The Hollow-Bone Hex

The rain at the merchant's funeral is freezing, but it is the corpse's unnatural posture that chills Khaydruk. As a world-weary feng shui master, he knows corrupted earth-energy when he sees it, but the merchant’s neck - snapped a full one-hundred-and-eighty degrees backward - screams of an intelligent, cold-blooded grudge. The isolated mountain village of Qeng-Dhar is under siege. Elder Kharom recently slaughtered the peak’s sacred Yurlun Owl, selling its crystalline plumage to wealthy lowlanders. Yet Kharom is no greedy tyrant; he used the silver to buy grain for a community ravaged by a three-year famine. Now, the owl’s calculating spirit has returned to collect its toll. The curse is methodical: anyone who consumed the purchased food feels their bones painfully hollowing out like a bird's, their skin rupturing with sharp golden feathers as their heads slowly twist backward to face the mountain they betrayed. Armed with only his compass, his biting sarcasm, and a hopelessly chatty incense-peddler named Pobur, Khaydruk must navigate shifting, hostile earth-lines to break the hex. But as Kharom’s desperate, sympathetic motives are revealed, Khaydruk faces a cynical choice: how do you exorcise a curse when the monster's vengeance is entirely justified?