Harrower Field Report #9748: Bodmin Moor, Cornwall
Submitted by: Harrower Maithe
Classification: Priority Amber
Activity: Persistent spiritual interference, residual hauntings, temporal anomalies
Spindle suspected to be anchored within site perimeter. Recurrent aural phenomena reported: layered choral harmonics not native to local haunting pattern.
Note—tones bear structural resemblance to Siren vessel resonance, suggesting possible misuse or mimicry of Iskar harmonics.
Abbey Ruins, Cornwall
Dawn broke pale and bruised across the moors, mist curling low over the heather as if reluctant to lift its veil. The Land Rover rumbled down a narrow country road flanked by stone walls slick with dew, its headlights cutting faint paths through the fog. Grey sat in the back seat, wrapped in her new coat—a thick, charcoal-grey wool garment—a gift Alaric had insisted she wear. The lining bore faint thread patterns that shimmered when the light caught them. Her thoughts drifted like the mist outside, anchored only by the steady pressure of Alaric's presence in the driver's seat.
Beside her, Maerlowe carefully unfolded a piece of parchment, the edges frayed and the ink long faded in places. The map was hand-drawn in curling script, marked with sigils and Harrower glyphs that shimmered faintly under the dawn light. "Drawn by Harrower Adelaine, sometime in the 1500s," he murmured, fingers tracing the lines. "She was the last to attempt passage through the veil near the Abbey. She didn't return, but she left this—attached to the field report sent in by Harrower Maithe, just before his reassignment to Iskar."
"Comforting," Wickham muttered from the passenger seat. "Nothing says 'safe journey' like inheriting cartography from a missing corpse."
Maerlowe ignored him. "The Abbey of St. Éolande was once a cloister for cloisterless women—hedge-weavers, wild-blooded midwives, even fae-touched exiles. Burned during the Dissolution. Most records erased. But we have threads."
Grey leaned forward, peering through the windshield as the terrain shifted—low hills rising, trees giving way to wind-scoured rock. The ruins came into view through the gloom, a collapsed nave and shattered bell tower sunken into the cradle of a wooded ravine. The Abbey had once been graceful, carved of pale stone, but time and storm had worn its bones bare. Moss blanketed the remaining walls. Arched windows opened only to fog.
They parked at the edge of the trail. The road vanished into overgrown heather and bramble.
Wickham was the first to disembark, stretching with an exaggerated groan. "And thus begins our grand ramble through the foggy bosom of doom," he declared. "I do so enjoy a hike with ominous undertones."
Alaric raised a brow. "You know you can wait in the car."
Wickham scoffed. "And miss the spooky underground crypt where death almost certainly awaits us? Perish the thought."
They began to walk, boots squelching against damp earth. The mist thickened as they moved, clinging to their coats, crawling into the seams of their clothes. Birds were silent. Even the wind held its breath.
Grey paused once, looking back. The fog swallowed the Land Rover whole.
She stepped forward again, a weight pressing between her shoulder blades. Not fear—something older. Expectant.
As they neared the treeline, the air shifted. Energy prickled over their skin, like a veil brushed against them. A glamour, heavy and ancient, wrapped the landscape in illusion. Maerlowe murmured a counterward, and the path twisted suddenly under their feet, revealing stone steps buried beneath gorse.
Grey stumbled slightly, catching herself on Alaric's shoulder. Alaric didn't flinch. His eyes were on the ruins ahead.
Wickham shivered. "I hate it when reality rearranges itself without asking."
Grey nodded, heart thudding. "Feels like we've crossed into a memory."
Maerlowe smiled faintly. "We have."
They pressed on.
The ruins of the Abbey loomed like the bones of a fallen god—arches pierced by ivy, stone columns leaning like drunks mid-collapse. As they passed under the broken archway of what had once been the narthex, Grey froze. A tingle spread through her chest, deeper than nerves. It wasn't pain, but memory—borrowed, ancient, not hers. The spindle pulsed faintly in her palm.
