WINTERGLOOM: HOLLOWSGROVE COVEN

The rusting iron gears of the town square clock tower ground together, striking fifteen minutes to four. In Wallowshill, four o'clock wasn’t just for tea time; it signaled the start of twilight in the mainland—a warning Lindsay Newell had never once seen enacted before this year. In fact, it was a tradition she had mostly done in private, in the walls of her own home. Casting spells over fault-lines so witches could more easily traverse the Witching Worlds between Covens and veiled cities—cloaking cities, like this one.

Besides, she hadn’t thought the neighbors to be the tea drinking type—just as she didn’t suspect them of being the rule following sort.

Pandemonium washed over with the disappearance of the last few neighborhood association presidents, and as such, residents were not as interested in the goings-on of yards, or houses that were not their own. It would have been a dream if something hadn’t interfered.

All around, the crisp, apple cider and pumpkin-scented air instantly turned, growing heavy with the smell of wet rotting pine. November had been bleeding out for exactly four hundred and eighty-six days. Lindsay quit paying attention to the calendar pages in the local library as every month that past seemed to bring more and more of the same things. There would be no true December here. No summer, no spring, no fall. No soft snow to bury the dirt. No fresh dirt to turn the flowers. Only the eternal, staining amethyst of a perpetual November dusk.

It would seem Lindsay’s cloaking mishap had backfired tremendously—and she was paying for it along with the rest of the town.

Lindsay hurried down the smooth cobblestone sidewalk of Banks Street, her wool coat snapping against her tired boots. She clutched a leather-bound ledger from the archives—a forbidden index of the town's missing people—some of whom she had personally aided in disposing of. She knew she couldn’t be the only one with a sentient house. That she was sure of. From her extensive—and albeit limited—research, it appeared every street that had a strange weather anomaly tied back to a sentient housing structure, in one form or another.

Where one was, it could easily be overcome by a stronger sentient. It became obvious that Barnaby had some sort of hand in this. Even if it was against his own will or better judgement. He couldn’t be trusted. That is why she spent most of her free hours tucked away in the darkest corner of the Library trying to figure out a plan, a counter-curse of some kind.

She was still a witch of the highest decree, a member of the Hollowsgrove Coven. Lucky for her, the library was still a protected structure, a place where no magic could breach, similar to the schools. Students at Winterveil, back in the Witching World— had had one hell of a year battling Sunderfest. It would seem their troubles had multiplied, arriving here in spades.

Her glasses fogged with the sudden, biting drop in temperature, but she didn’t dare slow down long enough to wipe them. To be caught outside after the final strike of four would bring dire consequences. Especially for her.

Around Lindsay Newell, the houses of Wallowshill were already executing their nightly rituals. Heavy oak shutters slammed shut, deadbolted.  

Then came the lights.

String after string of unseasonal holiday bulbs flickered to life on every porch on the block, blazing in formidable, hungry hums of purple, orange, and blue, casting long, warped shadows across the dry, unraked grass—matching those of her own. Barnaby’s favorite colors.

The lights weren't meant for holiday cheer; they were an environmental cloaking charm, a neon perimeter designed to keep the magic in. It was odd, a strange thing to see almost every house starting to match her own. The occupants shutting inward, no children on the lawns. No schools being attended, no jobs being managed.

She pondered alerting the Coven. But surely, they knew. How could they not?

Lindsays keys jammed frantically into the brass lock. Barely making it in before the snow grabbed her. She quickly extinguished every candle and light visible to the windows as the street fell silent.

The wind stopped. The wind chimes hung perfectly still.

The nightly lockdown had begun.

Safely inside, Lindsay leaned her head against the wood, listening to her own ragged breathing. The brick hearth in the living room roared to life without a match, fueled by the ancient magic beneath the floorboards. A puff of cedar smoke billowed into the room, warming her shivering limbs. She didn’t need to mutter a lick of magic.

"We're safe, Barnaby," she whispered to the quiet, breathing stillness of the house, trying to calm me, trying to calm herself. But it was no use.

