Lagoween has started. From now until Halloween night, the Hollow are loose on Output Lag. They’re small, they’re sneaky, and they’re hiding at the edges of our pages. Spot one, click it, and it’s gone. Banish 13 and the Lanternwatch has a reward for you.
Before the rules, though, you should know how they got in. Lag tells it best, but Lag tells it out of order, so this is the version Cairn wrote down. (New to the guild? The Lanternwatch has the whole story of who they are and why the Hollow hate them.)
The Quiet Rows
Out past the last bright doors of the Drift, where the water goes still, there’s a place travelers don’t go. Cairn calls it the Quiet Rows. It’s where the doors of finished worlds end up: games switched off, servers gone dark, kingdoms nobody visits anymore. The doors stand there in long crooked lines, grey and cold, like headstones. Nothing comes through them.
Most of the year, anyway.
Every October the nights grow long in every world at once, and players go looking for something to be scared of. They dig out old horror games, haunted mansions, the creepy one they never finished as a kid. For a few weeks, all that remembering sends a little warmth back down the Drift, all the way out to the Quiet Rows. Just enough for the cold doors to creak open.
Just enough for the Hollow to slip out.
Something scratching at the door
Lag noticed first, because Lag watches the door. Something was scratching at it. Not the great Hollow from the old stories, the ones that swallowed Tallowmere and the Lumen Arcade whole. Small ones. Shards of static no bigger than a coin, with dark eyes that never blink.
They had learned something since the guild came to Output Lag. A place full of people who care can’t be taken by force. So they stopped trying to break the door down. They slipped in sideways instead, one at a time, through the cracks: the edge of a page, the corner of a screen, the part of a guide you scroll past without reading. And there they waited for readers to stop paying attention.
Cairn checked his maps and went very quiet. Flicker flew a lap of the whole site and came back with a count that made her antennae droop. Vex looked at the situation over the rim of her teacup and said, “They’re hiding in the margins. How derivative.”
Lag’s plan
The guild argued about it for most of the night. Cairn wanted to map every hiding place. Flicker wanted to sound the alarm on every page. Vex wanted it on the record that she had seen this coming.
Lag, a beat behind as always, had been thinking about something else entirely.
“The Hollow feed on people not caring,” Lag said. “So let’s make a month nobody can ignore. A party. The loudest, silliest one the Drift has ever seen. Costumes, pumpkins, everyone hunting Hollow together. They can’t hide in the margins if everybody’s looking at the margins.”
Nobody could find a hole in it. That’s how the Lanternwatch ended up in costume.
- Lag went as a witch, mostly for the hat. Lag also ate all the treats before anyone else arrived, and would like you to know that one’s on Lag.
- Flicker went as a very small bat, and has asked eleven times whether there’s a horror showcase this month.
- Vex went as a vampire critic, which she insists is not a costume. Her position on jump scares: they are not a personality.
- Cairn carved a pumpkin around his lantern, so the last flame of Tallowmere now has a face. He calls himself a pumpkin wizard. Nobody has argued.
Then Lag named it. Flicker wins the race to almost every announcement, but this time Lag shouted “Lagoween!” a full frame early, for the first time in recorded history, and the name stuck before anyone could vote.
Something at the far end of the Rows
This next part, Cairn wrote in smaller letters.
The little Hollow aren’t the whole story. Far out in the Quiet Rows, past the last door on Cairn’s map, something is gathering the pieces. Every Hollow that slips back out of Output Lag without being banished goes to it. Cairn doesn’t know what it is yet. He only knows when it’s coming: Halloween night.
He did the sums on the back of a map. If readers banish 1,000 Hollow before then, the Lanternwatch will be strong enough to meet it at the door. Fewer than that, and he’d rather not say.
How the Hollow Hunt works
- Spot one. Read anything on Output Lag. On some pages, a Hollow peeks out from the edge of your screen. Which pages changes every day.
- Banish it. Click or tap it and it shatters. Each Hollow only counts once.
- Reach 13. Banish 13 and you unlock Lagoween wallpapers for your phone and desktop. Your progress saves in your browser.
Every Hollow anyone banishes also counts toward a community total, and each community goal unlocks something for everybody:
- 100 banished: Lagoween profile pictures of the whole guild.
- 250 banished: Hollow Hunters wallpapers.
- 500 banished: rare crowned Hollow start turning up, and each one counts three times.
- 1,000 banished: whatever is waiting at the end of the Rows comes for the door on October 31, and we meet it together.
Your own count and the community total both live on the Lagoween hub. If the Hollow are getting in your way while you read, there’s a button there to pause the hunt on your device.
What else the guild has planned
Lagoween isn’t only Hollow. Each member of the guild picked something for the season, and it’s all on the hub:
- Vex’s horror verdicts: scary games we played to the end and scored honestly.
- Cairn’s maps for the dark: guides for the horror games people are stuck in right now.
- Flicker’s scary watchlist: horror games on the way, straight from the Wire.
The Halloween edition of the Lanternwatch log, our Friday newsletter, lands on October 31. If you haven’t joined the watch yet, this is a good month for it.
The door stays lit
The Hollow have one weakness, and it’s the same one it’s always been. They can’t stand people who care. Every Hollow you banish this month is a small way of saying you still do.
The Lanternwatch is always recruiting. Grab a lantern. Lagoween runs until November 1.
