the children felt it first. all summer, they'd been dreaming the same dream, and by july, the dream had stopped staying in their sleep. a girl from the hollows woke with soil packed black beneath her fingernails. a boy kept asking whether it was time to float away yet and cried without knowing why when he was told no. a first-grader came down to breakfast with five livid marks ringing her wrist, a handprint too big to be her own, and explained that someone had held onto her so she wouldn't drift off in the night.
a farmer past the county line lost a goat in the second week of july. he found the carcass himself at the edge of his property, stiff and cold and unmistakably dead. three days later, it was standing at his fence. he knew it was the same goat. he'd put it in the ground with his own hands. it didn't want feed, and it didn't want him. it only stood with its head turned toward the trees, patient, hour after hour, and when he finally worked up the nerve to get close and really look, he found its eyes had gone black corner to corner, no white left in them at all, dark and wet and fixed on something past the trees that he couldn't see and didn't care to.
after that, the other animals started keeping their own counsel. dogs balked at corners they'd turned their whole lives, heels dug in, hackles up at nothing. a woman found her cat sitting in the cold fireplace at three in the morning, staring straight up the flue, and she couldn't coax it down for two days. more goats gathered in the dead of night, dozens of them, herds that couldn't have come from any farm anyone could name. and then they began to bleat, all of them at once, a sound that carried for miles, louder than any animal that size should make, going on and on into the dark until the whole town lay awake listening to it and no one dared go out to see.
then people started slipping. a bank teller stopped mid-transaction and said a string of words in a voice that wasn't hers, then came back to herself with no memory of the gap. a man stood motionless in aisle four of the hardware store for eleven minutes and couldn't say afterward what he'd gone in for. a teenager bagging groceries looked up at a regular and called her by a name that belonged to no one, calm and certain, then blinked and apologized.
and out at the field, the old burnt ring behind the bleachers began to grow again for the first time since halloween 1990. six years, it had been there, that scar in the grass nobody would cross after dark. now it crept outward a little more each night, the grass dying clean and sudden at the edge, no browning, no warning, green then nothing. soon after, people started turning up in the field in the dead of night, with no memory of how they'd gotten there.
the first was a woman two streets off the highway who woke at dawn in her nightgown, feet black to the ankle with the field's dead soil, her front door standing open behind her and no memory of the walk. she wasn't the last. it happened to a man who'd lived in magnolia creek for forty years and never once had cause to visit that field. it happened to others, one or two a night by the end of the month, all of them describing the same thing after: a pull, a certainty in the body that they were needed somewhere and running late, their feet carrying them on while the rest of them slept. they walked past their own cars. they walked miles, some of them, barefoot, and woke without a single blister to show for it.
it happened to a boy of nine whose mother found his bed empty at two in the morning. she found him an hour later standing inside the burnt ring, barefoot, calm, his head turned toward the trees the same way the goat had turned its. she called his name and he didn't move. she called it again, and again, and only on the third did he finally look at her, still half-asleep, unbothered, almost puzzled to see her there at all. "why'd you come get me?" he asked. "it's almost my turn."
then lettie dreams of the ring. she's standing in it before she knows she's asleep, bare feet in dead grass gone silver-pale, the whole field lit by a light with no source, no moon, no stars, just a grey even glow. the burnt circle is enormous now, wider than any field should be, and she understands without being told that it has been growing all this time toward exactly this size, toward her, toward tonight.
the leaves come down. not one tree in sight, and still they come, brown and curling, falling all at once, and where they touch the ground, they don't land so much as sink, swallowing into the dark soil. she counts them without meaning to. she loses the count. she starts again. she has the terrible sense that the counting matters, that there's a number she's supposed to reach, and that reaching it is the last thing she'll ever do.
then the bell. it rings, low and cracked and ominous, and with every toll, another of the lights she hadn't noticed overhead goes dark, one by one, an exhale of sound with each, until she understands she's standing in a night six years gone, watching a stadium go black from the inside of someone else's memory.
