Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 17: The Other Side of the Ledger

Description:

Two days of ordinary road stand between Andrik and the audience he's earned, and on the last night, the smoke-shaped thing that's hunted him from the very beginning does something it has never once done. It sits down across the fire. And doesn't attack.

What it tells him, in a voice quieter and less certain than he's ever heard from it, is a confession he isn't sure he can trust: that it was born from the exact moment his eyes found Neena again, at the pond, two years ago — and that somewhere in everything it's consumed since, it's started to wonder if some genuine piece of her is folded into what it's become.

"I don't know how to tell the difference anymore," it says. "That's the truest thing I've ever said to either of you." Andrik doesn't know whether to believe it. He isn't sure, walking toward tomorrow's door, that he can afford not to.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 16: The Hour No One Watches

Description:

It takes three nights of watching before Andrik understands what he's looking for — a stretch of perhaps ten minutes, deep in the dark, when every threshold in sight goes faint and unattended, like a desk left empty by a clerk who's stepped away.

The third toll asks him to do the one thing two years of survival never taught him: open a threshold instead of closing one. The moment he starts, the smoke-shaped thing that's hunted him since the cave arrives faster and more afraid than he's ever seen it. "Don't," it says. "You don't know what you're inviting."

He finishes anyway, with Wren standing between him and the only thing trying to stop him. What opens isn't a field or a fog. It's a corridor of very still, very dark air — and something vast at the end of it, finally, turning to look back.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 15: What a Name Is Worth

Description:

Andrik assumes, at first, that the name he owes the ledger is Neena's — two years of refusing to say it out loud, finally spent. Wren corrects him before he's even finished the thought. It was never his to give away. It was only ever hers to carry.

There's exactly one name in the world that belongs fully to him, and giving it away — standing alone in a ring of old stones, speaking his full, true name into the dark — turns out to be harder than he expects, especially once something arrives at the edge of the circle trying to steal the offering before it's finished being given.

He finishes it anyway, through gritted teeth, and feels something vast and distant turn the smallest fraction of its attention toward a clearing in the middle of nowhere — the unmistakable sensation of being noticed by exactly the thing he's trying to reach.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 14: A Truth Freely Given

Description:

"A truth that costs something to say." Andrik stands at the edge of their camp trying every version of honesty he's already made peace with, and the mark on his palm sits there, cold and entirely unimpressed by all of it.

It takes Wren, gently, to show him the difference — that a truth which costs something isn't one he's already said out loud and survived. What finally moves the mark is the one thing he's never let himself admit even to himself: that he doesn't know if the woman he's walking toward is still, in any way that matters, Neena at all.

The toll accepts it. One down, two to go — and the next one, he already suspects, is going to cost him something he's spent his whole life assuming was only ever his to keep.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 13: Something Worth an Audience

Description:

"We stop running from it," Andrik says, before he's even sure he means it. If an audience or a foreclosure are the only two outcomes waiting for him, he wants to be the one who chooses the hour.

What he finds, following a trail his new sight has never shown him before, is a cairn generations deep — names scratched into stone in a dozen languages, petitions from people who wanted something badly enough to ask for it directly. Buried among them, worn nearly smooth, is a pattern: three tolls, always three, the price of requesting an audience with the ledger itself.

Wren doesn't try to talk him out of it. She only tells him where to start — with the cheapest toll, the one that costs him nothing but the truth. He isn't sure, yet, that any truth he's carrying is actually cheap.

-----

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 12: What the Collector Left Behind

Description:

The mark itches all evening, and Andrik spends the whole night waiting to see what it will do. At midnight, it does something — a pulse in time with nothing his own heart is doing, and a warning that whatever's hunting him now knows exactly where he stands.

What steps into the mouth of their shelter isn't wearing anyone's borrowed face this time. It's Neena's shape, built from something that moves like smoke remembering how to be solid, and it no longer needs a door to find him. When Andrik reaches for the closing rite that's saved them a dozen times already, it isn't there to call — the ledger, it turns out, has opinions about what he's allowed to spend.

They escape through the thinnest, most desperate threshold he's ever used, and land miles from where they started with a second line freshly added to his palm, and a voice still ringing in the dark behind them: soon, little collector. You're almost worth collecting properly.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 11: The Cost of Asking

Description:

Wren keeps glancing sideways at him on the road, doing arithmetic she doesn't like the answer to. That evening, a man is simply standing in the road who wasn't there a moment before — unremarkable in every way except the stillness, the way he stands like a closed door instead of a person.

