"Some things don't chase you to kill you.They chase you to remember what you are."
The Hollow had gone quiet.
Not the usual quiet—the eerie hum of shifting miasma and distant chittering long faded.
This was deeper.
Thicker.
Like the world had inhaled and refused to exhale.
Matte stopped walking.
His boots ground softly against the ash-coated floor as he raised a hand, instinct burning cold through his veins.
Violet halted behind him, sensing it too.
There was something ahead.
Not movement. Not noise. Just… wrongness.
The Interlogue in her hand blinked once.Twice.Then dimmed entirely.
A failsafe. A survival reaction.
Even the tech was afraid.
They crested the next ridge, where a fractured trench of obsidian ran like a wound through the Hollow, and that's when they saw it.
The amalgamation.
It stood maybe thirty meters away—partially shrouded in fog, yet massive enough to block out the shimmer of the Hollow's false sky. Its body was an impossible tangle of bone, flesh, and ancient machinery fused into a twisted, living monument. Multiple spines jutted from its back, arching upward like broken wings. Its face—if it had one—was a writhing mass of shifting maws, teeth grinding in rhythmic pulses like a chant.
And it wasn't breathing.
It was listening.
Waiting.
Matte turned to Violet to signal retreat—but froze.
She wasn't moving.
Her eyes were locked wide. Her limbs stiff. Her entire body shook, not in a tremble, but in a numb seizure of terror.
He saw her jaw unhinge slightly.
The scream building.
He moved fast.
His hand clamped over her mouth just before it escaped, dragging her back behind a fallen steel beam with a speed he didn't know he had.
She writhed for half a second, pure instinct.
Then she saw his eyes.
And stopped.
The creature twitched.
A slow, gliding shift of its upper body—no steps, no friction, just presence.
Its maw rotated—revealing one single eye embedded within the meat of its torso.
It blinked sideways.
Then turned directly toward them.
Matte whispered against her ear. "Don't move."
Violet's breath hitched hard against his palm.
They stayed frozen for what felt like minutes—until the amalgamation screamed.
It wasn't sound. It was a pressure wave. A pulse that bent the air and shattered the bones of a nearby statue.
Then it moved.
Fast.
Matte grabbed Violet and ran.
No plan. No direction. Just movement.
The Hollow reacted violently—the ground shifting beneath them, walls forming and dissolving as they sprinted past burning glyphs, twitching corpses, and cracked pylons.
The creature didn't roar.
It followed.
Like it already knew where they were going.
They doubled back across The Choir Bridge—mouths howling now, the sound echoing behind them as the amalgamation warped space around its steps. Violet stumbled once. Matte caught her, slamming his shoulder into a wall as they careened toward the only place he could think of—
The hatch.
He reached it, ripped it open, and shoved Violet inside first. She didn't hesitate.
He followed.
Slammed it shut.
Locked the seal.
Darkness.
Only breath.
And the faint sound of the creature stopping above them.
Not retreating.
Just waiting.
They began to descend.
The hatch hadn't ended. The stairs coiled downward in impossible spirals, stone giving way to obsidian, obsidian to something… older.
Symbols etched into the walls began to glow. Not Essence. Not NULL.
Something else.
Something buried.
The air grew damp. The stone walls widened.
And then—
They stepped into a massive, hollowed void.
The ceiling arched into infinity.
And before them stood a submerged colossus—a pyramid structure half-sunken into black fluid, its walls carved with demonic visages and glyphs from a forgotten tongue.
Chained statues lined the pathway—not decorative, but actual bodies turned to stone, still locked in torment.
Violet's voice barely rose above a whisper.
"…What is this place?"
Matte stared ahead, his voice calm—but distant.
"A shrine. Older than the Hollow. Older than the Dracus."
His eyes narrowed.
"We just walked into something no one was ever meant to survive."
Matte stepped forward slowly, each footfall echoing into the vast silence. The black fluid at the shrine's base rippled slightly as he approached, reflecting the structure like a broken mirror.
It wasn't water.
It was too thick, too still.
Blood, maybe.
Or something worse.
Violet followed, her steps hesitant, her eyes scanning the walls and chained corpses surrounding the walkway. Each statue had a different expression—some screaming, some silent, others whispering with mouths sealed shut.
"This wasn't built for worship," she murmured.
Matte's voice came back like stone scraping steel. "It was built for containment."
They crossed a narrow bridge carved from fused bone and obsidian, leading to the shrine's sunken entrance—a jagged archway flanked by two towering humanoid figures, their bodies covered in runes that squirmed faintly in the torchless dark.
No torches.
And yet, the walls pulsed with dull red light.
The shrine was alive.
And it recognized them.
Inside, the air was colder, but not in temperature—in weight. Violet pressed a hand to her chest as if something was squeezing her lungs.
"Feels like breathing in regret," she whispered.
Matte didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on the carvings running along the corridor—images older than anything preserved on the surface. Beings with curved horns, wings of broken steel, faces split into thirds, each with a different emotion. The story carved here wasn't linear.
It was ritualistic.
Circles of summoning.
Mouths of sacrifice.
And at the center of every sequence…
A black sun.
Swallowed by hands.
They reached a chamber that spiraled downward, the floor covered in a layer of dark dust.
Symbols were etched into the stone beneath it, half-covered, but still humming with faint, hungry power.
Violet crouched near one and brushed her glove across the sigil. "This one's... human."
Matte raised a brow. "How do you know?"
"Because the name is in our tongue."
She stepped aside.
Carved at the base of the symbol, beneath the demonic markings:
"Althera Lune – First to Fall. One of Twelve."
Matte's eyes darkened. "Twelve what?"
Violet looked at him, then at the rest of the chamber—at the eleven other empty circles along the wall, still glowing faintly.
"Twelve shrines," she whispered. "Twelve sacrifices."
She looked back toward the entrance. "This isn't a temple. It's a graveyard for gods."
A low creaking sound echoed through the shrine.
Not from the walls.
Not from above.
From below.
Matte stepped back, hand on his blade.
The black fluid at the shrine's base… shifted.
A long ripple formed across its surface, like something massive had stirred beneath it. Violet moved to his side immediately.
"Tell me we didn't just wake something up."
Matte's jaw clenched. "I don't think it ever slept."
The shrine pulsed.
The statues groaned in their chains.
One of the sealed doors at the far end of the chamber cracked open an inch, revealing nothing but pitch black beyond.
Matte looked at Violet.
"Stay close. We move fast, we stay quiet, and we don't touch anything else."
"Agreed."
They turned back toward the exit.
And from somewhere deep beneath their feet… a voice whispered.
Not aloud.
Inside them.
"The Hollow is just the skin.This is the bone."