and under all of it, close as her own pulse, a voice. it isn't cruel. that's what stays with her after. it's patient, almost tender, the voice of something that has all the time in the world and knows it. "when the year turns to rot," it says, "and the door is cut where it was cut before. when the clock forgets the hour between one day and the next. that is when the skin goes thin enough to reach through. that is when we come up to meet you."
the voice draws closer, or the dream does, until it isn't coming from the field at all but from somewhere just behind her own teeth, folded in with her own thoughts so she can't tell where it ends and she begins. it doesn't speak in that stretch. it settles there and lets her feel how long it's willing to wait. "there's a cost," it whispers. "there's always a cost. you'll each pay a piece of it, and one of you will pay the whole. shall i tell you who? no. i think i'll let you carry it a while. it's so much sweeter watching you look at each other and wonder."
she understands, even asleep, that the not-knowing is the cruelest thing in the dream, and that it was left out on purpose. the hunger wants them to come. a thing that holds its door open for you doesn't warn you what it takes to walk through, only that it takes. whatever the descent costs them, they'll have to dig it out themselves. "count the nights, little seer," the voice says, as the last light goes out. "you're almost out of them."
she wakes with her throat raw and her feet cold and dirt she can't account for ground into the soles, and she lies there in the dark not screaming, not moving, doing the only thing the dream left her able to do.
she counts.
EVENT RECAP
lily called the fourteen to the peak and revealed that the prophecy that they knew all was wrong. someone altered it. she found the original in the archives of the school library, led there by lettie's visions, and read it aloud to everyone there: "six slayers, marked by death, bound by blood, shall rise when the hunger devours from beneath. to close the gate, one must be cut away, but the gate cannot be closed from above. when the hollow night thins the skin of the world, and the creek runs black with what lives below, the chosen must descend into the dark entire, and carry the light where the light cannot go. what the hunger has swallowed, it will not release without the cost of blood and breath and bone. the gate will not close until the deep is entered, and none who enter shall return alone."
the real prophecy was even worse than what they believed it to be. to close the gate, they would have to descend through the void into maggot creek itself, and it was a real possibility that not all of them would come back. as the group started to argue, the situation slipping out of control, kaden collapsed mid-scene. the hunger took hold of him for the first time in six years, using his body like a puppet. it went straight for alistair, knocking lily and xingyu to the ground in its path, lily's ankle twisting hard beneath her as she fell. taking hold of alistair, it revealed that he was the one who let it back through, that it had followed him out of the gate.
alistair, unable to see kaden inside it, moved to cut its throat. xingyu and lettie both tried to stop him, but it was odette who caught the blade with her bare hand and held him back. then the hunger made its offer: hand alistair over and the rest of them would walk away that night. refuse and it would start killing. some members of the group, especially matteo, were noticably quiet, until xingyu rose and refused for all of them.
the hunger made good on its threat. it turned on xingyu and lettie where they stood together, still close from trying to hold alistair back, and went for them both. it was kaden who stopped it, fighting his way back to the surface and wrenching control from the hunger before it could do real harm. lettie went down against the standing stones and came up with a fractured wrist. xingyu took his fall on the rock, his rib cracking against stone. the group was left with three injured members and even less answers than what they started with.
ADMIN NOTES
hi everyone, and thank you all so much for your patience getting here! i'm really proud of how the last timestamp came together, and i'm excited to move into this one. this timestamp runs from july 14th to august 2nd, 1996 in game, picking up in the days after maroon peak. the group is regrouping now, still shaken, and the town has started to change around them in ways that are getting harder to ignore. lettie's had a new vision, and it'll be the group's job this timestamp to figure out just what her vision means.
instead of paired threads this time around, i've listed some mini-events happening around town below that anyone can set a starter around, plus some missions your characters might take on as the group tries to prepare. you are more than welcome to come up with your own ideas, but hopefully, these will provide some good starting points for you all!
this timestamp will last about 2-3 weeks. towards the end of the second week, i'll take a poll about whether or not we should continue for another week or move on. this is more of a cool-down timestamp to give the group some time to deal with the aftermath of our group thread, but things are definitely still happening! as stated before, you are always welcome to continue on with old threads and start new ones within the previous timestamp. just make sure the timestamp is appropriately marked in the thread.