 Deep within my framework, my windowpanes vibrated a low, purring frequency in response. My bowels hungry, another sacrifice needed as she walked over my teeth, my lips, my dry mouth, daily.

She moved to the bay window, pulling the curtains just a smidge.

Outside, the empty street was a graveyard of orange, blue and purple light. The rules of the lockdown were drummed into the mind of every citizen since the Secrecy Accords were re-enacted. Keep all perimeter lights on, let the house do the rest. Keep interior lights invisible.  And above all, never speak the names of those who vanished into the autumn fog. If you speak their names, they stay forever. Never to return.

Lindsay had assumed Gary broke that last vow.

Though, she knew exactly where his wife had gone.

It was the most unfortunate set of circumstances, but a necessity nonetheless.

A shape emerged from the swirling twilight fog at the edge of the property nearest the street, moving with an uneven, clicking gait—heavy, dragging footsteps gliding over the frozen grass. Clipboard illuminated in the darkness. Lindsay’s chest tightened as the shadow stepped into the glow of the porch lights.

It was Naomi—or what was left of her ghostly spirit.

The neighborhood association president stood on the lawn, clothes caked in muddied dirt, eyes empty holes, splinters from my bowels puckering her boney skin. The rusted clipboard clutched in one hand and blue painter's tape in the other. She looked like a memory pulled from the deepest pits of hell, a rag-doll stitched together by the wild magic of the Rotting-Moors. Whatever she was, my charms had clearly eaten.

Naomi dragged herself toward the porch, her jaw hanging open like a broken locket.

Deep beneath my floorboards, where Naomi’s physical remains had long since decayed into astral dust, I squeezed myself tight. My magic wasn’t enough. Something else was clutching their claws into my wooden beams, ripping me apart, burrowing into me like wood-rot. Tiny magical roots. Their hold firm and unrelenting.  

Lindsay let the curtain fall, stepping back toward the hearth and pressed her hands over her ears to block out the rhythmic, hollow thud-thump of dead boots climbing the porch steps.

“Just a regular, ordinary night,” Lindsay whispered, reaching for a jar of black-ember-root. She pulled her knees to her chest, settling in to wait out the freezing hours until morning broke the curse.

The hollow pacing continued around the wrap-around porch all night, testing my frames, but I held fast. By the time the clock tower struck six the next morning, signaling the temporary safety of dawn, Naomi's ghost-doll had dissolved back into the Rotting-Moors fog.

But there was no relief. The broken autumn did not lift, instead, it lingered even stronger. As though my freewill had bound it so.

It had been over a year since Lindsay's last major magical mishap—the unauthorized August blizzard that had nearly cost us everything. For months, she had laid low, working quiet shifts at the archive and playing the part of the meek mainland librarian. No real magic involved.

But as she stepped onto the porch to collect the morning mail, the metal latch of the mailbox jammed.

When she forced it open, an avalanche of identical envelopes spilled onto the freezing cobblestoned street. Each was bound in coarse parchment and sealed with the black wax seal bearing the crest of the Highest Court of Mostly Misused and Overextended Magic. The crimson ink was so deep it practically burned the paper.

Lindsay’s face went entirely pale as she opened the first set of letters, reading the bleeding script:

NOTICE OF IMMEDIATE MAGIC REVOCATION & INSPECTION: EMERGENCY ORDER

MAGISTRATE DIRECTIVE 86-06-VIOLATION CITATION, SEVERE BOUNDARY BREACH

Visa Holder: Lindsay Newell

Emergency Reference: Sentinel Structure, 1234 Banks Street, C/O Barnaby Banks and/or Lindsay Newell.

The Office of the Magistrate has detected a severe security breach on your magic account, including but not limited to the sentinel structure—Barnaby Banks. Over the past forty-eight hours, unauthorized users within the Coven Organization have stolen your identity signature to cast illegal cloaking spells across the mainland. These rogue enchantments have broken local weather barriers, trapping pockets of the entire township of Wallowshill in a permanent, unnatural state of autumn snow.

