Brother Fen

What it looks like, and what it does

A bank of low fog lying in a hollow of a hill, faintly shaped like a cloaked man kneeling. A rope bell-pull hanging from nothing. A wooden bowl on a stone, brimming. Walkers' silhouettes crossing, heads bowed.

Lies in the hollow from dawn. Thins with the sun. Gathers again at dusk. Stirs when someone speaks his name.

What is known

Brother Fen took vows at the hill chapel in 1911 and lived alone there. By the 1960s the locals had noted that the hollow was always misty.

A walker crossing the fog is overcome by a sorrow too specific to be their own: a letter unwritten, a field left unploughed. They come out the other side weeping, relieved, with small details of a stranger's life in their heads.

What it can do

• Fills a hollow with a fog that carries his memories
• Gives walkers a clear sense of a stranger's regrets

Where it stops

• Burns off by noon
• Cannot form outside the hollow

An encounter

Gale entered the fog on a path she had walked for years and came out sure that she had once refused to forgive a brother. She has no brother. She rang the chapel's old bell-pull, and the fog shifted a little toward her. She said, “I'm sorry.” She could not tell, afterwards, which of them she had meant.

Hester Gale, walker, The hollow below St. Brannoc's Hill, A September dawn

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Forty-one walkers independently described the same events from the same life.
• rumor: That the gap is where the vow was made, and that he cannot remember what he gave up.
• interpretation: He may be giving his sorrow away, a little at a time, to those with room for it.

Still unresolved

Walkers have catalogued the regrets. Together they form a consistent biography with one gap, in the year he took his vows.

Where it has been recorded

• St. Brannoc's Hill (confirmed) — Recorded by Hester Gale, walker.

Connected entities

• Oda Brandt — Both are people who have become weather. Each is kept company by the village around them.