
“He calls it Solveig,” Karianne interrupted.
Liv’s throat closed.
“What did you say?”
“He says her name is Solveig. That she tells him stories. And that she’s always behind the mirror.”
That night, Liv sat across from Lukas at the rectory kitchen table, her hands tight around a mug of tea gone cold.
“I knew it wasn’t over,” she said.
Lukas stared at the floor. “This is how it spreads. Not like an infection. Like a… song. A lullaby no one remembers learning, but everyone knows the words to when they hear it.”
“Elias is only eight.”
“Age doesn’t matter. In fact, it prefers the young. The vulnerable.”
He stood abruptly and paced the room. “I thought closing the chamber would be enough. That sealing the tree would cut the echo.”
“But Solveig doesn’t live in the tree,” Liv whispered. “She lives in memory.”
Lukas nodded. “And memory is viral.”
The next morning, they visited the Grønli house—a neat red cottage just outside the village, where the snow seemed oddly undisturbed despite the wind.
Elias’s mother, Lene, answered the door in a faded sweater and exhausted eyes.
“You’re the priest and the teacher, aren’t you?” she asked. “He said you’d come.”
Liv glanced at Lukas.
“May we speak with him?” Lukas asked gently.
Lene hesitated. “He’s been… different. Since last week. It started small—just a new imaginary friend. But now he draws things. Circles. Trees. Faces.”
“Faces?” Liv asked.
Lene nodded. “Always the same. A girl with no eyes. And a mask with a smile that goes too wide.”
Elias’s room was quiet. Almost sterile.
No toys scattered the floor. No books. Just a blank drawing pad on his desk, covered in childlike pencil sketches. And in the center of the bed sat Elias—knees pulled to his chest, staring at the wardrobe mirror.
Lukas stepped in slowly. “Hello, Elias.”
The boy didn’t move.
Lukas knelt beside the bed. “Who is Solveig?”
Elias blinked. His lips parted just slightly.
“She was under the roots,” he whispered.
Liv stepped forward. “What did she say?”
“That I could help her. That she’s scared. That the man in the black robe is going to forget her again.”
Lukas went pale.
“What else did she say?”
“That she has a gift. But I have to open the right door.”
Elias finally turned to Liv—and his eyes weren’t quite right.
Too wide. Too still.
Like Ingrid’s had been.
“She says I’m the echo now.”
That night, Liv stayed in the rectory. She couldn’t sleep—not with Elias’s voice echoing in her mind.
“I’m the echo now.”
What did that mean?
She sat in the study, going over Lukas’s notes from the chapel archives.
Among the brittle pages, she found a folded map—one drawn by a monk in the late 1700s. It showed the village as it was back then. The chapel. The lake. And a strange symbol etched behind the western ridge: a triangle within a circle, labeled in Latin as “Speculum Portae.”
“The Mirror Gate.”
She ran her finger along the line.
Beneath the drawing was a phrase, half-erased:
“Where reflections gather, the veil is thin.”
Liv stood, heart racing. She had to see it.
Whatever Solveig was, whatever the mirror truly represented—it didn’t begin in the chapel.
It began at the Mirror Gate.
By morning, the village was different.
Frost hung heavier on the trees.
Birdsong had stopped.
And from the hill where the Mirror Gate once stood, a sound carried on the wind.
Singing.
Not joyful.
Not mournful.
Just wrong.
Ingrid woke screaming.
Lukas ran to her side.
“She’s in the mirror,” Ingrid sobbed. “But she’s not me anymore. She’s someone else now. And she’s smiling.”
Lukas looked out the window—and saw, far in the distance, something glinting in the trees.
A flash of silver.
A shape that looked like a tree made of glass.
The Mirror Tree was back.
But not underground.
Not hidden.
It had moved.
And something was standing beside it.
Watching.
Chapter 6: The Mirror Gate
The forest behind Skarnes had changed.
Liv felt it the moment she stepped off the road and into the snow-blanketed trees. The air wasn’t still anymore—it was holding its breath.
No birds.
No breeze.
Just the faint metallic scent of something wrong.
Lukas walked beside her in silence, clutching a leather-bound volume older than the chapel itself. Inside were accounts of “reflections speaking,” of spirits bound not by death but by memory—ones that echoed, and grew stronger when remembered.
“She’s feeding again,” Lukas said quietly. “Each time her name is spoken, each time a child repeats her story, it gives her shape. Voice.”
“Like a tulpa?” Liv asked.
He nodded. “But this one doesn’t just need belief. It needs a host.”
They crested the western ridge, where trees bent unnaturally outward, as if pushed from within by something vast. The wind shifted—and the singing returned.
Faint. Sweet.
A little girl’s lullaby, but out of tune. Out of time.
And far too close.
The Mirror Gate stood at the base of a small, frozen clearing. No actual gate remained—only the foundation stones of what had once been a shrine. In the center, standing crooked in the earth, was an arch made of twisted roots and broken mirrors, embedded like teeth in rotting wood.
Each shard reflected something different.
Some showed the woods.
Some showed Skarnes.
One showed Liv’s old bedroom, untouched for twenty years.
Another showed the inside of Elias’s closet—and in the corner of it, a girl-shaped shadow breathing.
Lukas stepped cautiously toward the arch.
“Don’t touch it,” Liv warned.
He didn’t respond.
He stared into one mirror shard showing the chapel as it was burning—fire rolling over the rafters, children screaming, a figure in a white dress standing in the center, untouched by flame.
“Lukas,” Liv said sharply. “Come back.”
He blinked—then stumbled back, pale.
“I heard her,” he whispered. “She said my name. She remembers how I left her.”
Suddenly, the mirror gate shimmered.
And from behind the trees came laughter.
Childlike.
But too hollow. Too slow.
Elias stepped out from the tree line, barefoot and shivering, but smiling.
“Hi, Miss Liv,” he said sweetly. “I brought her.”
Liv ran to him, grabbing his shoulders. “Elias—who brought who?”
He looked up. His eyes were glassy. His teeth were too white.
“She was lonely. You locked her under the roots. She didn’t like that.”
Then he looked toward the arch.
And something stepped through.
It looked like a girl.
But it wasn’t.
The creature moved like it had just learned how—every step slightly off, every joint bending a little too far. Its dress was white, but smudged with ash. Its hair hung wet, though the air was dry. And its face—
A wooden mask, warped by time, carved to smile with rows of teeth that stretched ear to ear. Eyes hollow.
As it walked, the trees leaned toward it.
The snow beneath its feet hissed and melted.
Liv couldn’t move.
Her breath caught in her throat as it turned to her.
The mask tilted.
Then it spoke.
“I wore her face,” it rasped. “But she cried too much. I like Elias better. He doesn’t scream as loud.”
The voice changed, mid-sentence—half-child, half-something else. Like an adult whispering through a child’s mouth, unsure how pitch worked.
It stepped closer to Liv.
She felt pressure—like her thoughts were being sifted, peeled back.
The mask split slightly down the middle. Beneath it was nothing. Just a hole, pulsing with static and whispering voices.
It reached toward her cheek.
Lukas stepped forward, slamming a crucifix into the snow.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti—”
The creature shrieked, not in pain but mockery.
“Words, words, words!” it hissed, echoing in Elias’s voice. “You buried her, Father Lukas. But she dug up the others.”
From the arch behind them, figures began to appear.
More children.
Not real.
Reflections.
Their eyes were black. Their mouths stitched shut. Their shadows moved differently than their bodies.
Liv screamed and yanked Elias back, but his body went limp in her arms—eyes fluttering, whispering:
“She’s in the glass now. She’s in the bones of the house.”
They fled.
Through the trees. Through the snow.
Not daring to look back.
Behind them, the Mirror Gate hummed—each shard vibrating with breathless tension. The arch glowed faintly blue. And the laughter grew louder, multiplied, bouncing between the trees.
Back in Skarnes, night fell fast.
Too fast.
The sun blinked out behind thick clouds, and power across the village began to fail.
Homes flickered and went black.
Phones refused to dial.
Mirrors began to fog over—inside bathrooms, bedrooms, cars.
And in each one, just beneath the mist—
a smile.
Liv locked the classroom windows and pulled the curtains.
