In the mountains was a small village. That village had no name.

In the village lived four siblings, two boys and two girls.

The eldest sister fell off a high cliff and died.

The younger brother was torn apart by wolves and died.

The older brother left the mountains to become an S-rank adventurer.

And the youngest sister became a maid…

Calling it a village was kindness. It was little more but a collection of fur-dressed tepees and hovels assembled of the dead, dried limbs of trees, like puzzles that couldn’t be put back together if they ever came apart. The dwellings were strewn along a steep, mossy slope under struggling pines, between one mountain and another.

The children grew up without knowing who their parents were. It was one such a close-bred, tight-knit community where everyone took part in the rearing of children, there were no secrets, and every house was home.

Those four children were each given names pertaining to the sky, and it seems it had been a full moon on the night I was born.

Of the Moon—Lunaria.

I was six when my older brother left the mountains. He did so against the elders’ will. He one day met a lost wanderer, who told him about the lands below—about grand kingdoms, valorous knights, courageous adventurers, and so forth, and he let the tales woo him. Nobody in the village had been away from the mountains before. They said the stories were lies and evil would befall my brother if he went. But he went anyway, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him. My brother had always been strong and quick and exceedingly cunning. When he decided to do something, nothing could change his course.

“When I see for myself what’s out there, I will come back for you,” he vowed to me on the morning he departed, and was then on his way.

But days turned to weeks and weeks turned to months, and my brother didn’t come back.

Our other siblings were dead and the villagers said he had been mad to go and was now dead too. There were nothing but monsters and savages out there, they said. Gods would soon cleanse the earth of the wicked people filling the lands below, and only the wise and faithful who lived up higher would see the new, better world that was to follow. But I didn't care about the new world. I had always admired my brother and mourned the loss of him.

Every day in the village unfolded the same.

At daybreak, we would go out to look for food, water, and firewood, and come back when it got dark, to eat together and rest, only to begin anew the next day. Only those who were too young or too old to climb the mountain stayed home. This perpetual cycle went on unchanged, with no regard for the dimension of time. Struggling to survive only for the sake of living and thinking of nothing beside that.

The winters there were freezing cold.

The summers were blistering hot.

But I never thought being in the mountains was hard.

Sometimes it hurt more, sometimes it hurt less. But it always hurt, and it never occurred to anyone to imagine better.

A couple of miles away was another village.

The people of that village were strange. They never spoke, to ask questions or answer them, only stared furtively at you from among the trees and went their own paths. We called them simply the “others”. The adults would warn us young ones not to associate with the others and to run away if we ever met them. There was no open fighting between the villages, but if the others met you alone in the woods, they would kill you.

I saw them a few times from a distance, those grim-faced men and women in their filthy rags that seemed to rot on their bodies, their hair unkempt, and their bodies unwashed, and I loathed and feared them. Thankfully, I always either noticed them first or else had friends with me. If the others were outnumbered, they would merely go away first and not cause trouble. They were all cowards, the villagers said, but we feared them no less for it.

We put up animal bones and pieces of wood on fine strings made of grass, and hung them on the lower branches of trees around the village, so that their clatter would warn us if any of the others came too close at night. Every leftover bone from every meal and every spare splinter of wood too small to give warmth was added to the collection, and over the years the wards had grown many. I learned to put my faith into them and couldn’t get any sleep without hearing their airy, aimless rattle and clang in the wind. Any unnatural, forced note in that consummately random melody would have me wide awake in a heartbeat. Such was life. So it had been for many, many years, even before I was born. You learned to live with the fear, to hold it at arm’s length. It was behind every tree and in every shadow and you walked between the shadows and looked behind every tree.

On one winter day, a woman was found dead in the wood, not far from the village.

The injuries on the body were not caused by animals. She had been murdered, undoubtedly by the others.

Everyone in the village had liked that woman and what happened to her became the last straw. Our fear and spite boiled over into white-hot hate. The adults talked late into the night about revenge, whipping up their bloodthirst by recalling every insult and injury. A few said we should give up on violence and let the gods judge the others, but impartial heavenly punishment never gratified a soul. They shaped spears and clubs and set out in force at dawn. Every grown man went and many of the women too, and the toughest of the children. I was too young and frail to go. A skinny girl, who could barely catch a rat to save her life, still weeping for her lost siblings.

