Snake Hill is not technically a hill. It’s a raised pile of earth, about the length of thirteen football fields, deliberately sculpted in the shape of a snake. When the first settlers in Middleton showed up, they assumed the Indians made it. But the local Plains tribes wanted nothing to do with it; they stayed away from it, and warned the first white people in the area to do the same.

For about a hundred years, it was just a weird thing in the distance, a landmark that people didn’t especially like to visit. Eventually, a couple of archaeologists from a university back in Rhode Island showed up and declared it an earthwork built by the first indigenous people to settle in the valley. They were part of a culture that made metal tools and weapons, carved stone tablets, and traded with other settlements up and down the continent, all the way to Mexico.

The archaeologists dug in the dirt and found copper jewelry. And religious icons. And bones. Thousands of bones. They discovered the remains of hundreds of men, women, and children. All of them ritually sacrificed in religious ceremonies, like others were by the Incas and Aztecs.

The archaeologists quickly filled the holes they’d dug and left town. They later wrote up a report calling it a burial mound and a primitive observatory, like Stonehenge. Snake Hill was declared a historic site, to keep anyone from putting houses on top of it. But nobody really wanted to live there anyway.

Whatever the first natives were trying to appease or bribe with their ceremonies, it didn’t work. The tribe disappeared from history, almost all at once, as if everyone who lived in the valley walked away at the same time. It’s an academic mystery that occasionally gets debated in a few obscure journals.

Eric knows what really happened. He knows what the people here were trying to keep down. Snake Hill is a burial site, true. But not for anything remotely human.

They are at a flattened area where a stone table once stood, about 300 years before the birth of Christ. There is now a fairy ring of plants and long-stemmed grass in a wide, near-perfect circle that marks the spot. It’s called the Serpent’s Crown by some people. Alana’s people, the Fair Folk, call it the Well of Stars.

Whatever you call it, this is where the serpent was fed.

Eric is not thrilled to be back. He can feel the power running under his feet, feel the thing writhing and straining again under the dirt, still waiting to get out. There is old, dark magic in the ground, rooted deep in the pain and suffering of innocents, and it would bend easily toward extinguishing whatever light is left in him.