The Grey Antler Stories
The fire burned low in the center of the cabin — not from lack of wood, but out of habit. The kind of habit that settles over generations until even flames learn to keep quiet.
They say that winter came early that year, though no one remembers which year exactly. This village never kept calendars. It kept stories. Stories passed from old mouths into young ears, then back and forth among children until they wore smooth like stones in the river — smooth enough to lose all their edges.
That night, the boys sat close around the hearth, arms around their knees, eyes catching and losing the firelight. They weren't trying to hear better. They wanted to see — to see if this telling would be the same as the last.
Old Ragar began without warning. He didn't look at them. His gaze was fixed on the ash, and it seemed the voice came not from his throat, but from behind the fire, as if it drifted out with the smoke.
"They carried no banners," he said. "Only bone necklaces. Some of the helmets had grey antlers painted on them."
"You mean on the helmets?" one boy whispered, then stopped himself. Ragar didn't pause. If he heard, he didn't show it.
"It was Split Moon night. They didn't take the road. Not even the riverside track. They went straight through the marsh. No one crosses the marsh unless they've made peace with losing half their men. But they didn't lose one. Not one."
The question came, eventually. It always did. It came like frost in late autumn — never early, never late:
"Did that really happen?"
The fire snapped. Ragar said nothing for a while. He picked at something under his fingernail, slowly, as if trying to free a buried thought. Then he spoke again, softer, deeper:
"The deer always run first. They know. Grey antlers always run before the storm."
He inhaled.
"They were Velkhar, yes. But not the kind you see at the trade fairs. These didn't laugh. They didn't barter fur for barley. They came to take back what was once theirs."
Another boy leaned in, reverent, uncertain.
"But no one can walk without making a sound."
Ragar didn't respond immediately. He chewed the end of a dry root. The fire gave a dry, sighing crack. Outside, the rain began again — the soft tapping of drops against old canvas.
"It's not that there was no sound," he said at last. "It's that no one heard it. That's worse."
He took a sip from his horn cup, wiped his mouth.
"There was one they followed. Grey Antler, they called him. No one saw him strike. No one heard him speak. But if someone said his name aloud, the village surrendered before the fire touched the walls."
The fire dimmed, and the shadows behind the boys seemed to lean forward, just a little.
Kellen, oldest of the group, asked without flinching:
"Who was he?"
Ragar blinked, then spoke slowly:
"Some say he was the chief's castoff son. Others say he wasn't a man at all — just a name to keep children afraid. The Velkhar don't tell a story twice. They give their memories to the soil."
Silence fell over the room. Outside, something creaked. Perhaps the wind. Perhaps not.
After a time, the youngest boy, whose voice hadn't yet broken, whispered:
"Do you think… he's still alive?"
Ragar didn't answer right away. He stood, knees cracking faintly, looked at the fire — and in that moment, it felt as though the fire looked back.
He said one last thing, breath barely more than a reed-flute's note:
"Some things don't live. They just… return."
He stepped into the rain. The door closed gently behind him.
Inside, the fire let out a final breath. None of the boys spoke.
Smoke That Hums
The fog didn't arrive all at once. It began on the edges — a thin film of moisture on the blades of grass, then a quiet vanishing of treelines in the distance. By noon, the entire caravan seemed bound in damp gauze, each rider able to see no farther than the ears of the horse in front of them.
They were merchants returning from Northford, taking the old path through the Kherun Valley. The weather had favored them. The journey, by all calculations, was to take three days. On the first night, camped beside Dhaler Lake, someone joked about dreaming of gold buried beside the road. But by the second day, something had shifted in the air. Tobacco wouldn't catch. The campfire collapsed without smoke. When a horse flicked its tail, it stirred fog, not flies.
"Smoke that hums."
The first to say it was Venn, a gaunt man who once made pottery along the southern coast. No one paid him much mind. It sounded like the kind of line someone says to give a shape to discomfort. But later that evening, he said it again. Not to anyone. To the night.
