Basecamp Hollow

Every mountain that's worth climbing eventually grows a village at its feet whose entire job is to hand the climbers their rope and pretend to understand why they want it. Basecamp Hollow is that village. It supplies the expeditions that go up The Polysyllabic Peak, crate by careful crate, and it is — by the cheerful, unanimous admission of everyone who lives here — completely baffled by what those expeditions are actually researching.

The bafflement is not for lack of trying. The Hollow is a working supply-village, brisk and practical, the kind of place where the bustle never quite stops and everyone has somewhere to be with something heavy. It provisions the grant-funded parties that come to study the Peak, and it has read, over the years, a great many of their research proposals. It has understood approximately none of them. Ask a resident what the expeditions are measuring and you'll get a long pause, a glance up the trail, and eventually a crate. Painted on the side of that crate is the one honest answer the village has ever settled on: altitude. Whatever the grants claim to be studying, every step up this peak adds altitude, floor by baffling floor, and the Hollow has quietly decided that's the only measurement it's willing to vouch for.

The name is longer than it needs to be, which in Kingdom XXXII is less a quirk than a civic religion. Down the trail sits the town of Longname, whose formal, polysyllabic name nobody actually uses — it's piled onto the sign in ever-larger letters purely for the formality of the thing. Basecamp Hollow keeps its own name-sign in the same spirit: all those extra syllables, propped up for ceremony, faithfully ignored by anyone in a hurry. Walk far enough down from the Hollow and that sign fades behind you into Longname proper, the way formality tends to, once you're out of earshot of the people who insist on it.

For all its cheerful confusion, the Hollow is a place people come to when they've stopped moving for the first time in a long while. It was here that Tamsin surfaced — Elowen's sharpest apprentice, until very recently, sitting apart from the supply-village's usual traffic with the specific stillness of someone who'd walked a very long way on very little sleep. She'd crossed three provinces to reach the Hollow, and she wasn't there for the rope or the crates. She was there because it was the first place far enough from the Order to sit down in. The Hollow, to its credit, doesn't pry. It hands you a supply list and lets you be furious in peace.

The one thing nobody in Basecamp Hollow can explain — and several have tried — is the dog. Up at The Overlong Summit, where the trail keeps lying about being nearly finished, a small dog of indeterminate and entirely untired breed has taken up residence, regarding every arriving traveler with the calm confidence of a creature that has never once considered turning back. The villagers' explanations all end the same way: a shrug, and the observation that it simply seems to enjoy being up there more than anyone reasonably should. Given that the Hollow can't explain the mountain it lives on either, the dog is at least in good company. It has, if nothing else, matched the village's tolerance for mysteries it has no intention of solving — and outlasted a great many of the grants.