“I don’t think she needs the forest anymore,” she whispered. “She’s everywhere now.”
Lukas slammed a book shut on the desk.
“She crossed over. The veil was thinnest at the Gate. Now the echo isn’t bound to one child. It’s a resonance. It can jump. Multiply.”
“How do we stop something that isn’t alive?”
He stared at her, hollow-eyed.
“We don’t kill it. We cut its root.”
He pulled out an old diagram—the same symbol Liv had seen before.
The circle.
The triangle.
The Gate.
“There’s a ritual. Not exorcism. Excision. We don’t drive her out—we erase the memory she clings to. But it means finding the original wound. The first voice. The real Solveig.”
“Are you saying Solveig… actually existed?”
“Yes. But the girl we buried wasn’t her. Solveig wasn’t a person. She was the result. The manifestation of what happened to her.”
Liv’s mouth went dry.
“What happened to her?”
Lukas said nothing.
He only looked toward the frost-covered chapel window.
And from the mirror beside it—
A girl’s eye blinked open.
Chapter 7: The Wound Beneath the Altar
The chapel was colder than outside.
Not just because of the stone. Not just the wind squeezing through the roof tiles.
It was cold in a way that felt deliberate.
Lukas held the lantern higher, its flame trembling. Shadows cast by the pews stretched long and unnatural, curling toward the altar like fingers reaching for heat—or for confession.
Liv paused beside the old prayer bench.
“I haven’t been down there since we sealed the chamber.”
“It’s still sealed,” Lukas murmured. “But it’s not silent anymore.”
There was a sound below.
Not footsteps.
Not voices.
Breathing.
Heavy and wet, rising from beneath the stone.
They pulled the iron ring in the floorboard and opened the hidden passage. A narrow staircase descended into darkness, mossed over and crumbling at the edges.
With each step, Liv felt the air grow heavier.
The deeper they went, the older everything felt. As if time hadn’t just passed—it had gotten stuck.
The stone was slick with moisture.
The walls pulsed with a slow vibration—like distant whispers pressed into the rock, too quiet to understand, too rhythmic to ignore.
At the bottom was the sealed door: carved with runes, hammered shut with nine iron nails.
Each nail had once represented a vow.
One for silence.
One for sanctity.
And seven for forgetting.
Lukas handed Liv a chisel.
“Help me,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“No. But it’s already too late to stay innocent.”
The final nail screamed as it came loose.
The door cracked open.
The air beyond was dead. Stagnant. Bitter. It rolled over them like breath from a long-closed tomb.
The chamber was as they left it—but not as they remembered it.
Where once the Mirror Tree stood was now only its shadow—an imprint scorched into the stone, glistening faintly with something that moved when not directly looked at.
And at the far end, a wall had crumbled inward, revealing a tunnel.
Not man-made.
Gnawed.
Lukas approached slowly, lantern lifted. The walls were lined with claw marks—and words, scratched over and over:
She was never meant to leave.
We buried her name.
But she remembered herself.
Liv crouched beside the markings.
There, scratched deeper than the rest, was a single word:
Solveig.
The tunnel sloped downward.
As they moved through it, the air grew thicker—choking, syrupy. Time itself felt different here. Watches stopped. Their phones flickered.
And then they reached the ossuary.
It wasn’t on any map.
A natural cavern, cathedral-sized, hidden beneath the chapel foundations. Dozens—perhaps hundreds—of bones lined the walls, arranged like saints. Skulls grinned from alcoves, some too small to have belonged to adults.
In the center stood a stone slab, half-buried in the earth.
An altar.
Unmarked.
Forgotten.
But the wound in the earth beneath it pulsed red.
Liv stumbled forward.
“It’s warm…”
Lukas knelt beside the slab and brushed away dust.
There was something embedded in it—a child’s braid of hair, wrapped in a ribbon long decayed. Beneath it, words had been carved in blood:
She begged them not to take her voice.
So they took her face instead.
Suddenly, the chamber shifted.
Not visibly. Not physically.
But reality thinned.
Shadows lengthened.
The stone beneath them blurred.
And behind them—soft, slow—a giggle.
They turned.
Standing in the tunnel was a girl in a white dress, barefoot, her long hair hiding her face.
“Do you remember now?” she asked.
Her voice was like crumpled paper.
“Do you see what they did?”
Liv stepped back. “Who are you?”
The girl tilted her head. Her hair parted slightly.
No eyes.
No lips.
Only stitched flesh.
“They took everything,” she whispered. “But memory doesn’t die. It festers.”
The lantern shattered.
Darkness swallowed them.
Lukas shouted.
Liv grabbed the edge of the altar.
The girl’s voice echoed everywhere at once—inside their heads, behind their ribs, whispering in a hundred stolen tones:
“Help me. I’m scared. I don’t want to wear the face anymore.”
Liv gasped. “You’re not Solveig…”
Silence.
Then—
“No,” the voice said softly.
“I’m what’s left of her.”
Suddenly, the chamber flooded with light.
Not from above.
From the walls—from each skull’s eyes, each bone’s hollow.
They began to glow.
One by one, the ossuary came alive.
And the bones began to speak.
Screams. Cries. Begging.
Hundreds of voices—women, children, old men—layered into a single plea:
“Remember her.
Don’t let her wear us again.”
Lukas dropped to his knees.
“The ritual,” he gasped. “We don’t exorcise her. We mourn her.”
Liv stared at him. “What?”
He grabbed the ribbon from the altar and pressed it to his lips.
“She didn’t want revenge. She wanted to be remembered. To be heard. But they silenced her. Covered it up. Pretended it never happened.”
The altar stone cracked.
A seam opened.
From inside the crack rose a mirror—small, hand-held, framed in bone.
Liv touched it.
The glass shimmered.
And she saw.
A farmhouse. Winter. Early 1800s.
A girl—Solveig—locked in a cellar, crying.
A priest standing above her, preaching purification.
Her father, weeping.
Her mother turning away.
Then flames.
Screams.
And darkness swallowing her name.
Liv dropped the mirror.
Tears ran down her face.
“They… killed her.”
Lukas nodded, trembling. “And when she wouldn’t stay dead, they buried her memory so deep even her ghost forgot who she was.”
“But now she remembers.”
From the tunnel came footsteps.
Slow.
Deliberate.
And wearing the mask.
But the creature’s body flickered—as if unsure what shape to take. Solveig’s pain was real. Her ghost was real.
But the thing that now wore her memory?
That was something worse.
Liv raised the mirror like a crucifix.
“You’re not her.”
The masked figure stopped.
“You’re her wound.”
The cavern pulsed.
“You feed on forgetting. But we remember her now.”
And with that—Liv pressed the mirror to the altar’s cracked seam.
There was a howl—not of rage, but of heartbreak.
The mirror shattered.
And the wound beneath the altar—
Closed.
The masked thing screamed once—high, brittle—and dissolved like ash in wind.
The glow faded from the bones.
Silence returned.
And in that silence… for the first time… peace.
As they emerged from the ossuary, the sky over Skarnes was beginning to lighten.
Faint pink.
Quiet snow.
The air felt clean.
And across the village, the mirrors were just mirrors again.
Back in her classroom, Liv found Elias curled up in a blanket.
Sleeping.
Breathing peacefully.
When he woke, he blinked.
“Miss Liv?” he whispered. “Did the girl go home?”
Liv nodded, brushing hair from his face.
“She remembered who she was. That was all she needed.”
Elias smiled faintly, then closed his eyes.
No mask.
No echo.
Just a child, safe again.
Chapter 8: The Teeth in the Well
Snow fell silently over Skarnes, wrapping the village in a deceptive stillness. The storm had passed, but the silence that followed felt hollow, as if the land itself were holding its breath.
Liv had slept for only two hours before the call came.
“Lukas,” she said, voice hoarse, “what’s wrong?”
“Come to the old well behind the school,” he said. “Bring your cross.”
The well had stood behind the Skarnes schoolhouse for more than a century, its stone worn smooth by generations of children’s hands. But no one used it anymore. The water had gone bad—sour, metallic. People whispered that a fox had drowned in it. Others said a child.
But no one had ever found a body.
Lukas waited beside it, flashlight clutched tight.
