What Everyone Knows
Every year, on the longest night of winter, someone must take offerings to the forest. Food, preserved goods, crafted items—a tithe delivered to something deep in the woods. It's tradition. It's always been done. The elders say it keeps Silverwick safe.
Most townspeople accept it without question, like blessing hearths or hanging ornaments on the Yule Pine. Some grumble about wasting food when stores are tight, but they contribute anyway. The alternative—questioning generations of survival—feels dangerous in a world where doing what's always worked is how you stay alive.
That's what most of Silverwick knows. That's what they're allowed to know.
The deeper truth is carried by the Tithe-Keepers alone, passed down through oral tradition, never written, never shared beyond the chosen successor.
The Keepers' Burden
There have always been Tithe-Keepers—a line stretching back to Silverwick's founding, perhaps before. One keeper trains one successor, passing knowledge through spoken word only. Nothing is written. Nothing can be written. Some knowledge is too dangerous to preserve where curious eyes might find it.
They learn the path to the Thornheart Grove. They're taught what must be brought, when it must be delivered, and—most critically—how to leave offerings without being taken themselves. They're told fragments of why the bargain exists, though even they don't know the full history.
And they're sworn to silence about what they witness.
Grandmother Sile is the last living Tithe-Keeper. She trained no successor—she thought she had time, and perhaps she feared burdening someone else with knowledge that hollowed her out year by year. Now, dying of lung-sickness, she faces the terrifying possibility that centuries of carefully preserved tradition might die with her.
The Bargain
The tithe is not charity. It's not worship. It's a contract.
Long ago—how long, no one remembers—Silverwick's founders made a bargain with something that dwelled in the forest. The exact terms are lost to time. What was promised. Why it was necessary. What would happen if the agreement were broken.
But the Tithe-Keepers know this much:
Something in the Thornheart Grove can command the Frost-infected animals. It doesn't create the corruption—that existed before—but it controls the creatures, directs them, holds them at bay.
The tithe is payment for that protection. Feed it, and Frost-Walkers avoid Silverwick's walls. Fail to pay, and they're released like hounds from a kennel.
It's not protection money paid to a mindless monster. It's a negotiated agreement with something intelligent, patient, and ancient. Something that honors bargains across generations.
Which might be more terrifying than facing a simple beast.
What Must Be Brought
The tithe changes each year. The Tithe-Keeper knows what's required—not through logic or tradition, but through dreams that begin weeks before midwinter. Dreams where knowledge enters your mind like water filling a cup. You wake knowing exactly what must be brought.
Always food. Always something crafted by human hands—carved wood, woven cloth, forged metal. Proof of skill, effort, humanity.
And sometimes... other things.
Grandmother Sile won't elaborate on what those other things are. Neither would her predecessor. But there are years in Silverwick's history where Tithe-Keepers returned changed—aged decades in a night, refusing to speak, waking with screams. Years where the dreams demanded something Silverwick was unwilling or unable to provide.
Those years, the Frost-Walkers came in force.
The pattern is clear: give what's asked, or suffer consequences. But what's asked isn't always simple food and goods.
The Journey
The Tithe-Keeper goes alone. This is absolute. No guards. No companions. No witnesses.
They walk into the western forest at dusk on the longest night, carrying offerings, following a path only they can perceive. Their Pathfinding Glimmer guides them, though it feels less like leading and more like being pulled. The forest watches. Shadows move wrong. The deeper you go, the more reality feels thin, stretched, uncertain.
The Thornheart Grove appears suddenly—one moment you're in normal forest, the next you're standing at the edge of that eerie, glowing circle. The Frost-Moss light illuminates everything and reveals nothing.
The Keeper approaches the Thornheart tree. Places offerings at its base in the circle of brightest moss-light. Speaks the old words—a phrase in that dead language that hurts the throat, the same tongue that names the River Ys. The words must be exact. Pronunciation matters in ways no one fully understands.
Then you wait.
And something comes to accept the offering.
What Comes
Grandmother Sile has made the journey forty times over forty years. She will not describe what she saw.