“Start anywhere. The Hollow has a way of meeting you there.”

They stood at the long worktable with tea warming their hands, the lamp still on though the room had brightened. Light from the front window laid itself pale and cool across the boards. The teacup sat between them, small and patient, with its chipped saucer and its green rim, as if it were perfectly content to be discussed and not solved.

Some said the bell had once belonged to a sky-herder. Others believed it had fallen from somewhere higher on a night when the stars were feeling generous.

It was a small bell, no larger than a teacup turned upside down. Coppery, worn smooth in places, mottled in others. Not grand. Not jeweled. Only well made and well kept, as if it had belonged to many quiet hands before finding the ground beneath the willow.

“Well, if this turns out to be another dramatic goat, I shall not be at all surprised.”

The other creatures of the Hollow would smile and say, “Hush, dear,” in the patient way one speaks to a kettle that has already begun to sing. Somewhere along the way, she decided that must be her name.

“Not everything that goes missing is truly gone.
And not everything is ready to be found again.”

In the Hollow, it is sometimes enough
to sit with a thing a while
and see what it remembers.

A silver key lay half-buried in the earth, pale as moonlight and nearly as cold. Its shape was odd. The bow curled like a fern frond, and three tiny dots had been worked into the shaft. It was not the sort of key Bran knew, which made it instantly more interesting.

At the Long Table House, Mabel held up a half-finished row of crochet and said to no one in particular, “Something has slipped a stitch.”

“I had it yesterday! Or was that the day before? No, it was definitely properly arranged. Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday, then...:”  He looked sharply at the sky. “That’s wrong. Something’s gone sideways.”

“It sounds,” Evelyn said softly, “as though the world remembers something when you sing.”