“It started humming,” he said. “I was walking past and felt something… watching me.”
Liv stepped closer.
There it was—a deep resonance, too low for hearing, but felt in the teeth. A kind of bone-buzz, like the growl of a beast still underground.
The rope hung limp over the stone rim.
“Someone opened the seal below,” Lukas said.
Liv narrowed her eyes. “There was a seal?”
“In the older records—before the church burned—there’s a mention of a sacred wellspring beneath Skarnes. The priests used to call it Livets Gap. The Mouth of Life.”
She stared down into the well.
It was black.
Too black.
Not just dark—but hungry.
They lowered a camera attached to a climbing rope.
The feed showed the shaft descending straight for about ten meters, then twisting sharply. The walls changed from hand-laid stone to something older—natural rock, but gnawed. Like the tunnel beneath the chapel.
Then the camera caught movement.
Not a shape—just a shimmer.
Something oily. Sliding past the lens.
Then:
A face.
Pale. Human.
Eyes wide open.
Mouth distended.
Then the screen went black.
They retrieved the rope.
The camera came up half-melted.
And wet.
But not with water.
It dripped something viscous. Clear.
Liv touched it.
Her skin crawled.
It wasn’t liquid. It was memory.
Images flared behind her eyes—a woman screaming in childbirth, alone in the snow. A soldier burying a broken cross. A child with no tongue scratching prayers into stone.
She staggered back.
“It’s feeding,” Lukas said softly. “On suffering. And now that Solveig’s grief is gone…”
“It’s hungry again.”
They drove to the archives.
Liv had remembered something her grandmother once said: “A well is not always a gift. Sometimes it’s a gate.”
Lukas pulled out an old map of Skarnes from 1854.
“There,” he said, pointing. “See that mark?”
It was a spiral etched in red, just under the hill where the school now stood.
“It’s the symbol for a helgrindr,” Lukas whispered.
Liv’s breath caught.
“A gate to the underworld.”
They found references scattered in Norse texts, Catholic suppression files, even Sami oral histories. It had many names: Livets Gap. Gánni’s Maw. The Quiet Mouth. The Hollow Light.
But it was always the same thing.
A place where sorrow pooled.
Where pain was swallowed.
Where memory could be devoured—and become something else.
Lukas spoke slowly. “Solveig’s spirit was never what haunted Skarnes. She was its bait.”
“A lure?”
He nodded grimly. “To attract others. The weak, the wounded. Children. It fed on her, and through her, on us.”
Liv clenched her fists. “And now that she’s gone…”
“It’s waking up.”
That night, the nightmares returned.
Liv dreamed of a well full of teeth.
Not human teeth.
Wider. Older. Rooted in stone.
Something beneath Skarnes smiled in the dark.
Morning brought panic.
Elias was missing.
His mother, Elise, had fallen asleep beside him in the living room. When she woke, the blanket was still there—but Elias wasn’t.
Only the mirror on the wall was cracked.
And on the inside of the living room window, scratched into the condensation:
“The Hollow Light is warm.”
Search parties scoured the forest.
They found no tracks in the snow.
Only a single shoe, wedged between roots behind the school.
And nearby, the sound of dripping.
They followed it to the well.
The rope was gone.
Only the wind answered when they called down.
Lukas dropped to his knees beside the well’s lip.
“It’s taking them. One by one.”
Liv stared into the void.
“We’re not dealing with a haunting,” she whispered. “This is a wound in the world. And something lives inside it.”
She rose.
“We’re going down.”
They returned that night—armed.
Ropes, climbing gear, flares. Holy water. A crucifix. Two knives—blessed by the bishop in Hamar after Lukas showed him the melted camera.
He hadn’t argued.
He had only said, “If you hear it speak in your voice, cover your ears and do not answer.”
The descent was slow.
The rope creaked.
The air thickened.
And then, the bend.
Liv braced her feet and slid into the horizontal shaft.
Lukas followed.
It was too tight. The walls brushed their shoulders.
The silence was total—so complete they heard their own blood.
And then—a light ahead.
Faint.
Blue-white.
Not natural.
Not electric.
They emerged into a chamber.
It was vast—far too large to exist under a hill.
The walls pulsed with light.
And hanging from the ceiling—hundreds of feet above—were mirrors.
Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Spinning slowly. Suspended on invisible threads.
Each reflected a different scene.
Elias crying in a cellar.
Solveig’s face, melting and reforming.
A priest cutting out his own tongue.
Lukas stepped forward.
The chamber whimpered.
Then something moved.
From the far side, crawling slowly toward them, came a shape.
Massive.
Blind.
Toothed.
It had no eyes, no limbs—just a mouth ringed with rows of jagged obsidian teeth, emerging from a body of pulsing sinew and sorrow.
It left behind trails of memory—echoes of screams, flashes of pain, faces frozen in despair.
Liv screamed. Lukas raised the cross.
The thing halted.
Its flesh split—not from damage, but in offering.
Inside its mouth was a figure.
Small.
Curled up.
Elias.
“Elias!” Liv cried.
She ran.
The walls screamed.
The mirrors shattered.
The Mouth roared.
But Liv dove forward, grabbed the child, and ripped him free.
The creature howled—not in pain, but in confusion.
It didn’t understand rescue.
Only sacrifice.
Lukas threw the vial of holy water.
It hissed, steaming, and recoiled.
And then the ceiling cracked.
Stone rained down.
The mirrors collapsed.
The chamber shook.
They ran.
They reached the rope just as the tunnel behind them caved in.
The Mouth didn’t pursue.
It only watched.
And in its gaping maw, before the shadows swallowed it, Liv saw something that turned her blood cold:
Another figure.
Not Elias.
Not Solveig.
But herself.
Smiling.
They surfaced into freezing night air, lungs burning.
Elias stirred.
His eyes were clear.
Liv wept.
But her joy was short-lived.
Because as she looked at the well, something shimmered across the surface—like a reflection trapped inside glass.
And from deep below…
A heartbeat.
Slow.
Steady.
Patient.
Chapter 9: The Mirror That Breathes
The snow had turned to ash.
That’s how it looked to Liv as she drove home from the well—tiny grey flakes drifting through the headlights, swirling like something undead.
Elias slept in the back seat, his chest rising and falling in a gentle rhythm. Lukas sat beside her, silent, gripping a flask of holy water so tight his knuckles were white.
No one spoke.
Not even the wind.
Back at her cottage, Liv laid Elias on the couch and wrapped him in quilts. Lukas lit the fireplace. They didn’t turn on any lights. Somehow, darkness felt safer than reflection.
The well was sealed, but they both knew it hadn’t ended.
It had opened something in them.
Later, as Liv washed the grime from her hands in the bathroom sink, she looked up—and froze.
Her reflection blinked out of rhythm with her.
She recoiled.
The mirror shimmered. Not like glass. Like water.
She leaned closer.
And the reflection smiled.
She didn’t.
Liv backed away, heart racing. She turned to leave the bathroom—but the door had vanished.
Just tiles.
Just wall.
Behind her, the mirror began to breathe—slow, heavy exhales that fogged the surface.
A word appeared in the condensation:
“Welcome back.”
She screamed.
And blinked.
She was standing in the hallway.
The mirror was still. The door was there.
She gasped, stumbled backward.
Lukas caught her.
“What happened?”
She pointed at the bathroom. “The mirror. It—moved. It’s alive.”
He didn’t question her. He just nodded.
“It’s begun.”
Over the next few hours, things shifted.
Elias cried out in his sleep, speaking in fragments of old tongues—languages Liv didn’t recognize but somehow understood: ancient dialects, funeral prayers, phrases that tasted of earth and blood.
The clocks stopped.
The crucifix on the wall turned upside down without sound or motion.
And Lukas—usually calm, unshakable—began scratching his arms until they bled.
Liv forced him to sit.
“It’s using our memories against us,” she said. “It’s inside now.”
“In what way?” he asked, barely able to meet her eyes.
She turned toward the window.
“There’s something in me,” she whispered. “I saw myself… in the Mouth. Smiling. Like it was… wearing me.”
Lukas didn’t answer for a long time.
Finally, he said, “It’s not just feeding anymore.”
“It’s replacing.”
That night, Liv dreamed of the mirror again.
