You find the theurge standing in a grassy field just barely screened by the budding spring trees. It rained all last week, but now the mud at Elton's feet is dry enough that it's starting to crack. He's wearing his familiar frock coat; when he turns to note your arrival, his white Mezzanine t-shirt is a pale blur in the fading light. Beyond him, spherical structures of brick, between five and eight feet high, dot the field. More are visible deeper in the forest. The wind whistles among the bricks, and it sounds like a woman screaming. Elton hesitates, then forces himself to examine the structures. This close, you can see the remains of glyphs covering some bricks, but every one has been effaced, smoothed away.
I practice my shutting up skills and follow my elders.
"What is this place?"
Screaming women are bad news even when they're metaphors. I go back to the van for my hatchet.
"The outdoor bread oven graveyard. At last, we've found it."
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You stay behind Elton as he runs his thumb over the bricks. They crumble a little and the glyphs dissolve. He glances your way after a moment.
"Ages ago, the Garou of the Broad Brook Caern fought the armies of the Wyrm here. We won, but then the dreams came. Dreams and nightmares, leaking into the waking world.
"Some things," Elton says, running his fingers over another crumbling brick, "don't die all the way. They…stop, but they don't go away. Even the most defiled Banes will return to Gaia in time, but these were the spiritual equivalent of styrofoam: can't recycle 'em, right? All we could do was wall them off where they died, so their undying corpses didn't leak into the surrounding Umbra."
Elton is about to say more, but then he frowns and stalks around a dried-up mud pool to another of the brick beehives, this one covered in vines. Gaps are visible in the brickwork. You can't see anything inside, only blackness, but the smell is rank, like someone wrapped a dead raccoon in bubble wrap and burned it.
"They're falling apart, and I don't know how to fix them," Elton says. "That's why we're going to find Nin. We need a Child of Gaia to really start healing this land. There's nothing I can do here: let's get back on the road."
The van rolls past fields of corn, asparagus, and marijuana, past a gas station with pumps so old that it still has a physical price display that spins like a slot machine, to a boarded-up white farmhouse with a rusted trailer in front and a red tobacco barn rotting out back. Tonight only, this barn is Hog Throne. You'd feared that eight o'clock was unfashionably early for a show, but these are farmers' kids, and the party is already lit. Fornam takes out an old flip phone and asks if the bands need help getting ready. Roscoe tells you to bail as he rolls onto a field of stubbly grass and negotiates for parking among the old and new trucks and the retro sports cars from the early 2000s.
There's a big age range among the crowd heading for Hog Throne: kids younger than you with neon hair and pronoun pins (unironic), then college students up from UMass or Amherst, not even bothering to get dressed up, jeans or yoga pants with hoodies. Millennial hipsters with sleeve tattoos and pronoun pins (ironic), carrying their own beer in plastic coolers, keep apart from the prematurely aged rural poor, ex-channers with cold eyes and grubby Carhartt jackets and low-slung caps. Then the serious music geeks in their forties and fifties, still making the circuit though the golden age of blogging has passed and so has the golden age of guitar rock. Some have their teenaged kids with them, who are already trying to escape their parents and hook up. A smattering of old burnouts like Roscoe and Fornam, still chasing the high they remember from Phish concerts or maybe even that old tie-dye band. Walking Dead? Dead Bears? You forget the name.
The once-stately white farmhouse, now a boarded-up ruin covered in weeds, holds the bands and most of their equipment. Nin is in there somewhere, but for now, you and Elton join the line that leads to the small door on the west side of the barn. That's the main entrance, since the bands use the south door.
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