In November 2024, a five-person scientific team arrives at a remote research station deep in the boreal forest of northern Ontario. Their mandate: document an anomalous twelve-kilometre circle of ecological collapse — geometrically perfect, expanding for sixty-three years, silent in a way that instruments can measure but cannot explain. No animals. No fungal network. Bark scored in recursive spirals. Undisturbed snow where there should be tracks. Dr. Ruth Calloway is the team lead. She is Métis, forty-four, a wildlife ecologist who has built her career on the discipline of not drawing conclusions before the data is in. On the first day, her Cree field technician tells her that his people have a name for this place, and a tradition describing exactly what lives beneath it. Ruth thanks him and moves on to the evening debrief. The data comes in. The conclusions arrive ahead of schedule. Hollow Ground is a slow-burn horror novella about a hunger that predates human language, waking in warming permafrost — and about the specific cost of scientific methodology when the thing you are studying has already begun studying you. As Ruth’s team disappears one by one, in precisely the sequence the oral tradition she dismissed predicted, she is forced to confront not just what is beneath the ice, but what she has spent twenty years filing under context instead of acting on. Intimate, relentless, and told with the precision of a field report, Hollow Ground asks what it costs to finally hear what you have always known.