This time, she stepped through.
The other side was a hallway of glass, each pane showing a moment from her life—her first communion, her mother’s death, the night Solveig was buried.
And one more.
Not from her memory.
It showed her standing above a body—Lukas’s body—covered in black veins.
She was smiling.
And in her hand, she held a crucifix—twisted into the shape of a fang.
She woke in a sweat.
The mirror was fogged.
And written across it:
“Soon, we will be one.”
The next morning, Elias woke.
His eyes were clearer, but distant—like he’d seen a century pass.
“Where did it take you?” Liv asked gently.
He hesitated.
“Not down,” he whispered. “Inside.”
She shivered. “Inside what?”
He touched his chest. Then his head.
Then hers.
They drove to Lukas’s cabin deep in the forest—far from the mirrors, from the town, from people. It was time to uncover the truth. They needed records. Answers. Something to fight back.
Lukas had inherited boxes of journals from his grandfather—once a local priest who had tried to warn the village about the well before being committed to an asylum.
“‘Skarnes is a nest,’” Lukas read aloud, flipping through yellowed pages. “‘Not of demons. Not of ghosts. Of something older. Something that feeds on remembrance.’”
Liv sat up. “Memory.”
He nodded.
“‘It doesn’t haunt people. It becomes them. Slowly. Thought by thought. Grief by grief.’”
They kept reading into the night.
The writings spoke of a symbiont spirit—a being that does not possess in the traditional sense, but rather invites the soul to collapse into it, gradually erasing the boundaries of self.
The warning was clear:
“Once you see your own reflection smile without you—
It has already begun.
And the Hollow Light shall never leave you.”
As midnight approached, the forest outside grew too quiet.
No wind. No birds. Not even the ticking of trees in the cold.
Then came the scratching.
Not on the walls.
From inside the mirror.
Liv looked.
There was something behind her.
In the reflection.
She turned.
Nothing.
But the mirror still showed it: a figure, hunched, skin stretched too tight across its bones, wearing her face like a veil. Its eyes were too dark. Too hollow.
And it began to peel itself off the reflection—one trembling hand at a time.
Lukas smashed the mirror before it could emerge.
But the damage was done.
In the corner, Elias whimpered.
Liv ran to him—but he recoiled.
“You’re not… her.”
The words stung.
But they were true.
Something was changing.
Inside her.
The Hollow Light had left a seed.
They boarded every mirror in the cabin.
But the reflections kept finding her—on glass, on still water, even in the glint of a knife.
And in every reflection now…
She was smiling.
Lukas found an entry near the end of the priest’s journals:
“If the Light takes root, burn the image.
Bury it under stone.
Never speak her name again.
And pray she does not answer.”
The next day, they dug through the snow to a grove mentioned in the journal—an old Sami burial site.
There, under the frozen soil, they found it:
A mirror wrapped in leather and sinew.
Carved into the leather were three symbols:
- A broken eye.
- A closed mouth.
- A spiral.
It was a containment vessel.
A prison for memory.
But the moment they touched it, Liv heard her own voice whisper from within:
“Let me out.”
She fell back, screaming.
Because it wasn’t spoken in fear.
It was eager.
And it was getting louder.
That night, she locked herself in the cabin’s basement.
She didn’t trust herself anymore.
Not fully.
Lukas stood outside the door with a Bible in one hand and a knife in the other.
“If I start to change,” she told him through the wood, “you end it. Promise me.”
He didn’t answer.
She heard him sit.
And wait.
But inside, the mirror began to form again—on the walls, in the grain of the wood, in the moisture of her own breath.
And then it spoke:
“There is no you without me now. You opened the gate. You’re my mouth.”
Liv fell to her knees.
And for the first time—
She wondered if she had already lost.
Chapter 10: The Gate Beneath the Tongue
The morning after the basement night, Liv awoke with a strange taste in her mouth — bitter, metallic, like rust mixed with ash. Her tongue felt swollen, thick, and strangely heavy. She ran to the mirror in the cabin’s main room, but the surface was blurred, as if breathing on its own.
She hesitated — then forced herself to speak aloud, “Is this real? Am I… still me?”
The mirror shimmered.
A whisper slipped through: “You are more than yourself now. You carry the gate beneath your tongue.”
Lukas was already downstairs, poring over old tomes and manuscripts from his grandfather’s collection. He looked up sharply when she entered.
“Your tongue?” he asked, eyes narrowing.
She opened her mouth. Nothing visible — no swelling, no wounds — but the heaviness remained, like something lodged beneath the flesh.
Lukas grabbed a small leather-bound book. “There’s an old legend — about a gateway that lies hidden beneath the tongue. Not a physical gate, but a spiritual one. A place where the boundary between the living and the Hollow Light grows thin.”
Liv swallowed hard. “Are you saying… it’s inside me?”
“Not just inside. It’s growing with you. Changing the way you speak, the way you remember.”
Over the next days, Liv found herself forgetting simple things — names, faces, moments from her childhood that had once been crystal clear. Worse, sometimes she remembered things differently, as if the past was being rewritten.
One evening, she sat with Elias, trying to distract him with stories from his early years. But he stared at her, eyes empty.
“You’re lying,” he said softly.
Liv’s heart clenched.
“I’m not,” she insisted.
“Your voice,” he whispered, “it’s not yours anymore.”
At night, the whispering grew louder.
Not from the mirror.
From inside her.
The gate beneath her tongue pulsed with a terrible hunger.
It spoke to her in a language she could almost understand — promises of power, of release, of joining something greater than herself.
Desperate, Liv visited the village elder — an old Sami woman named Aila, keeper of forgotten wisdom.
Aila’s eyes were sharp and cold when Liv told her about the gate.
“You are the vessel,” she said. “The gate that the Hollow Light uses to cross into this world.”
Liv shook her head, tears stinging. “How do I stop it?”
Aila handed her a carved wooden amulet.
“This will protect your tongue. But the gate must be closed at its root — beneath the earth, in the forgotten places where memories sleep.”
With Lukas and Elias, Liv ventured to a hidden cavern beneath the village — a place older than the church, the well, the village itself.
The air was thick with the scent of decay and ancient stone.
There, carved in the rock, was a spiral symbol — the same from the mirror’s leather binding.
Liv knelt and pressed the amulet to the stone.
The cavern trembled.
A voice echoed from the darkness:
“You carry the gate beneath your tongue. Speak true to close the gate.”
Liv spoke — words of truth, confession, and hope.
The ground shuddered.
But a shadow emerged.
It was the Hollow Light, manifesting as a darkness coiled with teeth and whispers.
It lunged at her.
Lukas stepped forward, brandishing the crucifix.
Light flared, scattering shadows.
The gate pulsed in Liv’s tongue, burning.
She screamed — not in pain, but in defiance.
The cavern shook violently.
The gate beneath her tongue closed with a final pulse — a silence that was almost deafening.
The Hollow Light hissed, retreating into the shadows.
But as the dust settled, Liv knew this was not the end.
The gate had been sealed for now.
But the seed remained.
Waiting.
Chapter 11: The Echoes in the Snow
The morning after the cavern trembled and the gate beneath Liv’s tongue sealed, Skarnes awoke to a sky thick with low, gray clouds. The snow that had once blanketed the village in a serene white was now mottled with dirt and dark ice, as if the very earth had been bruised overnight.
Liv stood by her window, watching the wind carry the hollow echoes of a distant howl. The sound was not like any animal she knew—it was more like the cry of something ancient, hungry, and far beyond human pain. Elias sat silently on the couch, his eyes unfocused, as if the cavern’s sealing had robbed him of more than just the Hollow Light’s grip.
Lukas entered the room, his face grim beneath the tired eyes.
“We bought time,” he said quietly, “but that darkness is far from gone.”
Liv nodded, swallowing the bitter taste that still lingered in her mouth—the heavy weight beneath her tongue that marked her as the gatekeeper.
“Last night,” she began, “I dreamt of the village, but it was buried beneath a sea of snow… and screams.”
She rubbed her temples. “The Hollow Light is growing stronger. It’s not just here anymore. It’s spreading.”
Outside, the village was beginning to stir, though the atmosphere was heavy with unease. People moved silently through the streets, faces pale and eyes haunted. Whispers of disappearances had already started to ripple through the tight-knit community.