Furthermore, because this situation threatens to expose our world, the High Court is skipping standard court mediation. A team of Magistrate Investigators have been dispatched and will be arriving to your home, 1234 Banks Street to resolve this crisis immediately.

"An identity breach?" Lindsay whispered, dropping the papers. "Someone is using my magic?"

The moment the realization hit her, my walls buckled. My floorboards flung themselves wildly against themselves like keys on a piano—warping and splintering upward as though an invisible hand was twisting me apart. There would be no time to investigate further as the sound of hot, breaking glass whipped through the air.

"Barnaby! Steady yourself!" Lindsay yelled, stumbling into the entryway as the walls shook around her. The porch barely scooping her in for an early dinner.

I couldn't. The magic keeping my sentience alive was coming undone. I could feel my wood splintering, my screws loosening, my panels shifting.

Thick sap oozed from the seams of my wooden insides and dripped down the floral wallpaper like black tarry tears of disgust. The holiday bulbs tacked to my copper gutters flickered, dimming themselves at the thought of losing my magic.

Lindsay lunged toward the brick hearth, attempting to feed one of her many sordid incantations into the fire, but it was no use, the chimney violently rejected it. Blasting barely hot ash and weeks old soot into the room in plumes of violent, gray clouds.

Through the bay window, the sky was already thickening into that formidable, bruising shade of dowry lilac. The clock tower had not even struck midday, yet twilight was falling fast—and the Magistrate Investigators were already on their way.

At the edge of Banks Street, three tall figures wrapped in jewel toned robes stepped out of the fog, their eyes glowing with the cold, unblinking glow of the High Court. Their faces hidden beneath flowing white beards that trailed behind them, blending with the ghostly fog. The Investigators had arrived early.

I braced my timber against the oncoming intrusion, but the presence of the Magistrate Investigators felt less like a knock on the door and more like a boulder dragging through my broken foundation.

The chill they brought ate through me. An unyielding freeze that numbed the very soil beneath my floorboards. My porch lights strobed in a frantic, desperate rhythm—purple, orange, vibrant blue—fighting to hold to my magic perimeter before evaporating into the night. The Magistrates wands at the ready.

Lindsay stood frozen in the center of my shivering entryway, the crimson-inked mandates still clutched in her trembling hand. "They're early," she breathed, her eyes darting from the weeping, sap-stained wallpaper to the bay window.

"Barnaby... if you are in there…if they cross the threshold and can prove you have been compromised, they won't just recall my visa. They'll dismantle you, as well."

The three figures did not hurry.

They moved with a terrifyingly synchronized, gliding momentum, their jewel-toned robes cutting through the perpetual November dusk like ink melting into what was left of the snow. The unblinking, cold light from beneath their hoods locked onto my front door.

"We don't have time to find a counter-curse in the archives," Lindsay whispered, a sharp, familiar spark of defiance finally cutting through her panic. She dropped the letters and lunged toward the locked cellar doors—the straightest path down into my raw, magical framework where my magic lie, along with the decaying bodies of past neighbors.

"If someone stole my magic, the evidence is rooted inside your foundations. We lock down from the inside. Now."

Deep within my beams, I groaned a warning. The roots of the wood-rot—the hostile magic that had been burrowing into my framework—twisted sharply in response to her movement, trying to pin my doors shut.

Outside, the first investigator's boot stepped off the smooth cobblestones of Banks Street and into the frozen grass of my lawn. My perimeter lights flaring one last, blinding time, before the bulbs began to pop, one by one, dropping us into darkness.

The last purple bulb above the porch shattered with a sharp, glass-splitting crack, plunging the lawn into the raw, overpowering gloom of the nightly twilight. The protective, glowing boundary was gone.