I stayed with the other children and women, and an elder called Dani was left in charge of us.

Old Dani was a shaman who could speak with spirits, make medicine, and even knew magic to heal wounds. On a hand-woven tapestry hanging in her high tent was portrayed an odd mark the meaning of which was passed down from shaman to shaman. Dani taught the sacred mark to me so that I wouldn’t be afraid, but would wait quietly and bravely.

Three days passed.

The warriors never came back.

Dani forbade anyone to go after them, but on the fourth day, I couldn’t endure being alone with my growing unease any longer. Living in endless uncertainty was surely worse than being killed. Before anyone else was up yet, I followed the trampled trail in the snow northward. I walked many hours and the tracks eventually brought me to the village of the others.

Or—what was left of it.

The decrepit shacks and tents were all smashed to pieces, the fragments scattered far and wide. As if a storm had hit them. But there were no bodies. Not those of the winners, nor those of the defeated. No survivors from either side, not a ghost to tell the tale. The shacks crafted of branches had returned to being only shapeless litter, torn furs and shreds of clothes spread about them. New snow had nearly buried the traces of whatever chaos had transpired there, leaving what looked like a memory half-faded from awareness.

I returned home and shared my thin discoveries with old Dani.

She wasn’t angry that I had defied her orders. What was done was done. She merely said the gods were angry and had wiped out both the villagers and the others. Because they had stooped to savagery and raised their hand against other children of the gods, like those mindless barbarians and beasts that roamed the lower lands. Their fate was a sign that the reshaping of the earth had begun. We were now the only ones left alive in the world, the only righteous ones.

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From that day, an overpowering apathy fell over the village.

The winter persisted. With fewer hands around, everyone had to work twice as hard to secure enough food and firewood, but no one saw the point in it, since everything would soon be gone. The few women left mourned their lost husbands and brothers and sisters and children, and had lost faith that the promised future was any better. At the same time, most of the children were too young to hunt and had not the strength to carry much wood or walk very far in the deep snow.

One by one, even the remaining villagers began to die off.

Old Dani was among the first to go, feeble to begin with. She entrusted her soul to the makers and stopped eating and sleeping, only smoking a pipe, praying night and day, and it didn’t take long before she was gone. She passed away the only one of us content, a relieved smile on her aged face.

Starting from the youngest and weakest, the rest were set to follow.

Taken by the cold, or the snow, or exhaustion, or hunger, or diseases caused by hunger, or by whatever feral creatures happened to cross their path.

Then I left the village.

I went without telling anyone, like my brother. I took off quietly, early in the morning, without a word of farewell, knowing the villagers would only either try to stop me, or insult me, the way they had my brother. I didn’t want to see it end. I couldn’t just sit there and wait for the gods to take us.

Maybe somewhere deep down, I had already begun to guess the truth. It wasn’t the gods, who had taken the others, or the villagers. My brother once told me great monsters lived higher up on the slopes, and those monsters were attracted by the noise of people. It was for them the bone wards were first made, before anyone even knew about the other village. The sounds of fighting and killing and the smell of fresh blood had lured the monsters down to feast on the warring villagers. And before long the smell of the corpses would lure them to our home too. But that was not how I wanted to die, snatched from the tent in the heart of the night.

Before I should die, I wanted to see the lowlands where my brother had gone.

The way down the mountainside was long and toilsome. The snow had piled high and towards the evening, a fierce gale set in. I hiked through the day in a numb daze, driven by a pressing, innate need, wrapped in a woolen shawl I had taken from Dani. I was soon exhausted but knew I would never wake again if I slept outside and forced myself to stay in constant motion.

I stumbled through the dark hours of the night, from one dark line of a tree to another, slowly, very slowly, but never halting completely for long. On occasion, I would rest my head against the nearest trunk and count quietly to ten, and allowed myself to rest that time. But once I almost passed out before reaching eight, and never did that again.

By the time I realized it was growing lighter again, I had come out of the trees.

I had the wide, round-topped foothills in front of me. Beyond lay vast, open plains dressed in a clean white sheet of immaculate snow. And far off under the horizon rose a town. A multitude of stout buildings, houses made of red brick instead of trees, grouped closely together. Over them stretched dozens of faint trails of smoke against a paling sky.

