"Some places die and rot.The Hollow... it just keeps breathing."
I don't know how long we walked after we left the shrine.
Time wasn't real down here. Light didn't move. Shadows didn't shift. The only thing that told me we were still alive was the way Violet's footsteps crunched beside mine—slow, deliberate, and getting heavier the further we went.
She hadn't spoken in over an hour.
But I didn't blame her.
After what we faced in that thing's heart, silence felt more like armor than absence.
The Black Hollow felt different now. Not just hostile. Not just haunted.
Aware.
Like the shrine's death had left a vacuum, and now everything else in the Hollow was waiting to see what filled the space.
The ground here wasn't stone anymore. It had turned... fibrous. Dry, like ash-covered roots that twisted under our boots. Every few steps I felt something crack beneath me that didn't sound like bone.
It sounded like old skin.
We passed through a ravine split down the middle like a scar, jagged walls covered in veins that throbbed faintly when we got too close. Violet kept looking away, avoiding them.
I didn't.
I couldn't.
Because every vein we passed had a face.
Not real ones—more like impressions, shallow and stretched, caught mid-scream and pressed into the surface. Some looked like humans. Others… didn't.
Our first encounter after the shrine came fast.
I heard the chittering before I saw them.
They crawled out of a ruptured husk embedded in the hillside—insectile demons, long and thin, covered in cracked gray chitin, their eyes hollow sockets, and their mouths filled with spiraled teeth that spun like drills. They didn't attack immediately. They just circled.
Watching.
Violet tried to say something, but her voice caught. Instead, she raised her blade and moved like she didn't care if she lived through it.
I moved first.
My blade sang with essence—short, controlled bursts to conserve energy. I tore through the first three in a tight arc, but when they split open, they didn't bleed.
They screamed.
Not from their mouths—from their exposed organs, each one shaped like tiny faces mouthing the word "hunger."
We burned the husk after.
Didn't look back.
We found a bridge not long after—though "bridge" isn't the right word.
It was a spine, curled and hollowed out, stretching over a pit of black smoke. I don't know how deep it went. I dropped a rock into it and never heard it hit bottom.
Midway across, Violet stopped walking.
She stared down into the fog and whispered something I didn't catch.
When I asked, she said:
"It's whispering names I don't know… but they feel like mine."
She didn't say anything else for the rest of the crossing.
Neither did I.
We fought a second group near a collapsed shrine-tower.
These ones were flesh-hounds—four-legged creatures made of stitched muscle, no skin, their faces sewn shut, but still managing to bark in three tones.
There were seven of them.
I only remember five.
I don't know what happened to the other two.
I think they watched.
Violet and I didn't bother looking for their bodies afterward.
The Hollow didn't just exist down here.
It adapted.
Every path bent slightly toward the next wrong place. Like it wanted us to keep going. Like it was leading us somewhere it needed us to reach.
One night—if you could call it that—I woke up to find Violet standing just outside our camp. Eyes wide. Lips trembling.
She wasn't asleep.
Just lost.
She looked at me and said:
"The Hollow dreams in us when we're still."
I didn't sleep the next two cycles after that.
We found a corpse pinned to a wall two days later.
Still alive.
No lower body—just a twitching upper half, fused to the wall like a parasite.
It begged us not to kill it.
Not because it wanted to live.
Because it wanted to keep watching.
We didn't bury it.
There's no ground here soft enough for that.
By the time we reached the edge of the next major zone, I didn't recognize my own voice anymore.
I spoke less.
Thought more.
My blade moved on instinct. My essence reacted before I did.
The Hollow does that to you.
It prunes what doesn't kill.
We stopped at a ridge above a spiral tower—something massive and twisting downward into the crust like a screw punched through reality.
Below it: a lake of hovering corpses, each one frozen in null-gravity, swaying as if suspended in thought.
I knew that tower was the next step.
And I knew the Hollow wasn't done with us yet.
"If this place has a voice," Violet said, standing beside me at the cliff's edge,"it's been humming in my spine since we left that shrine."
I looked at her.
Her eyes were tired.
But they were still hers.
"We keep moving," I told her.
"Even if it wants us to stop."
There were days where I didn't remember what my voice sounded like.Violet didn't speak unless she had to.
And the Hollow? It never shut up.
It whispered in the cracks between our steps. Moaned from deep inside walls that didn't exist the day before. It grew structures overnight—twisted archways and fang-like towers that hadn't been there the cycle before. It wanted us disoriented. Off-rhythm.
Some nights, we passed other things moving through the dark.
We didn't engage.
They didn't either.
That terrified me more than the ones that attacked.
We crossed a grove of bleached tree carcasses once—white, spiraled things growing out of the ceiling, not the ground. Their branches never stopped twitching. No wind. Just tension.
Each one had a body hung upside-down from it. Wrapped in red silk.
Violet kept her eyes forward. But I saw her hand brush her dagger.
Instinct.
We didn't need to speak.
We knew if any of those bodies so much as twitched, they'd never stop chasing us.
There were hollows inside the Hollow too.Caves so black not even Essence could light them.
We passed one that made my nose bleed as soon as we got close.
Something inside it sighed.
Just once.
Like it knew me.
We didn't go in.
Sometimes, we didn't fight the demons.Sometimes, we walked right past them.
There was one we called The Listener.
A hunched, skeletal being standing in a crater of shattered masks.It never moved.But every time we passed it, we heard things.
Not voices.
Not screams.
Memories.
Ours.
Violet heard her father say her name.
I heard Nyxia.
I remember the third fleshpack that ambushed us—those wolf-things with exposed bone maws. One bit into my thigh and tried to drag me.
I stabbed it seventeen times before I stopped counting.
When I looked up, Violet was crouched over two more, breathing hard, her hands shaking.
She didn't cry.
She just muttered:
"They don't die fast enough."
I stopped measuring time.
I measured blood.
I measured how many steps it took before my legs felt like collapsing.
How long Violet could walk without looking behind her.
How long I could go without blinking—because blinking meant seeing them again in the backs of my eyelids.
The faces.
The shrine.
The eye.
We came across a statue one night.It looked like me.
Exactly like me.
But the eyes were Violet's.
Its hands were empty—open palms as if waiting to be filled.
Violet asked if we should destroy it.
I shook my head.
"It's not trying to trick us."
"Then what is it?"
"It's a warning."
I think the Hollow loves us.
Not in a way that's soft or warm.
In the way a wound loves what made it.
It remembers us now.
It whispers our names in every root we step on.
I don't think it wants to kill us anymore.
I think it wants us to stay.
We made camp just outside the spiral tower.
We didn't speak.
We just watched the floating corpses swirl slowly in the air beneath us, lit by no visible light source, caught in an endless dance like thoughts that couldn't be forgotten.
Violet sharpened her blade with her back to me.
I stitched the wound on my shoulder without flinching.
And somewhere, deep in the marrow of the Hollow, a drum began to beat.
Faint.
Steady.
Welcoming.
"We're getting close," I said.
Violet looked up, her voice dry.
"To what?"
I didn't answer.
Because I didn't know if it was The Underground...
...or the part of me that dies just before I'm born again.