Tales from the Crooked Graveyard

Brumalia

The village of Brumalia lay in a sickly stillness, as if everything around it had stopped beating far too long ago. The houses, once standing tall with pride, now leaned like old men bowed by the weight of their secrets. Their roofs, twisted and broken, seemed to deform under the burden of the years, and the empty windows gazed out at the world with hollow eyes, as if they had seen everything and no longer wished to see more. The doors, ajar or completely collapsed, creaked in a monotonous rhythm every time the cold wind slipped through their cracks, whispering forgotten tales in the language of specters.

The trees that once lined the streets like guardians of green leaves now raised their bare and twisted branches toward the sky. They were like famished hands that, after centuries of trying to capture the light, had surrendered, clinging to the despair of an eternally gray sky. The atmosphere was heavy with a thick sadness, the kind of sadness that settles on the shoulders like a layer of dust that is not shaken off but accumulates over time, saturating every corner with its weight. A constant, icy, and sharp wind swept through the streets, bringing with it the murmur of memories, those that the village tried but never succeeded in forgetting.

Edgar walked among it all like one more shadow, a floating soul that fit too well into that decaying landscape. His slender figure, wrapped in a tattered cloak that swayed with the wind, seemed to merge with the shadows surrounding him. His face, pale as the veiled moon that barely revealed itself among the clouds, was framed by tousled hair that seemed to have a life of its own, twisting with each breeze. But the most unsettling feature was his eyes. Large, too large for such a thin face, and always wide open, as if waiting to see something extraordinary at any moment, something that perhaps would never arrive.

Edgar was not an ordinary young man. He did not fit in with the village or its decay. There was a spark in him, a spark that had not been extinguished by the sadness enveloping Brumalia. Since childhood, he had felt that the village was broken, incomplete, like a machine missing a key piece. And that piece, Edgar knew, was buried in the past, in a story that few wanted to remember, but one that he had nurtured in his mind for years.

The legends about the wizards had always fascinated him. It was said that, long ago, before shadows covered Brumalia, a group of wizards had brought the village its time of greatest splendor. Under their protection, the fields flourished, the houses grew, and the people lived joyfully. But, as in every story involving power, greed and fear soon intervened.

The wizards had been accused of treachery after a tragic event that no one could explain: in the heart of the harshest winter Brumalia had ever known, the main river that fed the village, once mighty, dried up overnight. The crops died, the livestock perished of thirst, and the wells filled with mud. Desperate, the villagers blamed the wizards, for there were rumors that their powers manipulated the forces of nature. Paranoia grew, and when a strange plague began to spread among the poorest families, many claimed that the wizards had abandoned the village, withdrawing their protection and condemning them to ruin. In fear and fury, the villagers hunted them down, and one night, without trial or mercy, dragged them into the forest and murdered them, burying them deep in the ground where no one could remember them.

However, those old stories had been nothing more than that: stories. Or so the village believed. Edgar, on the other hand, had always felt something more. An inexplicable connection to those beings, a force that urged him to uncover what really lay behind those legends. He knew, deep down, that the wizards had not entirely disappeared. No, their power was still there, buried with them, waiting to be unearthed by someone sufficiently mad—or desperate—enough to attempt it.

And then, fate intervened. It was an ordinary day, or at least it seemed so, when Edgar found what he had always been searching for. Digging through the ruins of an old bookstore, his gaze stumbled upon a book that seemed to have escaped time. The pages, yellowed and brittle, were covered in dust and mold, but beneath that layer of forgetfulness, something ancient and powerful awaited. The letters on the spine, almost illegible, seemed to move when Edgar stared at them, as if mocking him.