The Harvest of Hollowing

Whispers in the Hollow

Episode 5: The Harvest of Hollowing

Where soil remembers pain, and the town begins to speak its own funeral.

The Whisper-Field

The soil outside the chapel is soft now, softer than before. It shivers even without wind. Graves hum beneath the surface. The grass grows in spirals, like a memory trying to coil back into meaning.

Children with moths in their mouths wander through the churchyard, fingers stained with ink they didn’t touch. They speak only in questions. And always at dusk.

Something is coming.
Or rather, returning.

Scene One: The Altar-Tongue

Sister Roselyn doesn’t rise.

She lies collapsed on the altar, lips parted, inked tears still drying on the floor around her like a failed summoning circle. Luke and Marissa kneel beside her, but the chapel will not let them leave. The doors have vanished. The windows are eyes now.

Then Roselyn exhales.

It is not breath.
It is scripture.

From her mouth spills a language not heard in centuries, if ever. Not spoken, but written into air. Letters crawl across the dust, glowing briefly before sinking into the wooden floorboards. Her voice does not sound like hers. It sounds plural.

“I am not Roselyn.
I am what remembers her.
I am what she forgot.
I am what she erased to become holy.”

The ink on her skin begins to move. Verses rearrange. Names migrate from her collarbone to her thighs. Her veins spell things now.

She opens her eyes. They are all pupil.

“Begin the harvest,” she says.
“The Hollow is ready to reap.”

The Orchard of Returning

Marissa dreams, though she is awake.

In the chapel’s far wall, a door breathes. She walks through it and finds herself in an orchard that never was trees without bark, branches made of vertebrae, fruit shaped like baby teeth. It smells like old parchment and thunderstorms.

Each tree is engraved with a name. Each name is someone Marissa has forgotten.

One tree bears her own name.

She reaches for its fruit. The branch snaps and bleeds red dust. Beneath the roots, something stirs.

“To harvest,” a voice whispers, “you must first return what you buried.”

The orchard collapses inward, folding into a single writhing sentence.

Marissa wakes, screaming. But her scream comes out as a hymn.

The Book That Bled

Luke watches as the chapel’s floor splits beneath the altar.

From the crevice rises a pulpit, formed of bone, bound with hair, crowned by a book too heavy to lift. The title shifts as he reads it.

First: The Book of the Town.
Then: The Gospel of Rot.
Then: The Bones That Write You.

Roselyn, still kneeling, opens it.

The pages are blank at first. Then her hands begin to bleed, and the book drinks.

“These are your chapters,” the chapel says.
“Not of belief, but of becoming.”

She writes in her own blood:

• Chapter One: The Girl Whose Name Was Stolen

• Chapter Two: The Archive with No Exit

• Chapter Three: The Sermon of Unmaking

• Chapter Four: I Am the Hollow Now

The chapel begins to echo every line. The walls throb. The candles flicker and scream.

Outside, the churchyard soil begins to move.

The Town Remembers Its Funeral

It begins with the street signs. They twist mid-syllable, re-spelling their histories:

• “Whisper Lane” becomes “Wound-Walk.”

• “Ashby Avenue” curls into “Anya’s Throat.”

• “Main Street” splits in two.

The mayor, blind and blinking for the first time in years, begins to sob ink.

Every home hears a knock that isn’t real.

The library shelves collapse inward. Books long thought destroyed begin to whisper their own titles:

• The Teeth Beneath the Bell.

• The Baptism That Burned.

• Crest Hollow: A Town Without Mouth.

The soil opens in three places, beneath the graveyard, beneath the orphanage ruins, and beneath the school.

Roots, thick and ink-black, rise.

And they begin to write across the sky.

The Last Memory Unbound

Back inside the chapel, Sister Roselyn begins to convulse.

Her skin splits not with blood, but scripture. Her spine glows briefly, vertebrae rearranging into syllables. She is unraveling.

Luke tries to reach her, but her body is no longer hers. It is parchment now. She is being written by something older than the town, older than language.

“You asked to name the town,” the chapel says.
“But names are not enough. To harvest, you must become soil.”

She looks at Luke. Her voice is the wind through stained glass.

“I was never meant to survive this story.
Only to finish the sentence.”

She places a final bone on the altar, her own rib.

Then, gently, she dissolves into pages.
The chapel binds her.
And the Hollow reads.

Final Image: The Hollow Awakens

The church bells toll without being touched.

The graveyard trees lean inward.

And from the mouth of the earth itself comes one final proclamation, etched in roots and bone:

“The sermon is not over. It has only now begun.”

Next Episode: A Liturgy of Teeth

Where the town begins to chew on its own name, and the children of ash return to claim the hymn they were never allowed to sing.