The Mapstone Witch
Prologue
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───
The Legend of Sareth the Hollow
Stories of hunger.
Of madness.
Of the old law broken—the one that came before gods and kings: you do not eat your own.
One such story is of Sareth the Hollow.
The first to bear the Curse of Neverending Hunger.
The first vampire.
The first monster.
The Winter of No End
The storm had lasted too long.
The mountains groaned beneath the weight of snow and silence. Trees snapped like dry bones under the strain of ice. Rivers became tombs of stone. No birds sang. No beasts stirred. The world had gone still—held breathless in the jaws of a winter that would not end.
A village once stood buried in that frozen graveyard, deep in the highlands, where snow came early and left late. They were mountain folk—hard people with hard hands. They had survived countless winters. But not this one.
By the third month, the food was gone. The forests had been hunted bare, the river entombed beneath layers of unyielding ice. No matter how deep they dug, the water would not come.
By the fourth, they began to eat each other.
Neighbors turned on neighbors, teeth and knives tearing at the already-starved. Parents held weeping children close, not out of love, but to quiet their cries before the unthinkable. Screams echoed through frozen timber walls, then silence again. A silence thicker than death.
Sareth watched them die. One by one. Until he was the only one left.
He no longer feared the cold.
He feared the hunger.
It spoke to him in dreams. It pulsed behind his eyes. It whispered in the sound of the wind, in the twitching of his limbs, in the way his teeth began to ache at the sight of meat.
It coiled in his skull like a serpent.
And there, beneath rotting pelts in the corner of his ruined home, lay his wife.
Frozen.
Still.
Untouched.
Her lips were blue. Her hands curled like claws. Ice crusted her lashes. Her death had been silent, gentle—unlike the others.
For days, he knelt beside her. Starving. Trembling. Apologizing.
And for days, the hunger screamed.
And then—on the night when the storm howled loudest and the walls began to crack—Sareth made his choice.
He did not want to. He swore he never would.
But the hunger does not care for oaths.
It only wants flesh.
So he took the blade.
And he ate.
That was when it noticed him.
The Birth of the Hollow One
The first bite had not yet reached his stomach when the ground beneath the ice stirred.
Something ancient and blind turned its face toward him. Something that knew only hunger.
Something that had been waiting.
There was no name for it. No shape. No voice.
Just endless, gnawing void.
And in Sareth’s desperation, he had summoned it.
His blood turned thick and black in his veins. His body convulsed—bones snapping, muscles tearing. His skin dried, shriveling, clinging to his skeleton like old parchment. His flesh cracked and curled, turning pitch black, as if even light could not bear to touch him.
His ribs flared outward, splintering open like a broken cage. Beneath them, where warmth once lived, his heart hung loose—suspended in the hollow of his chest, pulsing faintly, like the flutter of a dying moth.
His eyes sank into his skull, glowing faintly from deep sockets. His fingers split and lengthened into gnarled claws. His mouth split too wide, his jaw unhinging, revealing rows of needle-like teeth that seemed to never end.
Sareth screamed.
But no sound came—only breath, ragged and wet and wrong.
The hunger did not fade.
It multiplied—now in his marrow, in his dreams, in the yawning, eternal void that opened inside him.
The man named Sareth was gone.
And the thing that remained was empty.
Sareth the Hollow took his first step into the snow, ribs exposed to the wind, heart swinging softly, eyes empty.
No thought.
No name.
Only hunger.
The Children of the Hollow
He wandered.
For years. For decades. For centuries—no one knows.
Villages vanished beneath his shadow, their people torn to shreds in the night, limbs dragged across ice, faces peeled from bone. He left no footprints, only bloodstains frozen in time.
But some did not die.
Some survived.
When they were found, their skin was pale. Their eyes were distant. Their hearts barely beat.
They did not speak.
They did not age.
They did not breathe.
And they hungered—not for flesh, but for blood.
They were the first vampires. The broken remnants of Sareth’s wake.
The cursed.
His children.
The Curse of the Hungering Blood
It is said that all vampires—no matter how clever, no matter how powerful—will fall as Sareth did.
Because the hunger never stops.
It only waits.
The young drink deeply and dream of immortality. They build empires of shadow and blood. They believe they are in control.
But the old know better.
The old rot.
Their minds decay. Their bodies twist. Paranoia consumes them. They forget their names, their reasons, their gods. Until nothing remains but that aching, relentless hunger.
Until they become like him.
Until they become hollow.
Where He Sleeps
They say that far beyond the known maps, where the world ends and the sky freezes in place, there is a land of eternal winter.
There, beneath the surface of a black-frozen lake, he wanders.
The Hollow One.
The first.
Sareth.
Driven by instincts older than thought, he drags himself across the ice fields, ribs wide, claws tearing snow, until the ice beneath him groans.
And cracks.
And gives.
He plunges into the water—cold so deep it stops even hunger. He thrashes once. Twice. Then drifts.
Below the surface, in that lightless tomb, he comes to a kind of rest.
His ribs sway. His heart ticks softly in its cage. His eyes, open wide, watch the underside of the ice.
Waiting.
But even in sleep, the hunger watches with him.
─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───