Alter Kindwood's Arc

Chapter 1 of 6

The third child vanished on a night with no moon, and Alter Kindwood found her shoe at the edge of the black pines. He crouched over it. Blue flame guttered in the sockets of his deer skull. Moss shifted on his pale shoulders as he lifted the small leather thing and held it to the wind. The village would blame him again. They always did. They saw the antlers and the bone face and reached for their bows. He had spent two winters keeping their goats alive in secret, mending their snares, guiding lost hunters home through fog they never knew he cleared. None of it mattered if their children kept disappearing. If he could bring even one back, they might lower the arrows long enough to listen. He followed the shoe's scent past the last friendly tree. The deeper woods held something he did not know. He had felt it for a month now, a cold weight that pressed the sap back down inside the trunks. Wherever it walked, the vines on his arms curled tight and browned at the tips. He needed a name for it. Without a name, he could not fight it, and the next child taken would not be found at all. He stopped at a clearing where the moss had turned gray. On a low branch sat a bird carved from black stone, gold lines running along its wings. Its eyes were open and wet. It was not a carving. It watched him. He had heard the old trees whisper of such messengers, sent by the forest's first keepers to those who asked the right question. Alter knelt. "What took her." The stone bird opened its beak. The voice came from somewhere behind his skull, inside the bone. "The Hollow Man. He wore your shape once. He wears hunger now. He eats what is small and afraid, and he cannot cross running water while the sun is up." Alter's flames pulled low. He had suspected a beast. A beast he could track. This was worse and better at once. A thing with rules could be broken by its rules. "Where." "Under the split rock. Three children breathe there still. By dawn, two." The bird closed its beak and went back to stone. Alter picked it up. It weighed nothing. He tucked it against the necklaces at his chest and stood. He had his name and he had his clock. He also had a problem he had not counted on. To reach the split rock before dawn he would have to cross the creek at the village ford, in full view of the watchmen who had shot at him last spring. The girl's shoe was still in his hand. He closed his fingers around it and started toward the smell of woodsmoke and lanterns.