"Naomi was a distraction," Lindsay whispered, her hand dropping from the lock as the horrifying realization crystallized in her mind. "The clipboard, the snow, her ghost haunting me, following me—" Lindsay's voice broke, a desperate, breathless stammer as she backed away from the window. "It was all a script, Barnaby.... someone wanted me looking outside so I wouldn't look beneath my own feet. It isn't the Coven." Her breath hitched as she stared into the growing dark, the truth chilling her to the bone. "It's the academy. Winterveil is feeding on my magic."

I groaned under the crack of twisting pine echoing from somewhere in my attic rafters.

The three Investigators didn't knock. The heavy brass lock on my front door began to shake, melting into a golden puddle on the welcome mat as the unblinking, cold light of the High Court pressed threateningly against my sides.

"Lindsay Newell," a voice echoed through my framework, sounding like crushed river ice.

It didn't come from the doorway, but from my windowpanes, the hallways, the dead spaces in between, vibrating through the glass until it nearly shattered.

"By decree of the Office of the Magistrate. You are hereby ordered to evacuate the premises and forfeit your use of magic pending further investigation.”

"Barnaby, hold tight!" Lindsay cried, lunging across the tilting, groaning entryway as it began to buckle under the weight of the Magistrates' magic. The dirty magic of the roots feeding on Naomi's astral dust flared violently beneath my floorboards, trying to paralyze my hinges and trap her to further devour. But I fought them with the last of my failing freewill.

With a horrific screech of tearing hinges, I forced the cellar doors to fling open, revealing the pitch-black pit of magic buried in my crawlspace.

Lindsay didn't hesitate. She plunged down the wooden steps into the darkness below, just as the front door split straight down the middle under the weight of the High Court's freeze. If she couldn't sever the powers bound to Naomi's remains, the Investigators would dismantle my magical sentient timber before the sun ever rose over the pines of Wallowshill.

Above my cellar, the boards of the ground floor carried the cold, unyielding steps of the Magistrate Investigators across my fractured threshold.

"Barnaby, block the stairs!" Lindsay hissed, scrambling on her hands and knees through the dark toward my deepest confines.

I slammed my heavy oak cellar doors shut, throwing my iron bolts into place with a desperate, wooden snap, but the High Court's magic was already melting down the stairwell. It bled through my beams, numbing the cellar air and turning my iron hinges to brittle liquid frost. Lindsay didn’t have long.

She reached my central support beams where my sentience connected directly to the earth, pulling a match-crystal from her coat, striking it to life. The flaring orb didn't reveal a dark, festering curse—it revealed a nursery of dying magic blooming at her feet.

“I see you,” Lindsay snarled, her voice echoing with the fury of a cornered Hollowsgrove witch.

Burrowed deep into my timber, wrapped tightly around the astral dust of Naomi's remains, were thick, braided veins of pine and twine. They weren't stained by murky magic; they were wrapped in the familiar, fading green and red holiday bulbs of the Winterveil classrooms. Humming with a terrifyingly familiar heat, casting a sickly, festive-red glow across my foundations.

Lindsay gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, dropping the match-crystal. "Nancy... Professor Muncey… is that you??"

She pressed her ear against my vibrating support beam. I didn't echo with the growls of monsters. Through the flaring orb, through the stolen signature of her own magic, came the faint, muffled sounds of clenched teeth and frantic, terrified whispers. Children crowding into the dark corners of Winterveil’s famed academy—pulling coats over their heads, waiting out a Sunderfest they couldn't quite beat.

The Coven hadn't stolen her magic to frame her. They had stolen it to build a bridge.

Wallowshill wasn't being conquered; it was being prepared.

A sharp, explosive crack echoed from above. My cellar doors shattered into a thousand frozen fragments. The unblinking, cold jewel-toned light of the High Court robes spilled down the stairs, illuminating Lindsay as she stood over the pulsing, desperate roots of her dying home world.

To save us from being dismantled, she would have to rip the roots out and cut the lifeline of the children she left behind—defying the Coven’s Creed—severing her ties permanently.

The cold light touched her boots. She reached for the glowing vines, her hands trembling as the children’s whispers grew louder. Deep within my framework, I prepared to shatter.