What to expect
Hollowmere is an old country growing older — stone keeps, candle-watch towers, markets and meadhalls, and a creeping wrongness the common folk only call “the cold years.” The tone is quiet and mythic: what a person does not say weighs more than what they do, and violence is brief and costly rather than constant.
How magic works here
Magic is hedge-magic and words of power — rare, and never free. Every true Working costs the caster something visible: a season of youth, a tooth gone grey, a year of memory. People bargain with the old powers at standing stones, and those bargains are always a little lopsided. A caster reaches for magic knowing it will take something back.
A taste of an opening
“The meadhall keeps a low fire and a colder beer than the southern road would prefer. Rain has been at the thatch for days. The door opens. A figure stands in it, black against the rain — and the room has gone quiet without quite meaning to.”