Episode 6: Scripture of the Unburied

Whispers in the Hollow

Episode 6: Scripture of the Unburied

Where memory becomes myth, and Roselyn learns that silence is only sacred when it is chosen.

The Thorn Rite Fractures

The cemetery in Crest Hollow has no gates.

Only thorned vines that retreat when hymns are sung.

This night, the altar-girls wear veils of soot and speak backwards. The air tastes of lavender and rot. Sister Roselyn stands in the center, cloaked in robes inked with ash-prayers and moth embroidery. Her hands tremble as she lifts the branch, anointed with grave water and dipped in powdered bone.

This is the Thorn Rite: a tradition whispered down by mouthless nuns to prevent the dead from remembering.

The girls chant:

“Silence is sacred. Names are burdens. Let the earth remain forgetful.”

But something fractures.

A breeze arrives, in reverse. Candles flicker backward. The ash rises instead of falls. The soil pulses. Graves murmur names that were never spoken aloud.

Roselyn gasps.

Suddenly she’s elsewhere, not with her body, but her mind, her blood. She is a child again at Saint Writhe’s Orphanage. Her mouth sewn shut with memory. A moth flutters in her palm. The chapel door creaks open, but no one enters. And the bell, it tolls thirteen.

Back in the graveyard, Roselyn’s lips part.

She whispers, “I remember you.”

The ground exhales.

“We are not what we buried,” says a voice from beneath.
“We are what waits.”

Roselyn drops the branch. The altar-girls dissolve into salt.

She runs.
Into the woods.
Into the whispering dark.

The Woods Eat the Witness

The Hollow Forest does not receive visitors.
It devours them slowly.

But when Roselyn enters, the trees bow slightly. Bark peels back to reveal forgotten scriptures. Moss chants in her voice, but wrong, broken, older.

The branches part above a crooked birch.

Beneath it stands a woman in a veil of threadbare mourning lace. Her outline flickers. Her hands are stitched from absence. She smells like river-stone and blood-soaked velvet.

“My silence was chosen,” she says. “Yours was stolen.”

Roselyn kneels.

“You erased the wrong silence,” the veiled woman tells her. “You were meant to scream.”

She hands Roselyn a satchel, stitched not with thread, but with strands of memory and unspoken grief.

Inside are three items:

• A child’s femur, etched with Saint Writhe’s seal, from the orphanage’s first buried name.

• A vial of ink, drawn from the Archive of Saint Absence, its color darker than shadow, older than truth.

• A mirror, its surface churns, revealing every age Roselyn denied herself.

“Do not rewrite the past,” the woman warns. “Let it rot into truth.”

And then she is gone.

Swallowed by bark.

Awakening with Artifacts

Roselyn awakens in her monastery cell.

Morning light curls through the window like suspicion. Her robes are clean. Her bed untouched. But her hands, her hands are black with ink. Her fingernails bloom glyphs. Her breath fogs the mirror with the words:

“You are not what you remember. You are what the Hollow has read.”

The satchel lies at her side, real. The bone is warm. The ink vibrates softly. The mirror is watching.

On her prayerbook, the words have changed. She flips through its pages, trembling. The handwriting is hers, but older, angrier, truer. A voice that once choked now commands.

In the hallway, a fellow nun hums an unfamiliar hymn.

But Roselyn remembers it from her dreams.

The Graveyard Map

Guided by whispers, Roselyn returns to the cemetery, alone this time.

She kneels beneath the Mourning Pew, where nuns once wept in silence for sins they were never allowed to speak.

There, wrapped in a burial shroud soaked with myrrh and mildew, she finds a map.

It is stitched in hair and vein-thread, marked by paths no record holds. There are graves without names. Trails that curve like wounds. Symbols stitched in the lower corner match the mirror’s face.

One sigil pulses red:

Mother Vein – Keeper of the Unwritten Dead

She follows it to a secluded grove, The Forgotten Row.

There, tombstones wear no names. Grief grows in mushrooms and bloomrot. Birds do not sing here. Instead, they tremble.

And beneath the softest patch of ground, Roselyn finds a handle.

Descent into the Library of Graves

The soil opens like a mouth.

Roselyn descends. A stairway of bone. Air that smells of ink and mourning.

She enters a cavern, part ossuary, part library.

The walls are shelves formed of femurs and jawbones. Ribs become scroll holders. Candles weep memories instead of wax. Ink flows in veins along the ground.

And standing at the center, Mother Vein.

She is taller than memory allows. Her robes are scripture, stitched from the names of orphans, martyrs, and women who screamed too quietly. Her face is many faces, flickering with every glance.

“This place,” she says, “was never meant for burial.”
“It is a library. These shelves are lives denied story.”

Roselyn walks the aisles.
And sees herself in every unspoken tragedy.

A plaque reads:

• A healer who silenced herself to save a town that never asked.

• A child who bled her prayers in a language no one taught her.

• A preacher who wept so loudly her voice was bound in chains and burned.

Each artifact whispers:

“I am the silence you cast out.”

Mother Vein kneels.

She offers Roselyn a parchment, blank and pulsing.

“Choose a voice. Speak it.
Let it rewrite you.”

Epilogue: The Unburied Begin to Sing

Roselyn chooses a scroll inscribed with nothing.

She speaks it aloud.

The ink responds, rising from the floor, curling up her arms, branding her throat. Her blood boils with meaning. Her shadow splits into two.

The Hollow answers.
It sings.

“You are not a Sister.
You are the Scripture they tried to forget.”
“You are the hymn no one let finish.”
“You are the archive of all who were buried in silence.”

Above ground, the Forgotten Row shudders.

Graves shift.
Names once erased appear, burning into stone like lightning on bark.

And from the mouths of tombs, voices return, not to haunt, but to testify.

Roselyn stands rewritten.

Not as a relic.
Not as a warning.
But as a vessel, for all stories denied burial.

Next Episode: The Teeth of Testimony

Where the living must chew on the truth unearthed, and the Hollow feeds not on fear, but on confession.