Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bran Blackbyrd" data-source="post: 1338090" data-attributes="member: 1710">Miseries HoleIt is said that misery loves company; that is no truer than at Miseries Hole. Some say that the nondescript hole in the ground, surrounded by the remains of a well, used to be the center of a small village. Nothing is there now; neither a house nor hovel stands beside that vacuum of happiness - that leech of dreams. The story goes that a brutish and paranoid man came home one night from the tavern drunk and angry. His wife woke from her sleep to see him carrying their infant son out of the house. She caught up with him in the center of the village, at the well, and demanded to know what he was doing. In slurred speech he ranted that the baby boy was not his, that it belonged to one of her lovers. She pleaded with him that this was not true, and in fact it wasn’t, but he was beyond reason. Without preamble, he threw the baby down the well. Shrieking in terror his wife jumped into the deep well after her child, only to break her neck on the stony walls before she hit the water.The husband was found by the well in the morning, sleeping off his drunk. It was not long before the village-folk discovered what had happened. The man was hanged, the bodies were fished out of the well, and life went on. But the well became an epicenter of woe and despair, though who’s to say that it wasn’t already? It is impossible to know for sure.Years later the well was poisoned during a conflict between kingdoms. The people of the village sickened and died and soon the village also died and rotted away. It is said that a crusading knight stopped for the evening and camped by the well and that in the morning he was found cold, lifeless and bloated as one who has drowned and washed ashore; however he was not wet. A priest, so the story goes, was on a pilgrimage and thought to slake his thirst at the hole. His companions watched him take a drink, grow melancholy, and then admit he had no more faith left before he fell forward into the depths of the well, never to be seen again.The stories are countless, but all are the same. Death and sorrow to any who tarry too near to Miseries Hole. So thick with the spirits of the dead are its waters that one can feel their cold, their anguish as he looks over the edge. You can hear them, moaning piteously if you only lean a little closer. But what is the point, I’m tired of telling this tale and those deep, black waters look very comforting…Next: The Bleaching Plains</blockquote>

Verification