There's a place, a forgotten corner of the world, where silence is a lie. It's a place where the air is thick with the weight of unspeakable anguish, a place where the echoes of torment reverberate through the very earth itself. This place is known as The Hollow, and it is cursed-haunted by the Screams of those who were never meant to be heard.
The first sign that you've entered The Hollow is the silence. It's not a peaceful quiet, but a heavy, suffocating stillness that wraps itself around you like a cold hand. The deeper you go, the more unnatural the silence becomes. It presses in from all sides, leaving you with the constant sensation that something is wrong, something is missing. The air is too still, too quiet. But then, it happens.
The Screams begin.
At first, they are faint, distant. You might think it's the wind playing tricks on your ears, or perhaps the cries of some animal in the woods. But as you walk deeper into the Hollow, the sounds grow louder, sharper, more human. These aren't cries for help-they are primal, desperate wails that rattle the bones. You try to ignore them, to convince yourself that they are nothing more than your imagination running wild, but then you hear it: a voice so full of terror, so raw with pain, it makes your blood run cold. A scream-no, a thousand screams-filling the air, overlapping, rising and falling, each one filled with more anguish than the last.
The worst part? The screams are alive.
They are not sounds trapped in time or memory. They are echoes of souls that are still in torment, trapped between worlds, unable to escape. Each scream is a part of them, a fragment of the agony they suffered. Some say these are the cries of people who entered the Hollow long ago-victims of a curse that binds them to the land. Others believe that the Hollow itself is the source of the screams, feeding on fear, tormenting anyone who dares to enter.
If you listen long enough, you will begin to hear the whispers between the screams. Faint murmurs, soft and pleading, as if the voices are trying to tell you something-warn you, beg you to leave. But no one ever leaves. The Hollow traps you. The longer you stay, the louder the screams become. They claw at your mind, pulling at your sanity, pushing you to the brink of madness. You might cover your ears, try to block them out, but it's useless. The screams follow you, an inescapable presence that wears you down until you, too, are driven to scream.
And then, when you can no longer tell whether the screams are your own or the voices of the damned, the Hollow claims you. Your soul becomes just another voice in the chorus of torment, your scream joining the endless chorus of agony that echoes through the dark, silent woods.
Some say if you listen closely enough, you can hear your own scream from the future. Others say that those who survive the Hollow are marked forever-haunted by the sounds that follow them in the night. You'll hear the screams in your dreams, in your waking moments, echoing behind every corner, lingering in the silence.