Liv and Lukas decided to visit the town hall, hoping to find answers in the old records or at least muster some support. The mayor, a stern man named Jorgen, greeted them with a forced smile.
“We’ve noticed the changes,” Jorgen said quietly, “but no one wants to admit the truth.”
Liv caught his gaze. “What truth?”
“The Hollow Light,” he whispered, lowering his voice. “It’s a name we don’t speak. But its touch is real. Last winter, a whole family vanished near the forest. Their home burned to ashes with no trace of how.”
As Liv and Lukas left the mayor’s office, a sharp wind sliced through the streets, carrying with it the faintest trace of a melody—soft, sorrowful, and unmistakably human. They followed it instinctively, down to the edge of the village where the forest began.
Among the trees, the snow was trampled, the branches blackened as if scorched by an invisible flame. Something had been there recently.
Liv’s heart pounded as she scanned the ground. Then she saw it—footprints.
But not like any animal or person’s. These prints were uneven, twisted, as if whatever had walked here was shifting between forms.
Suddenly, a sound—a soft whisper in a voice like ice scraping over glass—came from the shadows.
“Help… me…”
Liv turned, but no one was there.
The voice came again, louder this time, more urgent.
“Help me…”
She grabbed Lukas’s arm.
“We’re not alone.”
The pair plunged deeper into the woods, following the voices that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. As the trees thickened, the whispers grew into a cacophony of desperate pleas and mournful cries, each layered over the other like a broken choir.
Then, through a break in the forest, they came upon a small clearing.
At its center was a pool of black water—still, dark, and reflecting the stormy sky like an abyss. Around the pool’s edge lay frozen bones—animal, human, and something else indistinguishable.
Liv felt the cold curl of fear in her gut.
The Hollow Light had found a new nest.
Lukas knelt by the pool, tracing the rim with a finger.
“This is an ancient place,” he said softly, “a threshold between worlds. The Light feeds on sorrow and loss, growing stronger every time it claims a soul.”
Liv looked down into the water and saw something ripple beneath the surface—a faint, flickering shape that looked like a face, distorted and agonized.
“Is it trapped?” she whispered.
Lukas shook his head.
“No. It’s waiting.”
Suddenly, the ground beneath them trembled.
From the snow around the clearing, dark tendrils rose, twisting like smoke made of shadow and ice. The air turned bitterly cold, and the whispers morphed into screams of rage and hunger.
Liv grabbed Lukas’s hand.
“We need to leave. Now.”
They ran through the forest, branches clawing at their faces and clothes. Behind them, the dark tendrils reached out, seeking to ensnare and pull them back.
But at the edge of the trees, the tendrils stopped, recoiling as if repelled by some invisible barrier.
Breathless, Liv and Lukas stumbled into the village, where an eerie silence had fallen.
That night, Liv was restless. The seed of the Hollow Light pulsed beneath her tongue with a rhythm that felt alive, almost sentient.
She took the amulet Aila had given her and held it tightly, whispering prayers she barely understood.
But the mirror in her room reflected something she hadn’t seen before—herself, but with eyes as dark as the pool in the clearing, smiling with a hunger that chilled her to the bone.
As dawn broke, Elias came to her, eyes clear but filled with a strange intensity.
“I saw them,” he said quietly.
“Who?”
“The ones trapped beneath the snow. They’re calling. They want to come home.”
Liv knew then that the Hollow Light was not just a force outside them—it was inside, growing, spreading.
And the village of Skarnes was the first echo of a much larger darkness awakening.
Chapter 12: The Winter’s Grasp
The snow fell thicker that morning, muffling the village in a suffocating silence. Skarnes lay beneath a blanket of white, but the cold seemed unnatural—biting deep into the bones, as if the very air was laced with something poisonous.
Liv stood at the window of her family’s cabin, watching the gray world outside. Her breath fogged the glass, and for a moment, the mirror opposite caught her eye. The reflection flickered, and she saw it again—the dark eyes beneath her own, staring back with a hunger that refused to be quelled.
She shivered, a chill deeper than winter’s touch crawling up her spine.
Elias burst into the room, his face pale and urgent.
“Liv! It’s happened again.”
“What?” she asked, heart pounding.
“On the northern edge of the village—old Lars’s farm. He’s… changed.”
Liv grabbed her coat, the amulet warm against her chest, and followed Elias through the snow-covered streets. The village was eerily quiet, every window shuttered, every door tightly closed.
At the edge of the village, they found Lars’s farmstead dark and deserted.
The door creaked open on its own.
Inside, the air was thick with the scent of rot and something metallic—blood.
They found Lars in the kitchen, slumped against the wall, eyes rolled back, mouth twisted in a snarl.
But it wasn’t just Lars. The shadows in the corners of the room writhed and stretched unnaturally, like smoke with teeth.
Lars’s body convulsed, and from his mouth came a guttural voice—alien, harsh.
“You carry the gate beneath your tongue,” it hissed, “and so do we all.”
Liv stepped forward, clutching the amulet.
“Lars! Fight it! You’re stronger than this!”
But Lars’s eyes snapped open, glowing faintly with a cold blue light.
The shadow in the room surged, and a long, clawed hand shot out, grabbing Liv’s wrist with unnatural strength.
She gasped, pain flaring as the darkness tried to invade her mind.
Lukas and Elias rushed in just in time, pulling Liv free and chanting words from the old texts Lukas had translated.
The shadow recoiled with a scream that shook the walls.
Lars collapsed, panting and disoriented but himself once more.
“We have to move,” Lukas said urgently. “This is only the beginning.”
Word spread quickly: villagers were falling ill with strange symptoms—fevers, convulsions, sudden rages followed by long silences. The old church bell tolled constantly, calling the frightened and desperate to prayer, but even faith seemed powerless against the creeping darkness.
Liv and Lukas worked with Aila, the Sami elder, to prepare protective wards and to teach the villagers how to shield themselves.
But every night, more succumbed.
One evening, as Liv prepared the cabin with salt and ancient runes, Elias appeared at the door, face pale and eyes wide with terror.
“Liv… I saw her,” he whispered. “Maren. She’s changed.”
Maren was Elias’s sister, a bright and kind girl who had always been the heart of the village’s winter festival.
Liv felt a sick knot tighten in her stomach.
They hurried to Maren’s home, where the warmth of the hearth seemed to fight a losing battle against the chill seeping from the walls.
Maren sat motionless in a chair, head bowed. But her eyes, when they lifted, gleamed with a cold, unnatural light.
“Leave… or join us,” she said, voice echoing as if layered with another.
Liv stepped forward, holding out the amulet.
“Remember who you are. Fight it, Maren.”
But Maren’s smile was cruel.
“We are the Hollow Light now. We are the winter’s grasp.”
The shadow enveloped her, and with a cry, she transformed—her skin paling, fingers elongating into sharp talons, eyes glowing like frozen stars.
The village’s heart was breaking.
Back in the cabin, Liv and Lukas poured over the ancient texts, searching for any way to sever the Hollow Light’s hold.
“Every story ends the same,” Lukas said grimly. “The gate must be closed not just beneath the tongue, but at the source—the ancient place beneath the village.”
Liv clenched her fists.
“That cavern?”
“Yes. But it’s deeper than we thought. The Hollow Light’s roots stretch beneath Skarnes like veins through ice.”
That night, Liv lay awake, the bitter taste of the gate pulsing beneath her tongue.
She realized the Hollow Light was no longer just an enemy—it was a part of her now.
And the winter was tightening its grasp.
Chapter 13: The Frozen Threshold
The snow outside was relentless, blanketing Skarnes in an endless white that smothered sound and hope alike. Every breath Liv took felt colder, heavier — as though the air itself was laden with frostbite and despair. The bitter weight beneath her tongue throbbed with an urgent pulse, a dark rhythm that seemed to sync with the heartbeat of the village itself.
She stood at the threshold of the cavern’s hidden entrance, carved into the face of an ancient cliff deep in the forest, its mouth yawning open like the maw of some slumbering beast. The wind whipped around her, scattering snowflakes like shards of glass.
