Hollow Root

The town of Hollow Root is just one of the hundreds of small settlements in the swampy island chain of Solags Folly, at least on the surface. An odd town without much discernable industry, it still has a healthy population and some conveniences though visitors are very rare.
The settlement is spread over several miles of swamp with a majority of the families that live there, there is a more central gathering point that is mostly used for gatherings with only the settlements leadership living there. It is in this central point that most visitors will stay, the rest of the town enjoying their solitude and not taking kindly to those that break it. Many of the families buildings in the swamp are built up onto stilts or nestled in the tangled boughs of the ghostly willows that cover much of this island.
Their only connection to the outside world is through a winding channel in the shifting morass that leads to the deeper waters between the islands, a channel whose form changes depending on the drifting mats of swamp grass and where the currents push the thick silt to. The path is never the exact same every time and even the residents will shrug their shoulders with a smile, telling visitors that the swamp will show them the way whenever it wants them to leave.
Visitors of the town will find it to be mostly normal at first glance, the small central gathering of building serves as the towns gathering point for meetings, festivals and the like. Things become decidedly more odd the longer one stays as you rarely seem to see the same exact person twice, the amount of people ever in the town is visibly small and when asked after it the responses are generally smiles and shrugs with a friendly spattering of friendly and barely legible patois.
The formation of this town is shrouded in mystery, the townsfolk will talk about a legendary person called "Old Granny" or "Lady Calo" and will speak of her in cryptic terms, at times talking as though they had lived centuries before and at others as though they had spoken to her last week. The matriarchs of the different families that make this town home are all generally called some variation of "Grandmother", "Granny" or "Lady". The leadership of the town is a loose council of the various female elders of the different families, though to an outsider the term elder seems very misleading. The council, when it meets, can have a strange spread of old and young women on it.
In the town of Hollow Root, the families there have a particularly unique method of dealing with the unfortunate inbreeding that comes from their relative isolation and the damaged children that can arise from those unions. All deformed and stillbirthed children being offered to the swamp that protects the town. The Grandchildren are the blanket term for these sacrifices, though what happens to them is not spoken of.

Location: 
Solags Folly Continent of Keskad

Type

Village