Act 1: The Return to Hollow Hill
Chapter 1: The Girl Who Came Home
**Late October, Present Day — Hollow Hill, Appalachia**
The road to Hollow Hill was a serpent.
Eleanor Blackthorn gripped the steering wheel as her battered pickup truck wound through the mountains, tires crunching over gravel and dead leaves. The trees here grew crooked, their branches clawing at the sky like skeletal hands. She hadn't seen another car in hours. The GPS had given up halfway through the drive, its screen dissolving into static the moment she crossed the town's rusted welcome sign:
***HOLLOWHILL — POP. 327***
***FOUNDED1693***
***"WHERETHEVEILISTHIN."***
"Charming," Eleanor muttered, rolling up the window. The air smelled wrong—sweet and cloying, like rot disguised as honeysuckle.
She'd spent the last six years avoiding this place. Avoiding *her*.
Agatha Blackthorn's funeral had been two weeks ago. No one had called Eleanor. She'd found out through a terse email from the town's lone law office, subject line: *RE: ESTATE OF AGATHA BLACKTHORN (DECEASED)*. The lawyer hadn't even bothered to sign his name.
*She didn't want you here,* the email might as well have said. *But the old witch is dead, so come collect your inheritance.*
The truck lurched over a pothole, and the cardboard box on the passenger seat slid sideways. A framed photo peeked out from under the flaps: a younger Eleanor, grinning in a UCLA sweatshirt, her arm slung around a woman with silver-streaked black hair and a smirk that could curdle milk. *Agatha*. Even in a snapshot, her grandmother's eyes were sharp, unflinching.
"You couldn't just leave me alone, could you?" Eleanor said aloud, her breath fogging the glass.
The road dipped sharply, and Hollow Hill materialized below.
It was less a town than a scar. A cluster of sagging clapboard houses hunched around a crumbling church steeple. The Blackthorn family manor loomed on the eastern ridge, its gables piercing the low-hanging clouds like broken teeth. Eleanor's throat tightened. She remembered the last time she'd seen it—age sixteen, screaming at Agatha in the rain, her grandmother's voice colder than the storm:
***"Run, then. But the Hill will always call you back. It's in your blood."***
Now, the house watched her. Waiting.
---
**The Hollow Hill Gazette Office — 4:13 p.m.**
The bell above the door jangled as Eleanor stepped inside. Dust motes swam in the thin light filtering through grime-caked windows. A ceiling fan creaked overhead, its chains strung with dried herbs and what looked like animal bones.
"We're closed," said a voice from behind a tower of yellowed newspapers.
Eleanor cleared her throat. "I'm here for the keys. To the Blackthorn house."
The newspaper tower shuddered. A man emerged—mid-sixties, gaunt, with a tobacco stain on his shirt and eyes that darted like trapped flies. *Harold Greeley*, according to the brass nameplate on the desk. Publisher. Editor. Janitor.
"You're her," he said, not a question.
"Eleanor Blackthorn. Yes."
He laughed—a wet, phlegmy sound. "Heard you were dead. Or in jail. Or both."
"Disappointed?"
Greeley's smile vanished. He rummaged in a drawer and slapped a rusted key onto the counter. "House is yours. Town voted to burn it down in '98, but your grandmother… persuaded them otherwise." He leaned closer, breath reeking of whiskey and decay. "Watch the third step on the staircase. It's rotten. Wouldn't want you to *fall*."
Eleanor pocketed the key. "Any other friendly advice?"
"Leave before sundown," he said, turning back to his newspapers. "The crows get hungry this time of year."
---
**Blackthorn Manor — 5:47 p.m.**
The house was worse than she remembered.
Peeling paint. Shattered windows. Vines thick as fists strangling the porch columns. The front door hung crooked on its hinges, carved with symbols Eleanor couldn't name—but they made her teeth ache to look at them.
She hesitated on the threshold. *Don't be stupid. It's just a house.*
The third step groaned ominously as she climbed to the second floor. Greeley hadn't lied. She edged past it, flashlight beam cutting through the gloom.
Agatha's bedroom was frozen in time. A four-poster bed draped in moth-eaten velvet. A vanity cluttered with dried flowers and amber bottles. And the smell—sage and iron and something darker, metallic. Blood?
Eleanor's boot knocked against a loose floorboard. She knelt, prying it up with her keys.
There, wrapped in faded silk, lay a book.
The cover was leather, cracked with age, its surface embossed with a tree whose roots coiled into a spiral. A single word gleamed in tarnished silver:
***GRIMOIRE***
Eleanor's pulse quickened. She'd heard stories about this book. Agatha had burned her own copy when Eleanor was twelve, after catching her granddaughter trying to read it.
***"This isn't a fairy tale, girl. It's a weapon."***
She flipped it open. The pages were blank.
"Of course," Eleanor snorted. "Just another one of your—"
A crow slammed into the window.
She jumped, the grimoire slipping from her hands. It hit the floor with a *thud*, and the pages erupted in a flurry of movement. Words bloomed—crimson ink spreading like bloodstains, sentences writing themselves in jagged, frantic script:
***THE VEIL IS WEAK***
***THEY ARE COMING***
***FIND ME ELEANOR***
Outside, the crows began to scream.
---
**Chapter 1 End**
---
### **Key Elements Introduced**:
1. **The Grimoire**: The blank spellbook that reacts to Eleanor, hinting at her latent magic.
2. **The Veil**: Referenced on the town sign and in the grimoire's warning.
3. **Agatha's Secrets**: The hidden grimoire and Eleanor's fractured relationship with her grandmother.
4. **The Crows**: Ominous symbols tied to the town's magic; their aggression escalates.
5. **Foreshadowing**: Greeley's warning about the staircase, the rotten roots under the house.
### **NextChapterTeaser**:
In **Chapter 2: BeneaththeBlackthornTree**, Eleanor investigates the gnarled oak in the manor's yard, where she unearths a locket containing a portrait of Abigail Blackthorn—Mercy's lost daughter. Meanwhile, Sheriff Callahan pays a visit, warning her to "stop digging up the past." That night, the crows return… and something *answers* the grimoire's call.