Alaric slowed beside her, eyes scanning the crumbled vaults and half-buried flagstones. "This ground is saturated," he murmured. "With Hunt blood. This was a sanctum long before the Abbey."
Mist poured through the shattered transept, thickening into shapes that danced just at the edge of vision—flickers of antlers and ash-grey hounds, thunder in the roots of the trees. The stones whispered in a tongue no one recognised. Even Alaric's face remained stony, his brow tight with unease.
Wickham paused at the treeline where the old forest took root again. His breath caught. A symbol had been carved into the bark of an ancient yew—an angular sigil, formed of interlocked spirals.
He stepped forward slowly, fingers brushing the groove. His hand trembled.
"That's from my final trial," he said, voice thin. "My Harrower trial. I never knew what it meant."
The air around them thickened. A branch creaked, though there was no wind. Alaric stepped closer. "It's a ward against dissolution," he said. "Old magic. It holds back forgetting."
Maerlowe's gaze sharpened. "So someone wanted this place remembered."
Grey glanced at Wickham. The usual spark of mischief had vanished from his eyes. Wickham looked younger somehow—haunted. Behind them, a half-buried antler jutted from the earth like a fossil. No bones accompanied it. Only the faint echo of a horn's call, too far off to be real.
Then, ghost-like memories of a Wild Hunt surged into view—riders tearing through the trees, silver horns raised, laughter wild and unkind. Amid the chaos, a song threaded faintly through the mist—haunting, wordless, not sung by any voice present but remembered by the ground itself. Young women danced in the clearing, their eyes too bright, their hands bleeding thread, as though pulled by music not their own.
The mist swallowed the scene again. Only silence remained.
Wickham exhaled. "Well," he said shakily, "this is shaping up to be an absolute riot."
Grey put a hand on his shoulder. "We've got you. Whatever this is—it's part of your story too."
The symbol on the tree glowed faintly in answer. The forest, it seemed, was listening.
As they pressed deeper into the forest, the path diverged—tugged apart by unseen forces. The mist thickened, turning to silver walls that shimmered with illusion, veiling even sound. One by one, they lost sight of each other, not in sudden panic but in gradual, dreamlike dissociation, each believing they were still walking together until they turned and found only fog. The air pulsed with enchantment, thick as honey, dulling thoughts and warping memory. Each of them knew, somewhere deep, that they weren't thinking clearly—but the knowledge floated just out of reach, like a name on the tip of the tongue. The forest pressed in. Footsteps echoed wrong. And no one could quite recall which direction they had come from.
Wickham stumbled into a clearing bathed in moonlight. At its center stood a figure cloaked in shadow, bearing the face of someone long gone—his first love, eyes soft with remembrance. A voice, impossibly kind, asked a question he'd buried: "Why didn't you save me?"
Tears welled, unbidden. "Because I couldn't," he whispered.
The figure wept with him. "Then forgive yourself."
A riddle etched itself in the air, its lines forming in runes of flickering silver, dancing in a spiral that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. The sigils formed a shape Wickham remembered from his training—three interlocked loops, each one representing duty, mercy, and self. The solution wasn't spoken but lived: he stepped forward and touched the symbol for mercy, whispering the name of the one he lost. The runes dissolved like morning frost.
The illusion broke like mist at sunrise, and with it, the song faded—a final, aching note unraveling into silence, like breath held too long finally exhaled.
Alaric came to a glade ringed with broken horns and ghostlight. A boy waited there—ginger-haired, laughing, vibrant. He ran to Alaric and embraced him, whispering, "I missed you."
Alaric dropped to his knees, arms locking around the boy with a desperation that came from years buried too deep to name. The embrace was fierce, trembling—not just reunion, but mourning. He buried his face in the boy's shoulder, inhaling the scent of wildflowers and hearth-smoke, real or imagined, like it might anchor him. The boy felt solid. Alive. But even as Alaric held him, he knew the moment was borrowed. Fragile. Already fading. He held tighter anyway.
