The Widow of Summer Wind

"The records end where the fear begins. Every ledger, every birth roll, every will stops at her name, as though the ink refused to follow her any further."

— Scholar Evin Marren, The Quiet Dead: Studies in Rural Disappearances

The earliest records tied to the Summer Wind estate appear in land ledgers kept by the surrounding cantons. In these documents, Summer Wind is listed as a newly built manor on cleared forestland. Over the next three decades, five different men purchased or inherited the property, each one dying within only a few years of arrival. Every official report lists the cause as illness, accident, or misfortune. Privately written letters from that time tell a different story.

Merchants passing through the region described the estate as beautiful but cursed. One traveler noted that the air near the pond smelled of rot even in winter. Another claimed that servants whispered of a mistress who refused to age, her face unchanged after decades of ownership. These accounts were dismissed as superstition until the local clergy began to record baptisms and funerals connected to Summer Wind. The children born there were named in church rolls, but no burial entries exist for them. They simply disappear from record after their fathers’ deaths.

A later generation of priests investigating the site during a drought found the pond reduced to half its size. Within the exposed mud they discovered small bones and fragments of jewelry, including a signet ring that matched the crest of one of the missing families. The remains were buried in a communal grave beside the chapel at Wren Hollow, though none of the clergy involved agreed to bless the ground. The parish collapsed less than a year later under unexplained circumstances, and the records were sealed.

Civic accounts of a riot at Summer Wind survive only in fragments. They describe a night of panic in which townspeople stormed the manor and set fire to its lower floors. The official entry calls it a “domestic dispute escalated to violence” and names no victims. Personal journals from the same week tell of children’s clothes hung over gates, of shrieking from the pond, and of a woman’s laughter echoing long after the flames had gone out. Some claimed the house itself burned from the inside first.

Following that event, the estate was confiscated by the canton, though no family ever took possession. The surviving structure was left to decay, its interior stripped by scavengers. In time, the upper halls collapsed into the cellars. Surveyors who visited the site in later centuries noted that the pond had deepened unnaturally, as though the ground beneath had sunk away. Attempts to drain it failed. The water simply returned overnight, blacker each time.

Modern historians treat the Widow of Summer Wind as an intersection of folklore and verifiable tragedy. The physical remains of the estate still match the records of its age. The pattern of disappearances, deaths, and silence across three generations has been confirmed through archival cross reference. The cause remains unknowable. Whether the legend of the widow emerged from the crimes of a single woman or from a series of coincidences lost to time, the story has left a mark deep enough to stain both memory and map.

"No one remembers the story the same way, but everyone agrees on the silence. The house is quiet now because the land learned its lesson."

— Alton Varrel, oral historian of the Agriss Cantons

The story of the Widow of Summer Wind never traveled far beyond the cantons that surround the Agriss valleys. It is a local tale, passed from parent to child beside quiet hearths, told in low voices so the little ones will listen. In the villages that border the old estate, no one repeats her name after dark. When storms pass through and lightning touches the hills, people shut their doors and say it is the widow searching for her reflection.

In nearby towns, the story is shared as a warning. Travelers are told not to seek shelter near still water, and children are kept away from the old road that leads to the manor. Farmers working in the low fields claim that on clear nights, the air carries the sound of a woman humming, soft and tuneless, followed by the faint splash of something heavy falling into water. They say it is the sound of her remembering.

Each generation reshapes the tale to fit its fears. In some tellings, the widow was a victim who drowned herself after being accused unjustly. In others, she was the monster who could not die, her spirit bound to the place she poisoned. Scholars of folklore note that the rhythm of the story never changes. The house stands, the pond waits, and the dead keep count. The living only pass through.

Among the more remote cantons, the story is treated as a matter of faith. Offerings are left at the first frost of winter, when the pond’s surface grows thin and restless. People place carved dolls, silver buttons, or small stones with children’s names scratched into them. The gifts are meant for the ones in the water, not for the woman in the house. No one leaves anything for her.

Outside the region, the legend has faded into rumor. Traders who cross the passes speak of an abandoned manor that still glows in fog, and a pond that never freezes even in the worst cold. Some call it a superstition, others a curse. A few claim that the house is one of many along the western spine where the dead do not stay buried. No one stays long enough to prove it.

For the people who still live within sight of its crumbling roof, the tale of the Widow of Summer Wind is not a story but a memory that refuses to fade. They believe the ground itself holds the truth, and that the pond remembers every sound it has swallowed. When the wind rises through the valley, carrying the scent of lilies, they say the children are stirring again, and that the widow is listening.