I’m a Polish author writing dark Slavic fantasy set in 10th century Poland — the actual historical Slavic world, not the romanticized version.
I’ve done a rough AI translation of a chapter from my novella “Tower of Debt” to test whether the story works in English before investing in professional native speaker translation.
The novella follows Popiel, a warlord above Lake Gopło whose uncles have plotted against him, whose ground has stopped answering — and whose mice are coming.
This is Slavic folk horror — quiet, mechanical, inevitable. Influenced by the aesthetic of Cormac McCarthy and the historical detail of Bernard Cornwell.
Honest feedback wanted: Does this read well enough in English to be worth investing in a professional native speaker translation? What works, what breaks immersion, what’s missing?
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## TOWER OF DEBT
### Chapter 10: The Swarm
Before dawn, when the frost presses into the bones like steel into a scabbard and the sky is darkest an hour before graying, the ground beneath the stronghold began to breathe differently.
Not a tremor. Not groundwater seeking a path between the roots. Something older and more patient, something that had lodged beneath the earth for months like water behind a dam and now, when the dam gave way, flowed. The fissure opened by tainted blood and by bodies at the threshold and by the law broken three times sought an outlet with the mathematical, pitiless precision of nature repairing its own errors. And it found it.
What flowed out was not vengeance. Vengeance requires someone who remembers the wrong and waits for the moment. This did not wait. This was mechanics, just as water is the mechanics of gravity, without anger, without pity, without any purpose other than filling the void that awaits it.
The first ones came out of the earth by the eastern wall of the ramparts.
Through the cracks between the boards of the palisade. Through the fissures in the clay packed over the years. Through every place where the ground met the wood of the stakes, densely, soundlessly, the way water seeps through the sand in a riverbed that no one will stop. Gray shapes. Small. So numerous the earth beneath them moved and breathed. They flowed across the yard not like a herd, but like a single organism spilling across every available space, through every fissure and crack and unsealed corner, with the quiet inevitability of the tide.
Toward the tower.
Without haste. Without stopping. Not attacking, not feeding. Walking like a thing that knows its purpose and knows exactly how much time it has.
In the main hall, through which they passed at the beginning, there was no one left. The door stood open. The stove cold for many hours, the ash pan gray with cold embers. On the bench by the eastern wall the sewing lay folded carefully, the needle stuck into the fabric on the last stitch. Laid aside for a moment. To be retrieved shortly. By the floorboard, by the leg of the bench, in the layer of dust one handprint, flat and distinct. Nothing more. The testament of the last hours of this place, dry and complete like a page from a chronicle.
They passed through the hall without stopping. Toward the tower.
Birds came from the lake.
Still before sunrise, when the sky over Gopło was black and deep like a bottomless well, a sound emerged over the surface. Not a single raven, not a flock. Something collective and guttural, something coming from the north and the east and the west at once. All the birds of darkness in Europe knew suddenly there was a place and a time and a matter here. This sound grew like a distant wave before it becomes a breaker. First a noise to be disregarded. Then one that could not be ignored. Then one that filled the air the way darkness fills the hall when the last fire is extinguished.
The sky turned black.
Not from clouds, from wings. Thousands. Tens of thousands of wings beating in a rhythm that resembled breath and was not breath. Their shadow lay upon the water the way a storm cloud lies upon an open field, slowly, unevenly, from the edges toward the center, until Gopło vanished beneath it and there was no lake anymore, only darkness beneath darkness. They circled low over the stronghold, over the palisade and over the roof of the main hall and over the well in the yard. Over the tower by the bank denser than anywhere else, in a circle whose center was precisely over the fourth floor.
They circled quietly. Only the wind through feathers. Only shadow through shadow.
Out of the reed beds by the bank came things in silence that are not in the habit of coming out before dawn.
Snakes from burrows by the roots of old willows. Lizards from the stones, where they had slumbered since the first frosts. Frogs from the mud that had been their home all summer and autumn, from the very same mud they never left in cold October without reason. They came out now without a hiss, without a leap, without any of the sounds a creature makes in flight or in attack. They simply came out, with the same quiet inevitability as the gray shapes across the yard, and walked through the mud by the bank and through the rushes toward the tower.
By the stakes of the tower, there where the wood entered the mud under the water, they gathered and stood.
In the darkness before dawn their numbers were unseen. A pressure in the air. Tangible as the shift before a storm. And on every stake, from the waterline upward to the height of a grown man's shoulder, lines remained. Darker than the wood. Like a border. Like a mark burned by something that stood by the tree very long and wanted very badly for the tree to remember.
The ground around the eastern stakes opened before dawn wider than in all the preceding weeks.
Through the fissures in the earth. Not through the visible ones the warriors buried and which returned every night. Through something deeper, through the parting of the soil itself at the foundations, came out that which lives deeper than a shovel reaches. Beetles and worms and creatures without names, the kind a man sees only when he breaks an old foundation or steals earth from under the moss by the forest. They came out quietly and flowed toward the tower, toward the very same place as all the others this night. Something beneath the earth had handed them all the same order in the same moment.
The fissure by the eastern stake of the tower, the same one through which something went in and out through months of scraping, opened at last to its full width. And through it flowed that which for weeks had seeped carefully and slowly. All at once, without rhythm, through the entire opening simultaneously, like a river that has broken a dam and no longer needs to remember caution.
The sky grayed.
Slowly, from the east, as always. But this morning even the dawn was uncertain of its right to return. The first birds began to fly away when the first gray streak appeared on the horizon. Not all at once, but in waves, from the outer rings toward the center, the way a stone thrown into the water creates rings that spread from the center, but these spread in reverse, toward the outside, toward all the directions of the world. South first. Behind them east. Then west. Over the tower the sky cleared last.
When the sun rose. Cold, October, without heat, merely as a geometric fact. Over the stronghold lay an empty sky and dead water and a silence you could cut.
The tracks remained.
In the mud by the bank of Gopło, there where the silt met the hard ground, thousands of prints of small feet. Four toes, densely, in all directions, without any order, without any path leading anywhere. Something had come from the lake and stood and did not know how to leave, walking in circles until the earth recorded this helpless movement in its surface.
By every stake of the tower a line on the wood, dark and a hand's breadth wide, along every stake from the waterline upward, toward the first floor. A border distinct as a sign by the road. Like the handprint of someone who held on through the whole night.
The stone mortared into the base of the frame by the stronghold gate was warm the whole day. No one entered through the gate. No one touched it. Before sunset it cooled slowly, without drama, the same way the embers in the stove in the main hall cooled that same night. It simply cooled and was again a cold stone in the cold gate of an abandoned stronghold over a lake that fell silent.
The stronghold empty before sunset.
The reptiles returned to the water. The earth by the eastern wall of the ramparts closed over its fissure like a mouth over a secret, and only the silt slightly fresher at the bases of the stakes betrayed that something had been in this place and gone. The water by the tower stakes lay dark and without motion, the same as through the last months. But darker now, not from the coloring, but from the depth that became different this morning and will remain different through generations of fishermen's sons who will not know why they do not fish by the northern bank.
The ground beneath the stronghold kept silent.
Not the way it kept silent through the last months, with that active silence of the absence of something that should be there, the silence of a well without water, the silence of a hall after the man who left it forever. Differently. The way the earth keeps silent after a long winter when the snow has melted and the earth waits for the first warmth, ready, cleansed, with that peculiar tension of the ground that knows something new is to begin in it.
Someone who years later steps onto this embankment and lays a hand on the earth will take it into his flesh. Without a name for it. But the weight will remain.
And the ground will wait.
It will wait as long as necessary.