The Hollow-Bone Hex
By @john1208
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?
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The Flayed Mastiff's Shroud
By @john1208
The Qarlik Spires are protected by the Zhal-Mastiffs, giant hounds that guide freezing souls to the afterlife. But when Patriarch Oghul slaughters and skins the eldest hound to fashion a coat of peerless warmth, a horrific curse descends upon the Yashgar Cliff-Manor. Oghul's bloodline is afflicted by the 'Hollow Frost' - an unnatural, agonizing hypothermia that turns their living flesh to black ice, driving the guilty to violently flay the servants just to steal their warmth. Nimka, the Patriarch's quiet and intensely stubborn daughter, desperately investigates the manor's forbidden archives to break the curse. Under the guise of a timid girl trying to save her family, she exhibits a cold, calculating brilliance, subtly isolating her cruel relatives so they face the hound's wrath one by one. But as Nimka pieces together the esoteric ritual binding the flayed beast, a terrifying revelation surfaces. She is not just an innocent descendant trying to survive; she is the reincarnation of the hound's original, murdered master. Will Nimka complete the icy extermination she engineered lifetimes ago, or will the flayed beast turn its insatiable hunger upon her?
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