Riverain was a country known best for its port cities along the western coast and progressive government. Elkney was a landlocked fiefdom pressed against the Skerra-Kar mountain range, Riverain’s eastern border, that only exported apples and apple-based dishes and beverages. As one could imagine, its inhabitants weren’t the worldly sort.
Rather, Elkney-folk were the type who believed and perpetuated beliefs about elves being little impish beings who snacked on babies or how dwarves were a strictly male race or that the bodies of the deceased would rise as undead if embalmed without garlic cloves in the mouth. Isolated and wary of strangers, travelers who were unfortunate enough to happen upon Elkney weren’t greeted kindly - more-so ‘tolerated’. They would be given rest at the town’s common house if willing to pay and told to keep to the western roads, as the mountain-range was treacherous and the forests beyond it home to the ‘bae nerrer’, the ‘child-snatchers’ - a misguided warning over the Faan-as-syy elves, who fled the continent two hundred years prior.
‘And never,’ any sensible Elkney-man or -woman or -guard would say, “never follow the path by the creek into the woods.’
They’d neglect to explain what was buried there, deep in the thicket.
The path itself - if one could call it a path - was distinguished by a lighter shade of grass that hadn’t grown in the same direction and spaces between the trees, and after the creek forked away it was nearly impossible to follow with overgrowth. Children occasionally managed to, still, and grew up to tell their own children that it must’ve been fae-addled, the ruins they found.
Six massive stones, alternating between three- to four-times the height of a human man and each as thick as a mule’s length, were arranged around a stepped mound. The circle tapered to a seventh monstrosity with the likeness of a sharp-eared and serene-faced woman carved into its base. And sat before her, at the peak of the mound, an alabaster altar that had long-since been overgrown with foliage. While dirtied and vine-strangled, the stones showed no signs of erosion or disrepair. They could have only been built and kept by the Faan-as-syy, but the wood-elves were a lost to the centuries - and the henge might as well have been erected within the decade.
They were as beautiful as the wellspring of flora surrounding them, but none of the townsfolk visited or prayed to the patron goddess whose name they couldn’t place.
Fifty years prior, when Lord Osten’s keep was still being built and the town’s orchard a yard of saplings, the henge had been discovered and promptly forbidden, though no one made any effort to section off the site. No one talked of it, save for wiley children who wanted to see it for themselves and the parents who warned them off it. To speak about it was to invite its bad luck, or to remind those who’d seen it themselves of its unnerving height, of the sensation of being watched. No one had ever entered the circle, and no one had gone at night. Whatever was there, it be suicide, Elkney-folk thought.
Nonetheless, someone trampled over dead branches and pushed aside knee-length grass, headed straight for the clearing of the Circle. And the quarter-moon had risen hours ago. He could hear them approach.
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