He calls himself a collector, the genuine article, and lays out exactly what Andrik has been doing without permission for weeks — closing debts, opening thresholds, protecting a traveler who never signed for coverage. All of it, he says, drawing attention it shouldn't have drawn, from an office with a name: the Hollow King.

He leaves before the sentence finishes settling. What's left behind, cold and precise on Andrik's palm, is the first line of an account that didn't exist an hour ago.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 10: A Debt Not Hers

Description:

The question Wren left burning in the ashes leads Andrik somewhere he's never tried to go before — choosing a threshold instead of merely surviving one. What waits beneath a dry, abandoned well is an archive with no visible walls, floor to ceiling with ledgers, and a Keeper who has been expecting company for longer than either of them have been alive.

"Closed," the Keeper says, of the debt collected at the pond two years ago. "Paid in full, on schedule, by collection." Not an accident. Not simple grief or cruelty. Something reviewed the debt, found it due, and sent for payment — and Andrik has no way yet to find out whether the correct account was ever actually closed.

He also learns, for the first time, what something in this world has already started calling him. Little collector. He doesn't yet know how much weight that name is about to carry.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 9: The Day the Water Went Still

Description:

By a fire in an abandoned shepherd's hut, Andrik finally tells it all — the wedding, the pond, the custom of throwing flower crowns into water that never showed the sky, and the hundred people twenty paces away who heard absolutely nothing when it happened.

He tells her about the old woman past the mill, the rule he broke a hundred paces from the light, and the thing that followed him back through the door he tore open trying to save her. "That's the whole of it," he says. "That's what you're traveling with."

Wren doesn't offer him comfort. She offers him a question instead — one he's never once let himself ask in two years of grief. Why was the water still that day, specifically, out of every day? And once asked, it's not a question either of them can un-ask.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 8: The Weight of Two

Description:

The road gives way to marsh, and Andrik notices he's dropping things, forgetting things, losing pieces of the ordinary world the way you lose your footing on wet stone. Wren notices too, and asks the question he's been avoiding: what did it actually cost him, closing that door around her instead of himself?

He finds out the hard way, in the reeds, when protecting her a second time takes something from him he can't name — a memory, gone and then, mercifully, back, but shaken loose in a way that terrifies him more than the marsh water ever could. "It's taking things," he realizes. "Without a proper price. It just takes whatever's nearest."

By the time they reach dry ground, Andrik has promised her something he's never promised anyone since the pond: the whole truth, tomorrow, with a roof over both their heads.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 7: The Price of Staying

Description:

They make camp in a stand of thin trees, and it's well past midnight when Wren starts to dream out loud — a small, pleading murmur, a name repeated in a voice thick with something older than sleep. What's crouched at the edge of the firelight isn't the thing that's been hunting Andrik for days. It's smaller. It's watching her.

He understands, with a lurch, exactly what he's looking at — not his ghost, but hers, wearing the shape of a sister who drowned in a lake when Wren was eleven, saying the one thing Wren has never let herself hear out loud. For the first time, Andrik closes a door around someone other than himself.

It works. It also tells him something he isn't ready to know yet — that whatever's been hunting him has a hungry cousin, and it just found a second door into two travelers instead of one.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 6: The Village That Forgot to Scream

Description:

The village is wrong before they even reach its gate — full of people, and not one sound worth the name. Doors close without a knock. Children watch them with wide, careful eyes and say nothing at all.

What Andrik finds, once his new sight shows him the seam running beneath the village square, is an old bargain — generations of silence traded for safety, an agreement that never expired even after everyone who signed it died. And now something is standing in the square, using that inherited silence like a wall built entirely in its favor.

He has never had to force a door open before — only ever learned to close them. What he plays into the dark that night isn't a closing shape at all, and what it costs to tear one open instead, he won't fully understand until much further down the road.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 5: The Fellow Traveler

Description:

He hasn't slept properly in longer than he lets himself count when he sees her — a slight figure a hundred paces ahead on an empty road, walking as if the hour and the danger around her are the most ordinary thing in the world.