"It was singing. When we passed the fallen tree."
No one replied. The Karven merchant crouched near the unlit fire, warming a teapot wrapped in old sheepskin. He didn't look up. A woman's voice finally cut through:
"What song?"
Venn didn't answer. He just shook his head, gently, as if negating the question itself.
The night thickened. So did the fog. Only later would they realize — no one had actually slept. The air inside the tents had moved like hair drifting in water. Every time they closed their eyes, there was a sound. Not wind. Not insects. Something softer. Like breath trapped inside a wooden flute.
On the third morning, they decided to turn back.
The horses made no noise against the wet leaves. The dozen travelers fanned out like fishbones, visible to each other but silent. Then, from the back of the line, the youngest — Rhys — spoke up. His voice trembled:
"I… dreamt of my father. He was talking, but I couldn't hear the words. He died when I was little, in a Velkhar winter. But I saw him. On a black horse. Just looking at me."
Again, no one replied.
The fog now seemed to crawl under their skin. One rider began to wheeze. The Karven merchant pulled a copper charm from his coat — the symbol of Saint Orien scratched into its surface — and clenched it tightly.
Then, someone said:
"Did we ever really leave?"
No response. Not because no one had one — but because to speak would be to choose a version of the truth. And none of them were ready to pick.
By dusk, the fog withdrew. Not scattered, not dissolved — but pulled away, as if by an unseen hand. The trees returned. The road returned. A dry well stood to their right.
They had reached the outpost. The villagers came to greet them. But quickly, something felt off. The caravan had returned intact — not a man lost — but they spoke like strangers, like survivors of something unrecorded.
Weeks passed. Some among them began to whisper that phrase again:
"Smoke that hums."
Each time, in a different tone. Sometimes soft. Sometimes ritualistic. Sometimes it wasn't even clear who had said it. Eventually, it was no longer clear if they had brought the phrase back with them, or if the fog had taught it to them.
The Council's Eighth Chair
That chair was removed once.
The official transcript, archived in the central records of Arenthia, lists seven participants at the Council of Menders' forty-second border session. Each voice logged, each signature accounted for, nothing seemingly amiss.
But in the Old Tower, where records are copied long after memory has faded, the night-scribe who keeps vigil insists that eight candles were lit that night.
"If there were only seven men seated, why light eight flames?"
He asked this question for thirty years. No one ever answered.
The eighth signature line was left blank. Yet rumor holds that the back of that empty chair bore a charred piece of birch bark nailed into the wood. Upon it—an indistinct seal: a black eagle turned inward, its beak piercing the edge of its own shadow.
The scribe on duty that night, one Dal Emerin, once muttered—drunk, near death—that he "did hear eight voices." But the words are lost. All he remembered was a voice so low it sounded like rain trickling through the mouth of a well.
"Was he speaking about Velkhar?"
"Who?"
Silence fell. Then laughter—brief, brittle.
In the earliest fragments of that session's minutes, the eighth presence wasn't a man. It was a scroll passed from hand to hand among the seven—parchment that smelled of swamp rot and old blood. Said to have been delivered from the North by a courier known only as _The Bone Rider_, who rode a three-gaited horse.
Some say the horse cast no shadow.
After the session ended, the scroll vanished. So did the rider. No questions were asked. Only a few weeks later, near the palace wall on the city's northern edge, a mason on night patrol found something. A smudge on stone, drawn in clay—the negative space of a chair. Beneath it, a single line scrawled in an untranslatable tongue:
"Even what's unspoken counts."
Years later, in a bar adjacent to the city's scrap-paper district, someone overheard the nephew of the former scribe say, "He wasn't mad. He just wrote down the part that hadn't happened yet."
Someone asked, "Then who do you think the eighth man was?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. I just think… someone has to not be remembered."
