The village stood at the edge of a cracked salt plain, its roofs glinting like

shards of broken mirror whenever the sun burned low. Crows nested in chimneys,
their black wings painting the air with jagged strokes, and a smell of iron always
lingered near the well, as if the earth bled in secret. Travelers claimed the place
didn’t exist on maps, that compasses spun madly at its borders, that roads which
seemed to lead toward it instead curved away like frightened serpents. Yet the
villagers carried on, sweeping dust from doorsteps, hammering rusted nails back
into wood, whispering to their children not to look too long at the horizon where
shapes sometimes shifted like waiting predators.

In the inn, walls sagged under the weight of smoke and age. A harp leaned silent in
the corner, its strings furred with cobwebs. The innkeeper’s daughter moved through
the room like a candle flame refusing to go out, pale, restless, laughing too loud
when the rafters creaked. She told guests stories about a tower buried upside-down
beneath the plain, its spire pointing down into the molten heart of the world,
bells still ringing though no one could hear them except in dreams. Sometimes she
pressed a hand to her own ear and went quiet, as if listening to something only she
could feel.

Beyond the village, thorn trees huddled in crooked clusters, each one scarred with
marks no knife could make. They oozed sap the color of bruises, and the ground
around them was littered with bones—animal, mostly, though every once in a skull
appeared with a hollow carved through its crown as though something had burrowed
out. Shepherds who dared drive their flocks near swore the sheep refused to graze,
preferring to starve rather than tear grass grown in that soil.

At night, the salt plain gleamed like a frozen sea, and if you lay your ear to it,
you could hear the steady, distant pound of something enormous moving far beneath
the crust. The elders insisted it was only imagination, the resonance of your own
blood. The children whispered otherwise, claiming to hear syllables in the
thudding, an ancient language drumming through the stone. Some began to mimic the
rhythm, tapping it against walls, carving its patterns into desks, humming it until
their voices rasped raw. Parents punished them, but the cadence returned,
unstoppable, like an itch in the bones.

Merchants rarely visited. Those who did brought odd wares: jars of moth dust, maps
with continents erased, instruments built from whale cartilage. One man wore a coat
stitched entirely from human hair and smiled with teeth filed sharp, promising
prosperity if the villagers let him sleep three nights beneath the well. They
refused, and he vanished the next dawn, leaving behind only the smell of scorched
feathers and a trail of footprints leading straight into the plain before stopping
mid-stride.

A clockmaker lived on the northern edge, tinkering with brass gears until his
fingers bled. His house was filled with clocks that never kept time, each one stuck
on a different hour. He claimed he wasn’t building to measure time, but to trap it,
to pin down its wings like a collector pinning butterflies. When asked why, he only
muttered about the day the sky would split open and spill the future like broken
glass. No one pressed further.

Once, a storm rolled across the plain though no clouds gathered above. It began
with whispers in the grass, escalated into invisible hands rattling windows,
lifting skirts, tearing laundry from lines. Sparks erupted from the soil, glowing
blue like veins of lightning turned inside out. For three days the storm howled
without rain, without wind, only the roar of unseen hunger. When it ended, half the
village roofs were gone, yet no one had felt a single drop of water. The
innkeeper’s daughter disappeared then, last seen walking calmly into the plain,
barefoot, as if answering a call.
Children born afterward bore strange marks: star-shaped birthmarks on their
throats, fingernails that grew translucent and sharp, pupils rimmed in silver. The
elders began tattooing protective spirals on newborns, but the marks kept
spreading. Some of the children developed voices that made mirrors shiver, that
cracked clay pots, that drove dogs mad with howling. Parents locked them indoors,
yet still neighbors heard the harmonies at night, weaving through walls like smoke.

A traveler arrived claiming he could read the salt plain like scripture. He spread
black cloth on the ground, sprinkled grains across it, and interpreted the patterns
as holy warnings. He said the plain was not dead land but the skin of a sleeping
leviathan, and each quake, each tremor beneath, was the twitch of its dreaming
body. The villagers spat at him, called him a fraud, yet secretly some carved
amulets from salt and wore them under clothes, just in case he was right.

The thorn trees spread farther each year, roots cracking stone foundations, their
branches scraping roofs. Villagers cut them down, but each stump sprouted three
more, thicker and crueler. Fires burned for days yet the wood refused to turn to
ash; instead, the smoke coiled into figures that lingered, pointing toward the
horizon where the plain stretched endless. One child followed the smoke shapes,
walked until his feet bled, and was found days later babbling of cities turned
upside-down, of oceans pouring upward into the sky.

The well deepened on its own. Buckets sank longer, ropes unraveled yards beyond
memory, and when hauled up, they dripped not water but black liquid that smelled of
lightning. Anyone who drank it spoke truths they could not possibly know: names of
the unborn, deaths of strangers miles away, secrets carved into walls of houses
they’d never entered. Yet after speaking, their tongues shriveled gray, leaving
them mute forever. Still, some drank willingly, clutching the bucket with desperate
hands, their eyes wild with hunger for forbidden knowledge.

The inn decayed. Guests ceased coming. Windows stared hollow, chairs collapsed
under dust. Yet some nights, laughter still echoed from within though no one lived
there anymore. Locals avoided passing near after dark, for fear of glimpsing her—
the daughter who had walked into the plain—sitting in the doorway, salt crusting
her hair, eyes like holes burned in paper. She never spoke, only lifted her hand in
beckon, palm streaked with crystalline scars.

Dreams grew stranger. Men woke with salt crusting their eyelids, women with thorn
scratches across their thighs, children with sand between their teeth as though
they had been gnawing the plain itself. A fever swept through, burning skin cold
instead of hot, leaving survivors half-blind yet able to see shimmering figures
pacing at the edge of sight. The blind wept, insisting the figures whispered
promises of release, of escape, if only the villagers would open the ground and let
what slept beneath rise.

But no one dared