Her name is Wren. She falls into step beside him like it was already decided somewhere he wasn't consulted, and ignores every warning he gives her about what follows him and what happens to people who walk near him too long. "Everyone on this road is running from something," she says. "At least yours has the decency to make noise before it arrives."

It's midday when she mentions, almost as an aside, a still lake near her childhood home — and something in Andrik goes very quiet, very cold, in a way he doesn't explain and she doesn't ask about. By dusk, in the treeline beside them, something pale is already keeping pace with two travelers instead of one.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 4: What Crossed Behind Him

Description:

The humming doesn't stop. It should — Andrik paid what the toll keeper asked, crossed the bridge, did everything a debt like that is supposed to require. Instead the tune keeps threading through the dark behind him, patient and unhurried, closer than anything that should still be standing on the far side of a river with no reflection.

Following the sound leads him somewhere he never meant to go — a seam of wrong light lying across an empty field, a threshold with no gate, no door, built by something that no longer needs permission to open one. And on the other side of an older, forgotten archway, past shapes that move like fish at the bottom of very deep water, he sees her. Small. Distant. Facing away.

He doesn't call her name. He isn't sure, in that terrible half-second, whether he'd survive being wrong about who's actually standing there.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 3: The Toll of the Threshold

Description:

The road narrows into something that no longer feels like a road, ending at a bridge over water so still it holds no reflection at all. Beside it waits a toll keeper built from the same bone-pale stone as the road itself — blind eyes that see with unsettling precision, and a price that has nothing to do with coin.

"A memory," the toll keeper says. "One true one. Freely given, and gone forever the moment it leaves you." Andrik has spent two years hoarding what little of Neena he has left. Now something is asking him to spend it, just to cross a river that shouldn't exist.

What he learns on the far bank is worse than what he loses to get there — a glimpse of thresholds hidden in ordinary doorways, and a voice, closer to whole than it's ever sounded, humming a tune behind him that should have stayed on the other side of the water.

-----

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 2: What Answered in the Dark

Description:

Andrik doesn't leave. That's the part he can't explain to himself the next morning — that after a night like the one before, staying should have been unthinkable, and yet somehow it wasn't.

The old woman by the hearth speaks first that evening, in a voice that isn't quite her own — low, patient, and far too amused for a stranger discussing a dead man's wife. Andrik recognizes the shape of it immediately, the same presence that sang beneath his own voice the night before, wearing a new mouth now the way you'd wear a borrowed coat. His hands find the lyre before his mind catches up to what they're doing — four notes, bent backward on themselves like a knot pulled tight, a shape he's never been taught and can't explain.

It works. But it doesn't leave alone. At the village's edge, something smaller is waiting on a fence post — a child, smiling with too many teeth, speaking in a voice that belongs to no child at all. "You'll run out of closings, little musician, before I run out of doors."

It isn't a threat. It's an introduction.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season One: The Hollow Road

Episode 1: The Music That Would Not Die

Description:

Andrik has played this same threadbare set in a hundred nameless taverns since the night his wife drowned — because a full belly needs coin, and coin needs calluses, and calluses need a song he can play without having to feel it anymore. Tonight's tavern is smaller and quieter than most, tucked at the edge of a village he won't remember the name of by morning. He tunes his strings by candlelight, settles into his corner, and does what he always does: he plays.

But somewhere in the third verse, under his own voice, another voice rises to meet it — one he has spent two years trying to forget the sound of. It isn't memory. It isn't grief playing tricks on a tired man in a dim room. Someone, or something, is singing back.

By the time the last note fades and the tavern empties into the cold, Andrik is alone with his instrument, his untouched drink, and a growing, sick certainty that he is not as alone as he thought. Something in the dark knows his name. And it isn't finished with him yet.

This is where the road begins. Every mile has a price — and this is the first one Andrik never saw coming.

------

Andrik the Cursed is a serialized dark mythological horror fiction podcast, told across ongoing seasons — not standalone episodes, but one continuing story, best experienced in order from Part One.

It follows Andrik, a traveling musician bound by a curse he never chose, walking a road that offers him back everything he's lost — for a price that never stops collecting. Season One: The Hollow Road begins his journey. More seasons continue it.

New parts release regularly. If this is your first time here, start from the beginning — the road doesn't wait for you to catch up.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.