That night, the bar fell quiet. The fire in the hearth burned low. A single bone cracked in the flame. It sounded like laughter. Or teeth grinding.
As for the chair—it was dismantled. The wood repurposed. Incorporated into the armrests of the other seven seats.
But some say that on nights when the moon is at its thinnest, at the far end of the palace gardens, an eighth chair still stands—gleaming faintly in the rain. As if it had never been, and yet never left.
Three Heads by the River
That evening, the lights in the riverside tavern north of Tharn weren't fully lit. The walls sweated mildew. Adrek, a retired bowman, was telling the story again.
It might've been the third time. Or the fifth. Or perhaps it had never stopped.
"I saw them myself. Three heads. Lined up on river stones, like old friends singing in unison, mouths open toward the same silence."
"How old were you?" asked the young man by the window. His voice barely rose above the sound of rain.
"Nineteen."
"Are you sure you didn't—mistake it?"
Adrek didn't answer. He raised a finger and tapped the air three times. Like lighting candles. Or counting ghosts.
"You know," he said slowly, "Velkhar's breaking didn't start with a revolt. Or a surrender. It began with a decapitation. A ritual, not a rebellion."
According to the _Third Chronicle of Scribe Faleron_—page seventeen, though no one agrees if that version survived—a subclan of the old Velkhar order was forced into the Blackrock marshes after an unnamed "blood-loss rite." There, they offered three heads to their ancestors. Not to honor, but to warn.
"Whose heads?" someone asked.
"No one knows," Adrek said. "No one's dared to find out. There's only story."
He said the heads were placed on a mat woven of vine and reed. It floated near the riverbank, gently bobbing. Waiting for the wind. Or saying goodbye.
"They say one of them later marched on the capital."
"So why tell us now?"
Adrek glanced around the tavern. Then drank.
"Because now, someone's finally listening."
Someone in the corner coughed. From a cold. Or holding back a laugh. Hard to say.
A few years back, that section of the Tharn ran dry. Patrolmen found three stones embedded in the silt—each carved with a single glyph. The strokes were crude, alien. Some said it was Old Velkhar. Others claimed they weren't letters at all, just totemic eyes left open.
No map marked the site. No text recorded it. Only the bowman, in the drifting haze of tobacco and damp firewood, still said:
"They didn't return for land. They came back so we'd remember where the heads fell."
Weeks later, a merchant caravan passed five miles south of Tharn. Something in the dry grass smelled wrong. When they dug, they found three skeletons. The skulls were set three feet apart, aligned eastward.
They did not report it.
But on the return road to Arenthia, the caravan grew silent all at once. As if the bones hadn't been buried by the river—but had lodged inside their tongues.
Years passed. The tale surfaced in a banned notebook, author unknown but for a single word:
Witness.
No one remembers who last read the book before it vanished into fire. What remained was a line, scribbled on the back cover in a handwriting that didn't quite belong to anyone:
"They buried the heads. But the mouths kept singing."
The Storm Did Not Begin
The thunder came after dinner.
Not loud, not close. Just a roll behind the far ridge—like some forgotten god turning over in sleep, not quite waking.
They were gathered by the old fire circle on Hollow Spine Hill. The fire had died days ago, but the scent of boiled cattle bone still drifted from the soil. One stone seat remained empty. It wasn't for someone absent. It was for someone who should not arrive.
"We're not awake yet," a young man muttered.
The old chief, Kharjal, raised a hand. His fingers flicked once, and the boy fell silent.
"Are _you_ awake?" Kharjal asked.
"I heard the thunder."
Kharjal didn't reply. He turned to look at Lhurm, the priest slumped by the wall. Lhurm had said nothing all evening.
Eyes still closed, Lhurm murmured as if speaking to the water beneath the rock:
"Thunder isn't a voice to wake the living. It's the heartbeat of those still asleep."
The young man asked again:
"Then what are we waiting for?"