Something about that view made me feel like I had only now come home after a lifetime away in the company of strangers.

It was undoubtedly a view worth seeing. A view worth dying for.

My strength utterly spent, I fell to lie on my back in the snow, wholeheartedly glad I had persisted, although the way had been hard. If the gods came to pick me up now, I was ready for them. Like old Dani, I could go smiling.

So thinking, I closed my eyes and embraced the relief of sleep.

Then a voice called me back.

“—Lunaria! Lunaria, wake up! Can you hear me? Open your eyes!”

It was the voice of a grown man, deep and strong, but it had a slightly familiar timbre. Warm hands felt my cheeks and, with effort, I opened my eyes to look at the figure hunched over me.

“Brother...Sterling...?”

It had to be a dream.

At least three years had passed since he left. There was no chance he would come back now, right on this day, this very hour. Surely my brother was long dead and I was imagining things. Seeing dreams. Only the gods could set up such a miracle, but gods, as we knew, were good mostly at taking lives and less apt at sparing them. I returned to sleep.

But by the time I came to next, I was carried on my brother’s wide back, and the silhouette of the town from before was now a lot closer.

“Why…?” I asked him. “...Why did you come back?”

“What do you mean, why?” he scolded me. “I promised, didn’t I? Don’t tell me you already forgot?”

“You’re...alive? You’re real?”

Brother Sterling laughed wryly. “Did you think the gods had taken me? Or that I came back as a wraith? No, I’m afraid the Farsí are not that interested in us lower beings. Sorry to disappoint, but it is only me, your mortal human brother.”

“The world...didn't end?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Then…you did it. You saw the other lands. Are the lowlanders...truly all godless beasts?”

“Well, I wonder about that. You should decide for yourself after you meet them.”

He trudged on for a while in silence, snow groaning under his boots.

“To tell you the truth,” he then spoke again, “I meant to come back only after becoming an S-rank adventurer. But it seems that’s going to take a while longer. A pity, but I’m only A-rank now. There are various rules about that. Rather than wasting more time on such things, I thought we should get you to a real school.”

“School?” I repeated the unknown word.

“A place where they can make you a civilized person. I found you a good place to stay in the meantime too. A home that won’t blow over in the wind. A home with a strong wall of stone instead of bird bones. The owner is someone who took care of me when I first got here. She knows your circumstances and you will be safe with her.”

I couldn’t be sure if I understood everything, but it seemed the world really had been reshaped into something better.

Still, as happy as that made me, I had to interrupt him.

“Brother...What about our village…?”

“What about it?” he nonchalantly replied.

“Aren’t you going to help our people? They’re dying up there.”

I told him briefly the story of what happened with the others.

But my brother’s reaction to learning about the shocking demise of his tribe was strange.

He laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. There was a tinge of madness to it.

“What a tale,” he remarked. “If anyone else told me the same, I’d never believe it. But, I suppose it must be true since you’re here.”

“What are you talking about…?”

“You should throw the villagers off your mind, Lunaria. I’m afraid they really are doomed. Yes. All they can do now is fade away quietly, having lost their core.”

“Why? What does that mean?”

Instead of answering me, he said something else.

“Do you still remember what I told you about dungeons? What that adventurer told me before. To put it in more elaborate terms, a dungeon is a place where the denizens of the hollow earth reform our reality by the collective mass of their presence. Bit by bit, the surface world is converted into a world of monsters just by having them walk on it. What is above becomes like that which is below. Old things begin to take on new meaning. Familiar rules are twisted and bent. When this happens in an enclosed space, that space is called a ‘dungeon’, and when it happens on open ground, we call it a ‘haunt’. Do you understand?”

“Huh…”

“Did you never find it strange? We didn’t know our own parents, yet it was perfectly clear to us from the beginning that the four of us were siblings, true blood-related siblings. A genuine family among pretenders. There was an obvious, undeniable difference between us and the rest of them, though we learned to make no mention of it. And it was nothing as innocent as our naming scheme.”

“Brother…”

“You can see it already, right? You have always been brilliant, Lunaria. Yes. The people we called family, our tribe, the people we lived with, they weren’t people to begin with. Not people in the conventional sense. We were, the four of us were——raised by monsters.”