Beside her, Lukas checked their gear — flashlights, ropes, old iron crosses, and the amulet that had saved her time and again. Elias held a bundle of sage and dried herbs, ready to ward off the darkness they would surely face below.
“This is it,” Liv said, voice steady but low. “The source.”
Lukas nodded grimly. “If we don’t close the gate here, the Hollow Light will consume everything.”
They descended into the cavern, the cold swallowing them whole. The air grew thicker, humid and stale, like breath trapped underground for centuries. Their footsteps echoed against the stone walls, the only sound besides the occasional drip of water from unseen cracks above.
The flickering beam of Liv’s flashlight revealed strange carvings — spirals and lines intertwined with figures half-human, half-shadow, etched deep into the rock.
“This place is older than the village,” Lukas whispered. “Older than any record.”
Liv ran her fingers over the symbols, feeling a coldness seep into her skin — not just from the stone, but from something else, something alive.
Deeper still, the tunnel split into multiple paths. The map Lukas had found in the old church’s crypt was incomplete, but it hinted at a central chamber where the Hollow Light’s power was strongest.
They chose the left path, the narrowest and darkest, the walls closing in around them. The bitter pulse beneath Liv’s tongue grew louder, almost deafening now.
Suddenly, a cold wind blew from ahead, carrying voices — whispers and screams tangled in a dreadful chorus.
Elias crossed himself. “The Hollow Light knows we’re here.”
Liv swallowed her fear. “We have to keep moving.”
As they reached the chamber’s entrance, the air shifted. It was colder, darker — a black void that seemed to swallow light itself.
Inside, the cavern opened into a vast space, its ceiling lost in shadow. At the center was an ancient altar, cracked and covered with frost. Below it, the spiral symbol glowed faintly, pulsing with dark energy.
Liv stepped forward, the amulet burning warm against her chest.
The bitter taste in her mouth flared, and she felt the gate beneath her tongue opening wider, like a wound.
Suddenly, shadows erupted from the altar, coalescing into monstrous forms — twisted shapes of men and beasts, their eyes glowing with the Hollow Light’s cold fire.
“Leave this place,” Liv commanded, voice steady despite the terror clawing at her. “You have no power here.”
The creatures snarled and surged forward.
Lukas raised the iron cross, chanting prayers. The light from the amulet flared, casting long shadows on the walls.
The battle was brutal. Liv fought alongside Lukas and Elias, every moment a test of strength and will.
In the midst of the chaos, Liv felt a voice inside her mind, soft and coaxing.
“Open the gate. Join us. We are eternal.”
She clamped her mouth shut, fighting the dark temptation.
With a scream, she plunged the amulet into the altar’s center.
A blinding light exploded, tearing through the cavern, shattering the shadows.
The monstrous forms shrieked and dissolved into nothingness.
As the light faded, silence settled over the chamber. The spiral symbol dimmed and then vanished.
Liv fell to her knees, gasping. The bitter weight beneath her tongue eased, replaced by a gentle warmth.
She looked up to see Lukas and Elias exhausted but alive.
“We did it,” Lukas whispered.
“No,” Liv said, voice trembling. “We only sealed the gate. The Hollow Light’s echoes will remain.”
Outside, the snow had stopped falling, but the village was forever changed.
The frozen threshold was closed — but the winter’s grasp was far from over.
Chapter 14: The Hollow Awakening
The air in Skarnes was still, but beneath the quiet surface, a sinister pulse stirred. The village, wrapped in its fragile shroud of snow and silence, felt like the calm before a storm—one darker and colder than any winter the villagers had ever known.
Liv returned to the village exhausted, her body aching from the battle in the cavern. The bitter weight beneath her tongue was gone, replaced by a dull ache—a reminder that the Hollow Light’s influence might be weakened, but not destroyed.
She found Lukas and Elias waiting at the edge of the village near the old church, their faces drawn and pale under the heavy gray sky.
“We’ve lost contact with several families,” Lukas said grimly. “People just… vanished in the night. No signs of struggle.”
Elias nodded. “It’s like the Hollow Light is spreading in ways we don’t understand. It’s no longer just possession—it’s becoming part of the land.”
That evening, Liv walked through Skarnes, her steps crunching on icy paths. The village looked the same—snow on rooftops, smoke curling from chimneys—but the people moved like shadows of themselves, eyes hollow, voices muted.
She stopped at Maren’s house, hoping to see Elias’s sister again, to check if there was any sign of recovery. But the door was ajar, and the inside was eerily silent.
Stepping in, Liv saw signs of a struggle—overturned chairs, shattered dishes, and a faint smear of blood on the floor.
A sudden chill prickled her skin. The shadows in the corners of the room flickered.
A voice echoed softly from the darkness:
“Join us… the Hollow calls…”
Liv’s breath caught. She drew her amulet and whispered a prayer, but the room seemed to close in around her, the walls breathing with unseen menace.
Outside, the wind rose, carrying with it a wailing sound—an unearthly lament that seemed to seep into the bones.
Liv hurried back to the church, where Lukas and Elias were gathering what villagers remained.
Aila, the Sami elder, lit candles and murmured ancient incantations, trying to hold the darkness at bay.
But even her power seemed diminished.
Suddenly, the church doors burst open.
A group of villagers staggered inside, their eyes glazed and faces twisted in agony.
One by one, they collapsed, convulsing violently as shadows poured from their mouths like black smoke.
Liv and Lukas rushed to help, chanting prayers, marking the walls with protective runes.
But the shadows clung to the villagers, twisting their bodies into unnatural shapes, draining the light from their eyes.
Lukas looked to Liv, his voice strained.
“We can’t hold them all.”
Liv felt a surge of despair but pushed it down. They needed a plan—something to sever the Hollow Light’s connection to the land itself.
“We have to go back to the cavern,” she said, determination burning in her eyes. “We need to destroy the source.”
Elias shook his head.
“It’s not just the cavern anymore. The Hollow Light is inside the village, inside us. We have to find a way to purify it here, or it will never end.”
That night, Liv stayed awake, haunted by visions of shadows creeping beneath the snow, swallowing everything in their path.
She dreamed of the cavern, now cracked and bleeding dark light into the earth.
And she heard a voice—cold, ancient, and terrifying.
“The winter is endless. The Hollow will rise again.”
Chapter 15: The Cleansing Flame
The dawn broke pale and fragile over Skarnes, but the village’s fragile peace was shattered. The Hollow Light’s grip had tightened, its darkness seeping deeper into every corner of the land and heart.
Liv stood outside the old church, watching as the first weak rays of sun struggled to pierce the heavy gray sky. The air was thick with an unnatural chill that not even the rising sun could dissolve.
Inside, villagers huddled together, their faces pale and eyes haunted by nightmares that refused to end.
Lukas was preparing a ritual — one they hoped would burn away the corruption spreading through the village.
“We’ll need fire,” he said, stacking wood and herbs on a stone altar.
Liv nodded. “A cleansing flame. It has to be pure.”
Aila, the Sami elder, arrived with a small carved wooden box. Inside, nestled in velvet, was a relic — a fragment of ironwood from the ancient forest, known for its sacred power to repel darkness.
“This is the heart of the forest’s flame,” Aila explained. “It will burn without smoke or ash, cleansing all it touches.”
As the villagers gathered, Liv felt the weight of the moment.
“This is our last chance,” she said. “If this fails, the Hollow Light will consume everything.”
The ritual began as twilight fell, candles flickering in the growing darkness. Lukas led the prayers, his voice steady but urgent.
Liv held the relic aloft, and as she did, a strange warmth spread through her fingers — a promise of hope in the cold.
Suddenly, a scream tore through the night.
From the church doors burst a shadowy figure — one of the possessed villagers, twisted by the Hollow Light, eyes glowing with cold fire.
It lunged at Liv, but she raised the relic, and a brilliant flame burst forth, engulfing the figure in a halo of cleansing light.
The shadow screamed, twisting and writhing before dissolving into smoke.
The villagers cheered, but the victory was short-lived.
From the shadows came more figures, their forms shifting and grotesque.
The battle was brutal — light against darkness, fire against shadow.
Liv fought with every ounce of strength, the relic’s flame burning bright but the Hollow Light relentless.
As dawn approached, the shadows began to retreat, howling their fury.
