The Hallowes

The Hallowes were meant to be the seat of Judge Caleb Mauthisen ’s regency. Central to all Realms, with totemic portals through the grounds, The Hallowes was at one point, the sight of a grandiose cathedral dedicated to the Christian God, built atop a Scandinavian longhouse, adjacent to a Faerie Circle older than the first oak tree. In 2017, the Hallowes were a derelict Cathedral and Parsonage off country roads in Yorkshire. Impossible to find unless one knew where, and what, it was. Nothing but ruins and rock and overgrowth and the aura of a past far from dead and buried.

Purpose / Function

The Hallowes were both Sacred Temple and Home, a place of respite for the Judge and a space for him to continue his connection to the Creatrix. One of the oldest contiguous places of worship in the history of the Middling Plane, The Hallows was a noble dwelling tarnished by its fallow ownership.

2017

After over 100 years of vacancy, The Hallowes continued to call to its intended occupant. What was a bit of stonework, a bit of plaster or the dedication of a Fae Laird’s powers for a few measly hours to the ruins neglected in the edge of Yorkshire?

Alterations

From seedling interspersed in wildflowers to a mighty forest, a settlement to a sacred place, the Hallowes has been modified by as many cultures and generations as there has been humanity. Currently, the stone and timber work of the medieval Cathedral and Abbey win out.

Defenses

Anonymity is one of the greatest defenses for such an abandoned place. But, when that won’t work (as I’ve warned it won’t), the Hallowes contains rune-work, spellcasted and mystic barriers from every Realm of the Truce. Once someone gets around to rejuvenating the place, it will be the best guarded location on the planet. Why they don’t maintain it, I’ll never know.

History

At the first touch of a human’s foot upon the soil, the Hallowes became a juncture of spirit and substance as a tribe of animist Bell Beaker people turned the glade into a place of seasonal return. A girl-child laid a few bones stuffed with marrow, the simplest and most precious of gifts in a circle of flowers and a single seedling barely higher than the blossoms. Although the tribe scolded her, she cocked her coy head to the side, and with a smile at the dancing petals in the renewed breeze, whispered that this would be the fairest of seasons.

She was right, the skies gentle and weather warm, foraging and hunting easiest while the nomads rested in the glade.

They began to leave offerings of marrow bones and tallow each time they returned and when they left, navigating back through the stars and the elderly wise woman’s coy smile. The sapling through the wise woman’s life grew into the first Oak of the forest, and Fae folk wafted through the wildflowers and trees after the honoured spirits of stag and deer. Of wolf and fox.

This was the first belief, and when generations changed, the glade became adjacent to a settlement, for destroying the trees was announced by all to be a terrible omen.

Generations passed, the oak tree grew and humanity left their marrow bones and tallow, or the carcass after the solstice’s first feast, or their daughters for an entire moon cycle when they came upon their menses.

When the first of the Scandinavians came, a mighty longhouse was built adjacent to the holy site, after three skalds and two Jarls woke simultaneously from prophetic dreams. Twin ravens roosted in the mightiest Oak, and the Danes cut none of the sacred forest down, taking timber instead from a nearby valley. Dedicated to Thor’s sons, the Longhouse remained until the Normans burned it to the ground and upon its ashes, built a mighty Cathedral dedicated to St. Michael, the Archangel.

Across the gardens from the Cathedral, a small abbey was built for the few monks and priests, who called the Cathedral home.

The world changed, the unkept forest became a wild place, lurking threats forgotten for the shade and the dark. Common humanity drifted off from their dwellings, moved to York, to Masham and Rippon, leaving the once mighty Cathedral vastly fallow, but for those monks, who heard the whispers of the Oak and the twin ravens and the wolves all gone.

When The Mystic Truce required a location to house the infant Judge the Hallowes was deemed the most perfect location in Midgard for neutrality’s sake.

The Abbey was turned into a parsonage, and Raynar Einridsen raised his son within its bastion.

Yet, when the young Caleb got too close to Selyka, and broke the Truce’s Neutrality when inviting her inside another Realm’s sacred ground, the Hallowes lost their charge. After several years, Raynar also abandoned the place, no longer preaching in the Cathedral, little more than a Chapel in the minds of the scant few humans who attended.

The Hallowes turned to ruin, little more than an overgrown garden, a damaged Abbey and too far out from town for many to come tend to the place.

Tourism

Only those connected to the Truce really know where to look on the winding roads and overgrown paths in rural Yorkshire well enough to find the place.