The Hollow Circle

Where the stories are told, and never fully end.

You won’t remember how you arrived. Perhaps the trail kept going when it should have stopped, or you stepped into an alley that didn’t exist yesterday. However it happens, the Circle is always waiting. Worn stones, arranged in a ring, press into the forest floor like a forgotten ritual. In the middle stands a lantern — old, battered, always lit. No one carries it in. It is simply there, glowing softly, as though expecting company.

This is the Hollow Circle. It is not a town or a time. It exists between things — between memories, between footsteps, between stories and sleep. You cannot choose to visit it. It finds you.

Those who gather do not share names. They do not explain how they came to be there. When the lantern is passed to you, you begin. “I once heard,” you might say. “Someone I knew had a cousin who…” The tale begins not with certainty, but suggestion. And as you speak, the story takes on shape. Not your shape — something older, something that remembers how to listen.

There are rules, but no one recites them. They are learned by repetition. You do not claim a story as truth, but you never dismiss it. You speak only when the lantern is in your hands. If its flame falters while you are telling your tale, you must finish it in darkness. No one will stop you. They will only listen.

Some say the Circle began with grief — a woman who lost her son and begged others to name their fears so they would not follow him into the same unknown. Others believe it began in complete silence, and that the lantern’s first light was sparked by a story told with no words.

What is certain is that the Circle endures. And the stories — the ones told in that clearing, under that light — have a way of echoing beyond the moment. A noise you can’t place. A dream you didn’t have. A name carved somewhere it should not be. Some listeners leave changed, though they cannot say how.

Stories in Nocturne always begin in the ordinary. A neighbor who won’t open their blinds. A hallway that loops back on itself. A knock at the door, even though you live alone. But slowly, the familiar unravels. Details shift. Time becomes uncertain. The world stretches into something quieter and colder. And before you realize it, you’ve crossed a threshold you can’t step back from.

The Hollow Circle does not explain itself. That is part of its power. It demands stories that grow like roots — slow, unseen, inescapable. The horror is not in what is shown, but in what follows you home.

When the story ends, the lantern is passed. If the silence lasts too long, the flame flickers out. The Circle vanishes. Until next time.

Because the light remembers. And the stories are never truly over.