The village was battered but alive.
Lukas looked at Liv, exhaustion etched on his face.
“This is just the beginning,” he said. “The Hollow Light’s hold is broken here, but it still festers beneath Skarnes.”
Liv knew he was right.
The true battle was far from over.
Chapter 16: Echoes of the Forgotten
The morning after the Cleansing Flame ritual, Skarnes lay in uneasy silence. The villagers moved like shadows, their eyes haunted by memories that weren’t entirely their own. Though the surface darkness had been burned away, a deeper, more insidious chill remained — one that gnawed at the edges of their minds.
Liv stood outside the church, staring into the dense forest that surrounded the village. The trees seemed taller, more menacing after the ritual, their skeletal branches clawing at the sky like ancient hands grasping for something lost.
The bitter taste beneath her tongue had returned, faint but unmistakable. The gate was not closed — only sealed temporarily.
Lukas joined her, clutching an old, tattered journal he had found hidden in the church’s crypt.
“This belonged to Father Henrik,” he said. “He was the village priest more than a century ago.”
Liv opened the journal, the brittle pages crackling in the cold wind. The handwriting was shaky, but the words were clear.
“The Hollow Light is no mere darkness. It is a curse born from blood and betrayal, a shadow birthed by the village’s sins long buried. The cavern beneath Skarnes is the wound through which it seeps. Only by facing the past can we hope to heal the present.”
The words sent a shiver down Liv’s spine.
“What sins?” she whispered.
Lukas’s eyes darkened.
“According to the journal, centuries ago the villagers betrayed their own. They locked away something — or someone — in the cavern. The Hollow Light is the echo of that betrayal, a darkness awakened by forgotten guilt.”
That night, Liv couldn’t sleep. The shadows in her room flickered and stretched, whispers curling around her like smoke.
She saw visions — fleeting glimpses of a woman in tattered clothes, eyes wide with terror, chained to the cavern walls.
A voice echoed in her mind, chilling and desperate.
“Free me… free me… or all will fall to shadow.”
Driven by the vision, Liv gathered Lukas and Elias and descended again into the cavern. The air was colder than ever, the stone walls slick with ice and darkness.
At the heart of the cavern, they found a hidden chamber — smaller, suffocating, with iron shackles embedded in the walls. The air was thick with decay and sorrow.
On the floor lay a broken locket, its glass shattered, the portrait inside faded and cracked.
As Liv picked it up, the shadows around them thickened and coalesced into a figure — the woman from her vision, her eyes blazing with pain and rage.
She spoke, her voice a guttural whisper that echoed through the chamber.
“I am Solveig, betrayed and forgotten. I was bound here by those I trusted, left to die in the dark. The Hollow Light is my curse… and my vengeance.”
The cavern trembled as Solveig’s fury erupted. Shadows surged forward, cold and sharp as blades, cutting into the walls and floor.
Liv and her friends barely escaped, the chamber collapsing behind them with a thunderous roar.
Outside, the forest seemed to close in, the trees groaning like ancient beasts awakened.
Back in the village, the air grew thick with dread. The Hollow Light’s true face was revealed — not just a darkness, but a curse born of betrayal, pain, and a desperate hunger for retribution.
Liv knew the battle was no longer just for survival, but for the soul of Skarnes itself.
Chapter 17: The Binding Ritual
The village of Skarnes was wrapped in a suffocating silence, broken only by the crackling fire inside the old church. The night outside was blacker than ever, the moon swallowed by heavy clouds that blotted out the stars. It felt as though the world itself was holding its breath.
Inside, Liv, Lukas, Elias, and Aila prepared for the most dangerous ritual they had ever attempted. The Binding Ritual — a desperate measure to trap Solveig’s vengeful spirit and end the curse once and for all.
Aila laid out a circle of salt and ancient runes drawn in ash and charcoal on the cold stone floor. Within the circle, ironwood branches twisted together to form a cage-like frame — a prison of light and earth.
Lukas held the tattered journal close, reading aloud the incantations passed down through generations of villagers who had battled the darkness before them.
“The spirit of the betrayed must be bound by truth, her vengeance quelled by remembrance and forgiveness,” Lukas intoned, voice steady despite the tremors in his hands.
Liv felt the bitter weight beneath her tongue pulse violently as she stepped into the circle. The amulet around her neck grew warm, its glow faint but persistent — a beacon against the encroaching shadows.
Elias held a small mirror, polished to a reflective sheen. “The mirror shows the spirit her own reflection. She must face herself to be bound.”
Outside the church, the wind howled, rattling the wooden shutters and carrying the whispers of the Hollow Light like a chorus of mournful souls.
The villagers gathered at a safe distance, their faces pale and eyes wide with terror. They could feel the ancient power rising, a cold wave that threatened to freeze the very marrow of their bones.
Liv began the chant, her voice trembling but growing stronger:
“By fire and stone, by blood and bone,
By ancient oath, you are not alone.
Bound by truth, held by light,
Find your peace in this endless night.”
As the words left her lips, the temperature plummeted. Shadows seeped under the church doors, twisting and writhing like living smoke. The air thickened, charged with a dark energy that made the hairs on Liv’s arms stand on end.
Suddenly, the mirror began to glow, and the surface rippled like water.
From the depths of the mirror emerged Solveig’s ghostly form, her eyes burning with sorrow and rage. Her hair floated as if underwater, and chains hung from her wrists, clinking softly in the still air.
“Why do you bind me?” she whispered, voice echoing like a distant wind. “I am the forgotten. The betrayed. The Hollow Light that will consume you all.”
Her form flickered, growing larger and more terrifying — a spectral wraith with a face twisted by centuries of pain.
Lukas stepped forward, holding the journal. “Solveig, your story will be told. Your pain will not be ignored. But your vengeance must end. The village remembers.”
The spirit’s eyes flashed with fury. “The village remembers only what it wants. The truth is buried beneath lies and blood.”
With a scream, Solveig lunged at Liv, her form cracking the air like thunder.
Inside the circle, Liv raised the amulet, and a burst of warm light exploded outward, clashing with the cold shadows.
The church shook, stones falling from the ceiling. The Binding Ritual was underway, a violent battle between light and darkness.
Solveig’s voice echoed through the chamber, shifting from rage to despair.
“Remember me… remember me…”
Liv’s voice joined the chant, weaving through the chaos:
“By truth revealed, by past atoned,
You are no longer alone.”
Slowly, the shadows began to retreat, drawn into the ironwood cage that glowed brighter with every word.
Solveig’s form shrank, her fury dimming to a sorrowful glow.
With a final, mournful wail, she was sealed within the cage — a prisoner of light and memory.
Silence fell over the church.
The villagers outside waited, breath held tight.
Then, the doors creaked open.
Liv stepped out, pale but victorious.
The curse was bound — but not broken.
The Hollow Light’s shadow lingered, a reminder that darkness could never be fully erased.
Chapter 18: The Last Vigil
The Binding Ritual had sealed Solveig’s spirit within the ironwood cage, but the victory felt hollow. The villagers of Skarnes remained restless, shadows clinging to their thoughts like a persistent chill. The Hollow Light was contained, but its hunger had only grown more desperate.
That night, the village gathered in the church once again. The stone walls, scarred from the previous battle, seemed to pulse with an unseen energy. Candles flickered in the cold drafts, casting grotesque shadows that danced like living things.
Liv stood before the crowd, her face pale but resolute.
“We have bought time,” she said quietly, “but the Hollow Light’s curse still lingers. It will try to break free, to consume everything we love.”
Murmurs rippled through the crowd, eyes wide with fear.
Lukas stepped forward, his voice steady but grim.
“We must keep watch. Tonight, we hold the Last Vigil.”
He explained the tradition — a night where the village would unite, guarding against the darkness until dawn’s first light, using fire, light, and faith as their shields.
Outside, the wind howled like a wounded beast. The snow fell heavier now, blanketing the earth in a thick, suffocating silence.
Liv patrolled the perimeter with Elias, their breaths forming ghosts in the bitter air.
From the forest came distant, chilling howls — unnatural, discordant cries that sent shivers down their spines.
As the night deepened, strange phenomena began to unfold.
Shadows stretched unnaturally long, seeping beneath doors and through cracks.