APPENDIX
mini-events
the mayor's address (july 18). with the rumors piling up fast, mayor white calls a press conference on the steps of town hall. the official party line is that the sleepwalking, the blackouts, and the sick animals all trace back to a contamination in the well water. he asks people to keep their children indoors after dark "as a safety precaution" while the town works to fix it. reporters from several towns over show up, and so does most of magnolia creek, standing in the square in the heat. no one seems convinced.
the summer festival (july 26–28). the town's one real gathering of the year. three days of rides and game booths and food stalls and music performances, the ferris wheel offering a view of the entire town. this year, the determination to have a good time has a bit of an edge to it. everyone's a little too loud, a little too eager to pretend. out-of-towners often show up, if only to see the urban legend of maggot creek with their own two eyes.
the book signing (july 24). a folding table set up at the front of twice-sold tales, a stack of glossy hardcovers. gordon shivers survived the night at the field in 1990, or says he did, and he's spent six years turning that into a novel: what came for us: the untold story of magnolia creek. all lies and tall tales from a man who probably wasn't even there that night. the store's owner didn't even want to host him. still, everyone turns out anyway, some to gawk, some to buy, some to protest outside, and a few to tell him to his face exactly what they think of him profiting off the worst thing that ever happened here.
missions
research the prophecy. somebody has to make sense of what lettie and lily brought back from the library. this means long nights in the library archives, cross-referencing, chasing the meaning of a riddle none of them fully understand.
decode the vision. lettie's dream points to something that'll happen in the future. someone needs to figure out what that might be. it's dangerous work in its own way — the closer they get to the answer, the more real the descent becomes.
figure out the cost. the hunger promised a price and refused to name it. the group can't walk into a descent blind, which means someone has to dig for an answer on what going down actually takes. the most important job and the one least likely to have an answer.
keep watch on kaden. after maroon peak, no one's sure if the hunger is still within him or whether it could happen again. someone needs to stay close, watch for the signs, and be ready if it comes back, without treating him like a bomb waiting to go off. a delicate but important task.
investigate the town. the sleepwalkers, the blackouts, the strange animals, the growing ring — the hunger's influence is clrealy growing in magnolia creek. someone should be looking for answers around town, trying to figure out what the hunger might be up to next.
prepare for the descent itself. the clock is ticking. they'll need weapons, supplies, and a plan for going into the dark and coming back out. or maybe with enough research, they can find a way that won't require going through the gate? can the prophecy be circumvented? if there's another way, the group needs to find out now, before it's too late.
there's something different about magnolia creek. you can feel it in the air.
the fog doesn't burn off by noon anymore. it just sits there, low over the mill road, thick enough that headlights turn to smudges and the tree line disappears an hour before the sun actually goes down.
the birds left early this year. nobody talks about that out loud but everyone's noticed the quiet where they used to be. the animals that are still around are acting strange. dogs won't cross certain streets, no matter how hard their owners pull the leash. deer stand in the middle of the highway at dusk and just watch the cars come, patient, like they're waiting to see what happens. ms. prescott's cat clawed through a screen door trying to get out of a house it had lived in for eleven years, and nobody's seen it since.
the well water tastes like pennies past the county line. the radio cuts out on cedar street for no reason anyone can find, three seconds of static and then nothing. kids are having the same dream, all of them, though none of them will describe it the same way twice. a few have stopped sleeping instead, lying awake in the dark, staring at their closet doors like they expect a monster to jump out.
and underneath all of it, the thing nobody is willing to say aloud: the town remembers 1990. they remember the all-consuming dark, the way it swallowed the stadium lights whole. the blood-stained grass. the feral screams that didn't sound like any of the six kids everyone knew. the older people cross the street rather than walk past the football field after dark. they don't explain why. they don't have to. they just watch the fog roll in a little lower every night, and wait to see who it takes first.
a month ago, mr. hanlon went down to the water at four in the morning because his dog wouldn't stop barking at the treeline. he found something crawling up out of the bank on its hands and knees, soaked through, moving wrong, like its joints had forgotten which way they were supposed to bend. he didn't call it a person. not at first. he called the sheriff and said there was an animal in the creek, and then he stood there in the dark and watched it drag itself onto the grass, lift its head, and look at him with alistair pryde's face.
