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🕯️ ASHEN FALLS I — The Feast Beneath the Hill
(Medieval Christmas, c. 1287)
Snow lay heavy on Ashen Falls, muting the forest and choking the road that wound down from the hills. The town crouched beneath its stone church like an animal seeking warmth, smoke seeping from thatched roofs into the grey winter sky.
Inside the great hall, the Yule log burned.
It had been cut from the old wood beyond the river — a mistake, some said — but the steward had ordered it regardless. The oak was black-veined, heavy with rot, yet it burned unnaturally hot, its flame tinged faintly green at the edges.
The people ate well that night. Better than they had all year.
Bread, thick stew, salted pork. Ale flowed until laughter drowned caution. Even the priest smiled, though he crossed himself more often than usual.
Outside, the wind howled.
As tradition demanded, a chair was left empty at the far end of the table — for the lost, the travellers, the dead. Most thought it superstition. None dared remove it.
Near midnight, the mummers arrived.
Their masks were crude: beasts, kings, death itself. They danced and shouted, telling a tale older than the church — of a sickness buried beneath the hill, of a winter that walked like a man, of hunger that learned to speak.
One mask did not come off.
When the fire guttered, just for a breath, the hall fell silent.
A man at the table coughed. Then another.
By morning, three were dead.
Their skin had greyed, their veins darkened, their mouths frozen open as if mid-scream. The priest said it was God's will. The steward ordered the bodies burned.
Ashen Falls endured.
But the hill remembered.
🎩 ASHEN FALLS II — Goodwill to Men
(Victorian Christmas, 1873)
The fog came early that year, rolling through Ashen Falls like a living thing.
Gas lamps flickered along Market Street, their light barely touching the soot-blackened snow. Inside the houses, candles glowed warmly, trees were dressed in paper chains, and children waited for morning.
Dr. Edwin Harrow did not celebrate.
He sat alone in his surgery, poring over parish records recently unearthed during the church renovation. Death registers. Winter deaths. Patterns.
Always winter. Always Christmas.
A cluster of unexplained illnesses in 1287. Another in 1432. A fever in 1666. Each dismissed. Each forgotten.
Each centred on the hill.
The charitable home near the old woods had been opened with great ceremony that year — a place of warmth for the poor, built atop ancient stone foundations. Since then, coughing had spread. Confusion. Aggression.
A boy had bitten a nurse.
They called it madness.
Harrow called it recurrence.
That night, as choirs sang and families gathered, the doctor walked to the hill. Snow crunched beneath his boots. The air smelled wrong — damp, metallic.
Beneath the charity house, he found the sealed chamber.
Inside: bones scorched black, a stone altar, and a journal written in Latin so old it predated the church. One word appeared again and again:
Virosa.
Living rot.
When Harrow returned to town, the bells were ringing — not for joy, but alarm. Smoke rose from the charity house. Screams followed.
In the chaos, the records burned.
Ashen Falls survived again.
But the sickness slept lightly now.
📱 EPILOGUE — December 24th, Ashen Falls
(21st Century)
The email was marked Low Priority.
SUBJECT: Anomalous Pathogen Sample – Ashen Falls
FROM: UK Health Security Agency
ATTACHMENT: soil_core_AF-HILL-03.pdf
Dr. Maya Chen skimmed it while Christmas music played faintly from the corridor. The lab was nearly empty. Everyone wanted to be home.
The sample had come from a redevelopment site near an old hill outside town. DNA fragments showed extreme degradation — ancient, but not inert.
Dormant.
The report referenced historical outbreaks. Parish records. A Victorian doctor's notes, rediscovered and digitised only weeks earlier.
One line caught her eye:
Pathogen exhibits unusual post-mortem cellular activity.
She frowned.
Outside, snow began to fall - rare for December now. Somewhere beneath the town, a sealed chamber cracked.
The power flickered.
And in Ashen Falls, something that had waited centuries finally found a world ready for it.