Whispers slithered through the darkness, voices filled with sorrow, anger, and despair.
Ingrid’s house was the first to be tested.
The air inside turned ice-cold, and the flickering candlelight warped into a sickly green glow.
Liv and Elias burst in to find Ingrid convulsing, eyes rolled back, skin pale as death.
From her mouth spilled black smoke, curling and twisting into shadowy tendrils that lashed out, trying to escape.
Liv grabbed the amulet, chanting prayers taught by Aila.
The smoke hissed and recoiled, but the darkness was relentless.
Ingrid’s body twisted violently, and from her throat came a voice—not her own—a guttural, ancient tongue.
Outside, the villagers huddled together, clutching makeshift weapons and burning torches.
Suddenly, the ground trembled.
From the snow-covered earth erupted dark roots, thick and pulsating like veins, crawling toward the church like hungry serpents.
Lukas shouted, “The Hollow Light’s power is rising! We must hold the circle!”
The church doors slammed shut, trapping the villagers inside, but the roots clawed at the walls, splintering wood and cracking stone.
Liv, clutching the amulet, took a stand at the altar.
“By the light of the dawn, by the strength of our faith, we will not fall,” she declared.
The villagers joined in, their voices rising in unison, a chorus of defiance against the encroaching darkness.
Outside, the roots writhed and screamed, a chorus of tortured voices bound to the earth’s cursed heart.
But as the first pale fingers of dawn crept through the windows, the roots recoiled, the shadows screamed, and the village was saved — for now.
But Liv knew the battle was far from over.
The Hollow Light was not just a curse but a force, ancient and hungry, waiting for the right moment to consume everything.
And Skarnes’ Last Vigil was just the beginning.
Chapter 19: The Breaking Point
The fragile peace that the villagers of Skarnes had clung to was shattered in the cold, unforgiving grip of night.
The Last Vigil had barely passed when the Hollow Light unleashed its fury with a force that no ritual, no prayer, could hold back.
Liv awoke to screams tearing through the village like jagged knives.
From her window, she saw flames licking the dark sky — houses burning, shadows twisting in the inferno like monstrous wraiths.
The earth beneath Skarnes trembled with an ancient rage, and the Hollow Light surged forth with a devastating roar.
She raced through the snow-choked streets, heart pounding, breath ragged.
Villagers were fleeing in terror, their faces masks of despair and disbelief.
The darkness was no longer just a shadow creeping at the edges — it was a living, ravenous beast consuming everything in its path.
At the village square, the old church stood battered but defiant, its doors wide open as if inviting the darkness to come inside.
Lukas was there, trying desperately to rally the villagers, chanting prayers and swinging holy water like a desperate soldier.
“The Binding Ritual… it’s weakening,” he shouted over the chaos. “The Hollow Light is breaking free!”
Liv joined him, clutching the amulet, its glow flickering like a dying ember.
“We need to strengthen the seal,” she said. “But I don’t know how much longer we have.”
From the shadows emerged twisted figures — villagers consumed by the Hollow Light’s curse, their faces distorted, eyes burning with unnatural fire.
They advanced like hunters, tearing through the crowd, spreading darkness with every touch.
Liv fought through the madness, her hands trembling as she raised the amulet, trying to hold the light steady.
But the shadows pushed closer, and the ancient curse felt unstoppable.
Suddenly, the ground split open near the church, revealing a gaping maw of darkness that seemed to swallow the stars themselves.
From the abyss rose a monstrous shape — a shadowed titan, writhing with the souls of the damned.
Its voice was a grinding thunder that shook the heavens.
“I am the Hollow Light,” it roared, “the forgotten pain, the endless night. Your hope is a flicker that will be snuffed out.”
Liv stepped forward, heart pounding, and met the beast’s gaze with fierce defiance.
“We will not be consumed,” she said, voice clear and unwavering.
With the last of her strength, Liv invoked the ancient prayers from the journal, calling upon the village’s ancestors, the earth, the light.
The amulet flared, bathing the square in searing brilliance.
The titan recoiled, a howl of rage and agony echoing through the abyss.
But the cost was heavy.
Lukas fell to his knees, blood dripping from a wound that no one saw until it was too late.
The village was broken — hope flickering on the edge of extinction.
Liv knew the final battle was near.
The Breaking Point had been reached.
The Hollow Light was stronger than ever, and Skarnes’ fate hung by a thread.
Chapter 20: The Hollow Light’s End
The village of Skarnes was a battleground—ashes and snow mixed beneath Liv’s boots as she made her way toward the church, the last refuge against the encroaching darkness. The bitter wind carried with it the scent of smoke and despair, but her heart burned with a fierce resolve.
Inside the battered church, flickering candles fought the shadows that seeped through cracks in the walls. The ironwood cage—the prison of Solveig’s spirit—stood shattered, splinters scattered across the cold stone floor. The Hollow Light was free.
Lukas lay slumped against a pew, wounds deep and unhealed. His breaths were shallow, but his eyes held a spark of hope.
“We don’t have much time,” he whispered, clutching Liv’s hand. “The Hollow Light… it feeds on fear, on pain. It grows stronger every moment.”
Liv nodded, the amulet around her neck glowing faintly—a small beacon in the overwhelming dark.
Outside, the shadowed titan—the Hollow Light itself—loomed like a living nightmare, its form shifting and writhing, composed of the sorrow and rage of countless lost souls. It towered over the village square, its roar shaking the earth beneath their feet.
Liv stepped into the center of the church, raising the amulet high. She began to chant the ancient words from Father Henrik’s journal, her voice steady despite the chaos outside.
The walls trembled; the shadows twisted and writhed as if resisting the light.
Suddenly, a cold wind swept through the church, extinguishing all but the amulet’s glow. Solveig’s spirit appeared once more—no longer twisted by rage, but calm, her eyes filled with sorrow.
“Release me,” she said softly. “Only then will the Hollow Light lose its power.”
Liv hesitated, but the truth was clear—the curse was tied to Solveig’s pain, her anguish imprisoned and festering for centuries. To end it, they had to let go.
With a trembling hand, Liv placed the broken locket—the symbol of Solveig’s memory—into the amulet’s light.
Solveig’s form shimmered, her chains dissolving into beams of radiant light. She smiled, a final act of forgiveness and peace.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and then she was gone.
Outside, the titan let out a deafening howl as it began to unravel, its form dissipating into shards of light and shadow that scattered like embers on the wind.
The darkness lifted.
The cold receded.
The villagers emerged from their hiding places, eyes wide with disbelief and relief.
Skarnes was free.
Lukas smiled weakly. “It’s over… for now.”
Liv looked up at the clearing sky, the first stars beginning to twinkle.
“The Hollow Light may return,” she said softly, “but so long as we remember, so long as we stand together, we will never be consumed.”
The silence of Skarnes was no longer a silence of fear, but one of healing and hope.
The village had faced the darkness — and in doing so, had found the light within themselves.
Epilogue: Dawn Over Skarnes
Weeks had passed since the Hollow Light was banished from Skarnes. The village, once gripped by fear and shadows, now hummed quietly with the soft pulse of life returning.
Snow melted from the ancient pines, revealing the earth beneath—rich and fertile, ready for new beginnings.
Liv stood at the edge of the forest, the morning sun casting long golden rays across the thawing landscape. The amulet, now dim and cool, rested gently in her palm—a reminder of battles fought, sacrifices made.
Beside her, Lukas, recovering slowly but steady, smiled.
“We did it,” he said simply.
Liv nodded, feeling the weight of the past lift just a little.
But there was more than relief in her heart.
There was a new understanding: that darkness is never truly gone, only waiting for the light to waver.
Skarnes had faced its deepest fears, and in doing so, had discovered strength beyond legend—strength born from unity, courage, and compassion.
In the village square, children played beneath the budding branches, their laughter weaving through the crisp air. Elders gathered, sharing stories not of despair, but of hope—stories of a girl named Solveig whose pain had been transformed into peace.
And as the dawn broke over Skarnes, painting the sky with hues of rose and amber, Liv knew the village was no longer just a place—it was a promise.
A promise that no shadow, no matter how deep, could extinguish the light that burns within the human heart.
Please read https://drlal.dk
The End
