"They woke up. We forgot them. Now they hunt us."
Buried Forgotten Returning
The stone was not where the map had placed it. I had walked that stretch of moor three seasons and never once seen a kistvaen half so large, nor one whose cap-stone bore such markings as these — though they were not fresh, and could not have been made in my lifetime, nor my grandfather's.
The shepherd's boy would not come near. He said the place smelled of breath.
I returned at dusk to photograph the stone. The plate, when developed, showed what I had not seen: the earth around the kistvaen had been disturbed. Not recently. Not by any shovel I know of.
Something had come up through it.
A kistvaen is a prehistoric stone tomb — four slabs and a capstone, set into the earth before history began to write itself down. The Kistvean is what happens when the stones no longer hold.
They were not human. They were not monsters. They were something else, and they were put under the ground for reasons no one alive remembers.
The rituals that kept them sleeping were passed down in songs and walking-paths and bread-marks. When the rituals stopped, nothing obvious happened. Nothing for a century.
Something is waking. It has been waking for some time. The archive you are about to enter is an attempt — perhaps too late — to remember what we were never supposed to forget.
She remembers fire, dancing, the sun setting. She remembers the sound of drums. She remembers a tradition built on a yearly calendar, her time to rest, eyes with constellations within them putting her to rest. She does not remember why she has woken in so much pain and anger and emptiness. Those eyes not there to welcome her back from her sleep — and she remembers wanting, when she stops being still.
She has the documents — and the rune that her uncle gave her for her tenth birthday on her wrist, secured in a bronze bracelet. She does not yet know what they mean — only that she was the one they were given to, and that someone, before her, kept them safe. She has begun to read.
He is both patient and desperate. He did not stop walking, following, and smiling.
The figures walk the archive at different distances. Choose the depth at which you would meet them.
Step inside the studio. Watch the world unfold, without commitment.
Hold the work, and its making, close. The heart of the archive.
Carry the work forward. The deepest entry — the things that never reach the chapters or the gallery wall.
Or, if you would walk the surface only — be marked, and the next chapter will find you.
For those who would walk the surface. Each chapter as it emerges — at Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, Yule. The four transmissions of the year, sent at no cost. The next: Lughnasadh, the 1st of August.
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Tamzin J Ritchie is a Chicago-based visual artist and writer whose work moves between oil paintings, composite photography, and gothic fiction. Her visual practice — shown at Saatchi Art and in exhibitions across Illinois and Wisconsin — is preoccupied with decay, dilapidation, and the weight of what the earth remembers.
The Kistvean is her first novel: a gothic dystopian horror told through found documents, letters, photographs, and folklore fragments. It is being published chapter by chapter beginning Beltane 2026.