he's not the same. that much is easy to see even for people who didn't really know him. he laughs at the wrong moments. some nights his eyes catch the light strange, pupils swallowing the color until there's nothing left but black. he'll go quiet mid-sentence, tilt his head like he's listening to something nobody else can hear. after a routine medical evaluation, the sheriff's department called it "post-traumatic stress disorder," gave him a clean bill of health, and let him walk right back into town. the five slayers who felt the tether for the first time in six years know better. they've spent the last month circling him, circling each other, trying to figure out what to do about the boy who crawled out of the water wrong. the fog just keeps getting lower, waiting for them to decide.
a team has been assembled, for better or for worse. it's been three weeks of plans and arguments that have gone nowhere, of fourteen people trying to agree on anything. it's been so long that the slayers have properly interacted with each other that nobody's really in charge, which is kind of the problem. they've tried voting. they've tried whoever talks loudest. they've tried just waiting for someone else to decide so no one has to be the one who's wrong. so in the end, lily decides to leave notes to the other thirteen. four words, the same four words, over and over. midnight. maroon peak. come.
maroon peak. the slayers and their friends know the way there with their eyes closed. past the creek, up the switchbacks, the forest just stops and gives way to a wound of red earth that shouldn't exist. bare rock that hums faintly if you know to listen for it. scorched circles still scarring the ground where they trained. stones still standing in careful, deliberate patterns. to anyone else, it's just a clearing. a strange one, maybe, if they noticed the dirt at all. but to the six who bled here once, it's the place they stopped being ordinary. the place the mountain has been waiting for them to come back to ever since.
tonight, they finally do.
ADMIN NOTES
happy opening, everyone! thank you all so much for your patience! i'm so excited to get started, and i hope you are too! for this timestamp, we'll be doing a faster-paced group thread for their meeting at maroon peak, along with paired threads to encourage new interactions. you are, of course, more than welcome to write with each other beyond that. i just thought some starting points would help! i will post the details of the group thread later today.
all characters are expected to be present at the meeting, but if you're especially busy this timestamp, please let me know and we can either come up with a reason why they didn't show or briefly plot out what they were up to at the meeting for other muns' reference. i'm happy to accommodate you however i can!
this timestamp is set from june 28th to july 12th, 1996. the meeting will take place on july 12th. you are more than welcome ( and encouraged! ) to explore the earlier portions of the timestamp before the meeting, but i ask that you not go ahead of the timestamp. some vital information will be revealed at the meeting, and i don't want anyone to miss out on the opportunity to react to it! i'm going to say that this timestamp will last for two weeks, but we'll play it by ear, and if we need a bit longer, that's completely fine!
you are welcome to do flashback threads as well. i do ask that you make sure that the characters are at least 21 years old in any flashback threads as we're a 21+ group. you may flash back earlier than that in self paras and drabbles as long as you're mindful of the content you write.
if anyone forgot to opt in for the paired threads and would like to be involved, please let me know and i'll get you set up as soon as possible! and if any of these prompts aren't working out for whatever reason, please feel free to reach out as well!
APPENDIX
june 28.
the tome and the talisman both turn up at twice-sold tales pursuing the same lead, neither aware the other had been looking into it.
june 30.
the blade finds the scythe at the old sawmill. neither of them have a good reason to be there, and yet neither one moves to leave.
july 2.
the ring arrives at fryday's to find the pyre waiting there for her. it becomes clear that the pyre has deliberately sought her out. words are exchanged.
july 5.
the chain comes across the veil alone at the pinewood laundromat late at night. it's clear from the veil's eyes that something is wrong.
july 8.
at the rest of the group's insistence, the wound and the beacon are forced to patrol god's acre together, looking for a group of ferals.
july 12 — maroon peak.
all fourteen arrive. the meeting begins. there's an uneasiness in the air that everyone feels. even the supernatural creatures in presence look a bit rattled. what was the meeting called for?
