One More Tale For Halloween....

The Harvesters of Hollow Vale

(A Halloween Dystopian Metaphor)

They used to say Britain was a green and pleasant land.

But that was before the Harvesters came.

No one knew where the cult began—some said it started in Parliament, others said it seeped up from the old cathedrals like mould rising through a damp wall.

It did not matter.

By the time anyone noticed, the roots were already underfoot.

The Harvesters spoke softly at first.

They called themselves Guardians of the Future.

They said the children were the seeds of the nation and must be tended… shaped.

So they took the young first—especially the girls—for the Harvesters believed girls had the strongest dreams, and dreams were dangerous.

They wrapped their “care” in ribbons and hymns.

They taught obedience disguised as grace.

They clipped the wings of imagination and called it discipline.

They told the children that fear was love and silence was safety

And while the children forgot how to speak, the country forgot how to listen.

Meanwhile, outside the schools and houses where the Harvesters worked, the streets began to rot.

Men in suits with velvet voices smiled in Parliament halls while their pockets swelled like autumn sacks.

They passed laws no one understood, traded promises no one heard, and feasted on the nation’s marrow as if it were their birth right.

Some nights, the lights flickered over towns like dying stars, and the streets grew sharp and hungry. People learned not to walk alone. Not because of shadows—but because of what wore human faces.

Murder became a kind of punctuation. A message scratched into the pavement:

Hope is not welcome here.

Yet the worst of it was not the violence. Not the poverty. Not even the fear.

It was the whispering.

The Harvesters knew how to speak inside a person’s mind—how to make them doubt their memory, their sanity, their own heartbeat.

They did not need chains.

Only words.

People began to police themselves. They forgot how to think without permission. They forgot how to want.

The land grew quiet.

But legends say that somewhere—beneath the ruined libraries, behind boarded windows, among those who still dream—there are embers. Small ones. Hidden ones.

Children who remember the sky before the smoke.

Women who remember the sound of their own voice.

Men who remember how to stand tall.

They wait.

For harvests do not last forever.

Even the darkest cult cannot grow in winter. And every forgotten seed remembers how to bloom.