The Gloaming Ring
Horror1 chapters
Start reading →Young sound engineer Mark travels to the isolated village of Black Hallow to record endangered Celtic folk songs. The village has no signal, and its people greet strangers with a silence so practiced it feels like a ritual. At the center of Black Hallow stands a vast prehistoric stone circle known as the Shepherd’s Bed. Each evening, as the light fades, every door and window is sealed. Villagers scatter a pale powder of elderflower and bone ash across their thresholds, warning Mark never to step beyond the stones’ shadow after sunset. They claim the Shepherd counts his flock at gloaming. Mark dismisses the tradition as superstition until his recording equipment captures a low, impossible murmur beneath the wind: thousands of tiny voices chanting in Old Irish. As the village’s customs grow more urgent and the surrounding forest begins to distort distance and direction, Mark realizes Black Hallow may not be preserving an old song. It may be waiting for someone to hear it.
Characters
Bríd Kelleher
Gracious, watchful, and deeply controlled, with the exhausted patience of someone who has repeated the same warnings for years.
Bríd runs the guesthouse where Mark stays. She offers him food, shelter, and careful advice about the stone circle, but her politeness conceals fear and her knowledge of the village’s traditions is greater than she will admit.
The Shepherd
Blind, impersonal, and incomprehensibly patient rather than emotional or openly malicious.
Known only through the villagers’ euphemism, the Shepherd is an ancient form rooted beneath the stone circle and parasitic on the land’s memories. It is encountered through low-frequency voices, warped distance, the behavior of the stones, and the village’s inherited pact rather than ordinary conversation.
Mark
Methodical, skeptical, and quietly compassionate; he trusts equipment and evidence until both begin recording what his senses cannot accept.
Mark is a young sound engineer who travels to remote Black Hallow to record endangered Celtic folk songs. At the story’s opening, he is an outsider with professional curiosity, little knowledge of the village’s customs, and no idea that his arrival has been anticipated.
Tadhg Oran
Calm, paternal, and bureaucratically serene; he treats terrible necessities as seasonal maintenance.
Tadhg is Black Hallow’s headman and keeper of its records. His notebooks contain the village genealogies and the seven-year schedule of disappearances, though Mark only gradually understands what those entries mean.
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