The Hallowes
Purpose / Function
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
Defenses
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
1879
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