✨Ebonevil, Gatewarden of the Síos✨

On still nights, the air learns a trick of light: a round of brightness gathers itself from nowhere and hangs in the hush like a lidded eye. Folk near the old barrow-roads call it the Moon-Tomb Gate. At its foot sits the warden, the being named Ebonevil—bone-pale against coal, a grave-calm fae poised upon a skull and a briar-rose. She is not a guard. Guards block and bark. Ebonevil listens. She keeps the threshold honest.

Her work is simple to describe and hard to do. Between the Faewilde and the Síos there must be balance; remembrance should not drown the living, and the dead should not hunger for the heat of crowds. The Gate answers to truth, and Ebonevil is its ear. She does not push anyone through. She tilts her head, and whatever the traveler has already chosen in their marrow decides the way—the ivy-lit dignity of the Catacomb Gardens, or the perilous pull of the Cemetaerie where old mistakes still breathe. When visitors try to posture, the black stones strung at her throat—onyx, obsidian, tourmaline—lie dull as shut eyes. When they tell the small, difficult truth, the beads take shine one by one, as if night found its own procession of candles.

Those who come often bring gifts, because stories say every warden has a price. Ebonevil’s is nothing a coin can buy. She asks for something honest: a thread from a cuff worried during a hard apology, the scrap of paper with chores done for a grave no one else tends, a promise already being kept. She prefers evidence to spectacle. The Gate won’t open for a flourish meant to be seen; it opens for the quiet work already underway.

Chroniclers keep accounts of her nights, though she never asks them to. A midwife once came shaking, because the last baby she caught did not keep. She had plastered the grief beneath busy hands and meant to ask for the forgetting that lets work go on. Ebonevil listened until the midwife spoke the child’s name out loud for the first time. The skull warmed. The Gate turned toward the Catacomb Gardens, where remembrance is kept company rather than hidden. When the midwife returned, she carried a ribbon to tie on her bag—one knot for each name she would refuse to bury with silence again.

Another time a hunter arrived with swagger he could not quite keep stitched. He swore he felt nothing about the stag he had penned three nights running for sport. Something rattled in his pocket—iron teeth from the trap. Ebonevil did not scold. She looked at his hands until he said, in a voice that sounded like thawing, that the noise in his sleep was the animal’s breathing. The Gate turned, and the Cemetaerie accepted him with a wind that tasted like old pennies. He stayed until he learned the work of release. When he came back, his traps had been reworked into bells that warned deer away from his snares.

A scholar once crept to the step with a ring she meant to return. She had “borrowed” it for courage and called it a joke, as if laughing could smooth the theft. Ebonevil did not move. At last the scholar said, “I was afraid no one would let me belong without it.” The Gate allowed her a brief walk through the Gardens, just long enough to find a librarian who keeps a shelf where borrowed things wait in the open until their owners are ready to be honest. The scholar went home wearing no ring at all and stood up straighter for it.

Four times a year, when the world thins and even the bold breathe carefully, Ebonevil is said to lift the Gate and wear it like a pendant. She does not stray far or long. She appears backstage after curtain fall, in kitchens rinsed quiet after an argument, in the space between thunder and rain. A promise hears itself. A door tilts. Those quick glints are the Spooklight Sparkles—flickers of the Síos where the living world can still see its reflection and choose what to do with it.

If you ask what Ebonevil wants, the answer is smaller than anyone expects. She wants steadiness. She wants people to know what work they are doing and to do it without cruelty. She will nod to a bow, but she will not be bought. She will listen to a boast, but she will open the Gate only when the boast collapses into something truer. The threshold keeps its manners because she keeps hers.

You can recognize her even without the skull and rose. Light behaves politely around her: gloss and shadow in measured turns, the way beads take shifts to shine. Her wings are not for flight but for balance, catching the smallest winds of decision. If you rush, she does not flinch. If you wait, she does not hurry you. Either way, the crossing answers you, not her.

On good nights you will pass into the Catacomb Gardens and find that beauty can share a room with grief without either being smaller. On necessary nights you will step into the Cemetaerie and learn to carry a dangerous light without burning others. In both cases, when you return, check your hands. You will be holding something you did not have before: a quiet, a weight, a seed. Ebonevil rarely lets anyone leave empty.

If this tale found you at the threshold, you can meet the Gatewarden herself—Ebonevil—in the shop.

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