The Green Briar Path: The Adventures of Father Rowan & Finn, chapter 3
Chapter Three: The Heart’s End
The woods pressed close, trees crowding in—silent, watchful. The Keeper strode ahead, her silver hair catching the dim glow of veiled light, a flickering ward against the dark. Finn kept pace beside her, his questions locked behind his teeth, while Father Rowan’s boots struck deep into the sodden earth, his ears straining for unseen presences, the air prickling with things yet unnamed.
“This way,” the Keeper murmured, though the path was little more than a web of roots and narrow gaps wound through bramble-choked undergrowth.
Rowan cleared his throat. “Are you sure?”
She halted, turning sharply. “Priests do not belong here. This place discerns among us—it welcomes children, fools, and madmen, but not you.”
Rowan arched a brow. “Is that so?”
Finn, ever quick, broke the tension with a grin. “I’m a child. Uncle’s a fool. That makes us half welcome.”
The Keeper did not smile. “It is no jest.” Her stride lengthened, urgency tightening her movements. “The well is our way out. It leads upward.”
Rowan frowned, stepping over a clawed root that grasped at his boot. “Wells do not lead up.”
“Not here.”
Yet the woods twisted around them, growing stranger with every step. The air thickened, carrying the weight of something unspoken. The Keeper’s faint light faltered as creeping blackness bled through the spaces where light should have held firm. Then came a brittle sound—a splintering crack, though none had stepped upon the ground.
The Keeper’s voice was low, urgent. “Run.”
From the dark, they emerged.
Figures hunched and jagged, their limbs too long, their spines twisted like broken branches. Fingers curled into talons, raking the bark as they drifted forward. Their faces bore no features but empty hollows, blacker than night, leaking wisps of mist that writhed and twisted.
The Stryghekh.
Not flesh, not wholly form, but shapes unwound from the world’s edges. They did not walk. They moved with the slow, inevitable pull of something that had always been. They were drawn to breath, to the warmth of the living, to the fragile pulse beneath skin.
Rowan pushed Finn behind him. The Keeper moved in a single, fluid motion, unsheathing a curved blade. Its edge, dulled by time, bore faint runes that pulsed in the fading light.
The Stryghekh hissed—not from mouths, but from the hollow spaces where sound should not exist, a whispering rasp that crawled into the ear and burrowed deep.
“This way!” The Keeper seized Finn’s arm and dragged him toward an ancient tree, its trunk a gaping wound, split wide. Without hesitation, she thrust the boy through the dark opening.
Rowan followed, feeling claws skim his coat, raking fabric but missing flesh by a breath’s width. He stumbled into blackness and fell.
When he rose, it was onto stone—slick and uneven, steeped in the scent of charred iron and old decay. His pulse hammered as he steadied himself.
They had stepped into a hall—warped and timeworn, its walls veined with leafless vines that pulsed faintly, as though something moved beneath their surface. Fragments of stained glass lay scattered across the floor, catching stray glimmers of light from nowhere.
And there, waiting, stood a figure.
Gormlach.
Tall and unnaturally slender, his limbs seemed whittled from driftwood and bent into angles just beyond nature’s shaping. His face, sharp-boned and pale as frostbitten stone, carried no cruelty—only an unsettling calm. His eyes, grey as spent embers, studied them with the patience of something that had long since stopped measuring time. He leaned upon a gnarled, thorn-bound staff.
“Well,” Gormlach said, his voice smooth, unhurried. “You have brought the wrong man. Priests do not belong here.”
The Keeper’s hand settled on the hilt of her blade. “We were bound for the well.”
“And yet, here you stand.” Gormlach’s smile was a sliver of knowing. “Paths shift when watched by unworthy eyes. Something far stronger than you has willed it so.”
Rowan’s voice was steady. “The Stryghekh.”
Gormlach inclined his head. “Servants of the unseen—whispers that take form, shadows sharpened to bite. They are born of the Hollow King’s gaze; his breath freezes, his hunger is boundless. You have stepped into his dominion.”
Rowan shifted, shielding Finn. “Can you help us?”
“I could,” Gormlach said, his grin thin as a blade’s edge. “But there is a price.”
Naturally.
The Keeper’s grip tightened on her weapon. “What price?”
“A song,” Gormlach said simply. “But, not just any song—I want the Heart’s End. Sing it, and I will carve a path for you, swift and sure. I will stay the Stryghekh’s hunger.”
The Keeper’s jaw clenched. “That song is forbidden.”
“Only to those who fear to listen.”
Rowan’s eyes flickered between them. “What does it say?”
Her voice, when she spoke, was quiet. Heavy. “It is older than your faith. Sung at the edge of things—after battles, before death. It does not merely tell of endings. It makes them.”
A slow cold crept along Rowan’s spine. “And you know it?”
She gave a single, silent nod.
Gormlach’s expression did not change. “Sing, and live. Hold your tongue, and…” He let the silence carry his meaning.
Beyond the broken walls, the rasp of the Stryghekh closed in.
The Keeper stepped forward, lowering her blade. Her voice rose—not loud, but full, thick with something neither sorrow nor defiance, but the weight of a thing that had been sung before the world was set.
Before the dawn stirred, before the stars were set, before fire shaped the dark, there was silence.
In that void, He cast them down— those who dared to defy, those who reached beyond their place.
The sky split apart; the earth trembled beneath their fall, and in the absence of light, they were scattered— not in the fury of flame, but in the quiet collapse of all that was.
Their hunger sank deep, their thirst took root, yet no well could contain them, no word unbind their fate.
The soil holds their memory. Stones crack with whispered loss. Rivers murmur of what was undone.
But the heart— the hollow heart— beats on, though its rhythm belongs to no soul.
The chant was not meant for mortal ears. It did not fill the space but thinned it, the walls drawing inward, the ground pressing down, the weight of it settling deep in the bone. Finn clutched Rowan’s hand, his fingers small but unrelenting.
When the song ended, the silence spoke louder than any sound.
Gormlach’s smile returned, faint and sharp. “Well sung.”
A door yawned open behind him, spilling pale light.
“The path is shaped. Beyond the well, your way home awaits.”
Rowan hesitated. The song still clung to him—not in sound, but in the unshaken weight of something left behind. The Hollow King’s presence lingered, thick as the air before a storm.
Finn tugged at his sleeve. “Come on, Uncle.”
Together, they stepped forward, leaving behind Gormlach’s knowing gaze and the lingering refrain of a song that had not finished singing itself.
To Be Continued…