He swallowed, his voice breaking like a wave against a distant shore. "I remember every year, every wrinkle. I remember how your hair turned silver at the temples, how your laugh deepened with age. You used to chase rabbits and ghosts with the same reckless joy—and then, in the end, you sat by the fire in that old cottage, wrapped in wool and stories, your hand never letting go of mine."
He bowed his head, breath trembling. "You were the best of them. Even when your eyes clouded, even when you called me your grandson because your memory was fraying—you still smiled at me like the boy I met on the battlefield.
But I don't remember your name."
The boy faded gently, and with him, the hum of the song that had quietly underpinned the moment began to unravel—like a thread being unspooled from the world itself. It lingered, fragile and forlorn, before dissolving into the hush of the glade. Alaric stood alone. Mortals make ghosts of us all, he thought.
In a circle of monoliths, Grey stood before three spinning wheels: one wove threads of blinding light, another of deep shadow, the third of swirling ash.
A faceless weaver hovered nearby, her presence echoing Ailbhe. "Choose," she said.
Grey's hands moved instinctively, but not without commentary. "Right, no pressure," she muttered under her breath, eyeing the wheels like they might sprout teeth. Still, her fingers brushed each spinning thread in turn—light, shadow, and ash. The textures clung to her fingertips like silk pulled from memory, warm and cold all at once. The light burned too bright, the shadow clung like guilt she hadn't earned yet, and the ash crumbled like half-spoken apologies.
But she wove through them anyway, stubborn as ever, jaw set in quiet defiance. If fate was watching, it could bloody well keep up.
The threads tangled, hissed, and sparked—but he refused to let go. Slowly, deliberately, they began to braid themselves into one continuous strand: silver-black, flickering with points of starlight, pulsing with quiet intent. It shimmered in the air between his hands, alive with purpose and possibility, as if it had waited all this time to be chosen.
When the final twist of thread aligned, the spinning wheels stilled in perfect silence, and Grey felt a pulse deep in her bones—as though the world had briefly realigned itself around her choice.
The weaver bowed and disappeared. As she faded, so too did the music—soft and strange, a thread of harmony Grey hadn't noticed until it was gone. It receded like tidewater pulled from shore, leaving her skin prickling with quiet, wordless memory. Grey exhaled slowly, not quite sure whether the silence that followed felt empty—or earned.
Maerlowe knelt beside a cairn half-swallowed by moss. The air was thick here—heavy with old sorrow, and the hush of unspoken names. He brushed away the years, fingers reverent as they parted moss and lichen, revealing half-buried tokens beneath: a rusted Harrower clasp, a sliver of antler, a cloth scrap embroidered with fading sigils.
"I built this," he said when Grey found him, voice low and ragged. "We lost too many. I… I gave one of them up. Lied to him. Told him help was coming so the others could escape."
Grey crouched beside him, silent but steady, placing a hand gently on his shoulder. She didn't press, didn't prod—just offered presence, like she was patching a tear she'd mended a hundred times before. Her expression was calm, but her voice—when it came—might've been dry if it weren't so soft. "You know, you can be a bastard sometimes, Maerlowe," she said quietly. "But you don't lie without reason. And you don't carry things alone anymore. That's the deal, remember?"
Maerlowe's mouth trembled.
"He was brave," he whispered. "Trusted me to the end. I looked into his eyes and told him a kindness that wasn't true. Then I turned away and left him for dead."
The forest exhaled around them, soft with wind that stirred the moss like breath. Grey tightened her grip slightly, offering what comfort she could.
"I've carried it since," Maerlowe said. His shoulders sagged, as though finally laying down a weight that had bent his spine for centuries. A faint hum seemed to retreat into the moss, no louder than breath—music fading, as if a song had been present the entire time, unnoticed until it vanished. When they emerged again, the air tasted of thunder and memory. And something old in the earth had stirred.
[To be continued...]