His mother said his uncle's name only once—on her deathbed, with her last breaths, warning him never to claim the inheritance.

"Don't go there, Caleb. Promise me."

Three weeks later, the letter arrives. Caleb Mercer is the sole beneficiary of an estate in the Appalachian mountains: a cabin on forty acres in a hollow so remote it doesn't appear on most maps. An uncle he never knew existed. Property his family spent generations hiding from him.

The cabin should be falling apart after a century of mountain winters. Instead, it's pristine. Smoke rises from the chimney. Someone has been maintaining it. Someone is there now.

In the cellar—far larger than the cabin above, carved into the bedrock itself, walls covered in symbols older than any alphabet—Caleb finds a chair. Ancient. Carved from black wood. Waiting at the center of a circle etched into stone.

Something speaks to him there. Something vast and old that has been watching his family since before America had a name. It shows him the truth: his ancestors murdered the original keepers of this hollow in 1843 and were cursed with the responsibility of containing what sleeps in the deep. Every generation produces a keeper. Someone who must tend the binding. Someone who must serve.

Caleb is the last of his line. Whether he stays or goes, the ending is the same. But staying buys time. A few more decades before the binding breaks and the world transforms into something with no memory of what humanity ever was.