Kharjal smiled thinly. His teeth were the color of smoke.
"We're not waiting. We're awake. We just haven't moved."
No one spoke after that.
Someone brought up last year's ambush in the western valley—the one that never made it into the annual chronicle. The horses were never found, they said. But as for when it happened, or who was involved, nobody knew, and nobody asked. They called it simply _that thing_.
"It wasn't thunder," said an old woman sitting near the outer stones. Her voice rasped like cold air leaping from ash. "It was the old drums, still echoing."
Lhurm nodded. Then he spoke again, slowly:
"The storm isn't something that arrives. It's something that was already here before we called it a name."
No decision was made that night. But within two weeks, young people from five villages had begun practicing archery in secret. They said it was "to honor a grandfather's crooked spine." No one questioned it.
Kharjal's cousin wrote a letter to the northern trade guild, canceling the autumn fur route. The letter cited "a misalignment in moon-star geometry." Those who understood didn't need it explained.
Thunder rolled for three more days. No rain fell.
Years later, in the ninth chapter footnotes of an annotated edition titled _Northern Counterharmonies_, a marginal line appeared, unsigned:
"They said nothing happened that night. But every person present dreamed of thunder afterward."
When Kharjal died, the people raised a stone. No name. No dates. Just a carved line:
"Thunder is the quietest warning."
The phrase would recur in various epic cycles, always in different forms, never traceable to a source.
Some scholars say it was invented after the fact—a poetic graft onto unrecorded history. Others insist it came from that night itself, from the silence that bound them all into the same dream.
And dreams, as everyone knows, are the hardest things to recount.
What the Dead Would Not Say
The merchant's name was Telan Oor.
It took him three years, after returning from Velkhar, to learn how not to vomit in his sleep.
He refused to speak about those years. When pressed, he only muttered, "The sun was wrong. Over there, it rises from the back of your skull."
The first time someone _heard_ him speak of it—truly speak—was in a cobbled-back tavern off Tanners' Alley in Eastgate. He'd had too much to drink. He used third person.
"They speak with bones," he said. "Not carved. Not etched. Heard."
Someone laughed—called him drunk.
Telan only smiled. He did not continue. He did not argue.
Later, perhaps to himself, he added:
"Once it burns long enough, the bone begins to hum. You press your ear to it. Like listening for wind in the bottom of a well."
No one took notes. Not many even remembered it by morning. Not until years later, when a borderlands appendix was added to the Imperial Histories—brief and bracketed—mentioning Telan by name. It concluded with the annotation:
"If encountered, do not pursue."
They say three researchers were sent after. None returned. A fourth stopped short at the edge of the mist, circled one night, and came back muttering:
"There's a sound in there. Not water. Not wind. Something… like a voice you weren't supposed to hear, whispering your name."
That spring, children in the capital began waking up crying, one after another. They couldn't say what they dreamed. Only that it felt like someone had told them something—and they had already forgotten it.
Years later, during a dig near the northern marshes, archivists uncovered a stone. On it: three words, etched faintly.
Zhuum. Drek. Vo.
No one knew the language. No one agreed on what it meant.
Some claimed it was an ancient tribal phrase: _What the dead did not speak._
Others argued it was no language at all—just mimicry. Echoes wind might make when it curled through an empty jar.
There was no consensus. There never would be.
In the year of his death, Telan left behind a handwritten notebook. It was never published. The pages weren't even bound. They were stuffed into the back of a closet in his grandson's home. On the inside corner of the first page, nearly illegible, was a single line:
"No one ever asked what I heard."
Decades later, in the revised eighth volume of _Testimonies from the Peripheral Zones_, a marginal note in red ink appeared on the bottom of an unnumbered page:
"Regarding Bone-Speech: not to be archived. Not to be questioned further."
The dead never spoke, this much was true. But the silence they left behind cracked wider with each passing year. And the deeper you listened, the louder it rang.