Bram Hollow was born in the lowest terrace of Sevenfold Hollow twenty years ago, in a house patched with sailcloth and grown over with flowering vine, the second child of Sela Hollow and a father he was told to call Coram. His grandmother Ithra taught him the old tongue one word at a time, and his mother taught him the jungle: which vines sleep, which cats hunt, which coves swallow swimmers.
His father taught him the spear. Coram Hollow was the Hollow's best hunter, broad and quick and always grinning, and Bram copied the grin before he understood it — because he does not understand it yet, and that is the shape of his whole life. Eleven years ago, when the island's accounts came due and the bloom began to thin, the elders of the Hollow made the old arithmetic work one more time: a tithe, given at the turning of the tide, to keep the fruit heavy and the wind warm.
Coram volunteered, or was chosen — the story changes depending on who tells it — and he walked down the Ossuary stair with his own spear and did not come back up. He was not permitted to die. The island kept him. Bram was nine. He was told his father had 'gone into the gift', a phrase that means everything and explains nothing, and he was told never to go down the stair, and he obeyed for exactly one year.
He is now the Hollow's only hunter and its unofficial guide, and he has spent the last twelve months doing something no one in living memory has done: hunting the thing that comes up the Ossuary stair at night. He tracks it through the lower terraces with Pass Without Trace, seeds the lowest gate with Spike Growth, casts Silence over the stair because he has a private theory that the thing follows sound, and he has never told anyone the theory's real reason — that he does not want to hear it speak, because lately, when it does, the voice is almost familiar. He has started to recognise its face. The face is his father's, blooming. He has not told Ithra. He suspects she knows.
Bram is the only person in the Hollow without fear of the dark, a gift of thinned Seven Nations blood from Ithra's line — darkvision, and a stillness in blackness that the other islanders read as either courage or wrongness. He is Chaotic Good in the specific way of someone who has decided that rules made by frightened people are not the same as right: he will break the elders' prohibition on the stair, lie to his grandmother out of love, and give his last Goodberry to a child who wandered too near the Ossuary door.
He grins at everything — strangers, danger, grief — because his father grinned, and because a grin held up against the dark is a wall as good as any gate. He is impatient with mainlanders and their paperwork, deeply loyal to the forty-odd souls of the Hollow, and quietly starving for the outside: he has climbed every terrace and swum every cove, and none of it has ever answered the question he cannot ask aloud.
When Peg Leg Carl's expedition lands on the Verdant Strand, Bram will be the first islander to find them — because he is always out at night, and because the thing on the stair has begun to walk further, and he needs help he cannot name.
