The Hollowed Shadow
The Hollowed Shadow was an underground club in Varaar, owned by Burkhan of the Damaziko gang. From the courtyard it looked like nothing more than an abandoned grey brick building with broken, cobwebbed windows, but the club lay deep in the earth beneath it, and it kidnapped young women to entertain the highest-ranking gang members in the city.[1][2] Tabitha Glowdish killed Burkhan inside it and burned it to the ground.[1]
The building
The Shadow stood off an empty cobbled courtyard at the end of a narrow alley, canopies strung between the buildings overhead and a small rusted bench in the middle of the yard. An etching of a snake with swords for fangs, the sigil of the Damaziko, was cut into the brick above the door.[1]
Inside the front door a spiral staircase dropped into the ground, and a red door led to a side corridor into the adjacent building, where the club's dancers were housed. At the foot of the stairs a second door opened on the club itself: one dark room with velvet-lined walls, oil lanterns flickering on the tabletops, and a purple carpet dark enough to hide the blood and gore that fell on it. Card tables filled the floor, waiters carried platters of sparkling pink drinks and tiny cakes, dancers performed on stools, and curtained alcoves stood along the walls. Half its patrons never left the place at all, sleeping beneath the tables and scavenging food off abandoned plates.[1]
A bear kept the courtyard door and a fox the door at the bottom of the stairs. Both wore the sigil of the Khaylant, an upside-down naked pine tree, one of the five gangs that govern Varaar and the one that ran protection for the Shadow on the Damaziko's behalf.[1]
The Shadow was one of the few places in Eslura where Tab could take her hood down. Her pectoral fins would have been a one-way ticket to Morgaedion anywhere outside its walls, and inside them nobody minded that she was an Olphin so long as she paid her share.[1] Where the club's name comes from, how long it had stood, and who built it are not recorded.
The dancers
The women who danced at the Shadow were not there by choice. Fawn was stolen from her family as a child and her family killed, and Burkhan kept her in the club and later announced he would marry her to strengthen his bloodline. Ayala, whom the dancers treated as a mother, and Hybie, a stoat who could not have been more than fourteen, were held there with her.[1]
Destruction
Tab was a regular at the Shadow, and it was there that she met Fawn. When she learned of the marriage she came to the club to cut Burkhan's throat and free the women. The fight went badly, an oil lamp went over, and the carpet caught. Tab held Burkhan down in the flames until he stopped moving, and a falling ceiling beam sealed him beneath it. She carried Fawn out through a hole in the wall of the dancers' quarters while the building burned behind them, and the women scattered into the alleys as the fire bells began.[1]
Afterwards
The gangs never touched the ruin again. With no money and no way to make any, Fawn, Ayala and Hybie moved back into the burnt-out basement and claimed it. They hung the plush walls with hand-drawn maps, tactical illustrations and portraits of women they mean to find, and they keep watchers in every corner of Varaar, working to stop the gangs taking any more women as they were taken.[2]
Tab came back years later to ask their help. Rubble had buried the purple front door, and she let herself in through a half-open window. What became of the fox who kept the inner door she did not know.[2]