"Some places were built to protect something.Others were built to forget it ever existed."
The Hanging Spiral wasn't on the Interlogue map.
No structure.No terrain reading.No signal bounce.
Just a dead space—a gap in the Hollow where nothing had been recorded.
The tower stood like a fractured pillar jammed into the world's underside. Its outer walls pulsed with a dull red glow—soft at first glance, but too rhythmic to ignore. Not light.
Heartbeat.
It wasn't built like anything from before.Not Dracus.Not human.Not shrine.
It spiraled downward—not as floors stacked atop each other, but as one unbroken helix. A spinal coil stretching into the Hollow's lower edge. And hanging in the space between the spirals—
Corpses.
Hundreds.
Maybe thousands.
Floating in perfect stillness.
As if trapped in a gravity that didn't belong here.
Violet and I stood at the threshold for a long time.
Neither of us wanted to speak first.
She eventually broke the silence.
"Do you feel that?"
I nodded.
"This place is old. And it remembers."
We stepped inside.
The first thing I noticed was how quiet it was.
No ambient hum.
No Hollow moan.
Just our breath.
And theirs.
The floating bodies didn't drift randomly.They swayed together.Like underwater weeds pulled by a current of memory.
Some were still fresh.Others… not even flesh anymore.
All of them had faces.
And some of those faces…
I recognized.
The Spiral didn't have doors.
Each level was a landing—circular, enclosed by black iron rails, with small relics left behind on cracked pedestals. Items of no value.
A child's tooth.A half-shattered coin.A single shoe.A blood-soaked note with words I couldn't read.
Each object pulsed faintly.Each one whispered.
I don't remember the first fight.Only the way it ended.
One of the corpses hanging near the edge twitched as we passed.
Its hand flexed.
I moved in to sever it before it could rise—but I was too late.
It wasn't rising.
It was possessing.
A voice echoed from Violet's throat before she even opened her mouth.
"Did you really think she forgave you for not dying with her?"
I turned—
Her eyes were mine.
Her voice, my mother's.
I struck—not to kill, but to separate. Essence surged from my blade and shattered the link.
The corpse dropped.
So did Violet.
I caught her before her head cracked the floor.
She wasn't crying.
Just breathing hard.
"I didn't mean to say it."
"I know," I said.
But the Spiral did.
The Spiral knew every voice we'd buried.
Every floor was like that.
Not a battle.
A test.
Some demons we cut down.Some cut into us without a blade.
One floor made Violet scream for minutes without stopping.There was no enemy.
Just mirrors.
Another made me see Nyxia—not as she was, but as she might've become. Holding a child that looked like me.
She didn't speak.
She just offered her hand.
I didn't take it.
I couldn't.
We lost track of time.
I fought a version of myself with no eyes, wearing the torn robes of the void-struck.
Violet was chased by a thing made of song—disembodied voice and smoke shaped like her dead sister.
Neither of us broke.
But we cracked.
By the time we reached the bottom, we weren't the same people who entered.
Violet looked hollow.
Her blade dragged slightly behind her now.
Mine was chipped.My left hand wouldn't stop shaking.
There was no reward.
No artifact.
No guardian.
Just a doorless wall—a circle of black stone that waited to open once we stepped near.
I asked Violet if she was ready.
She didn't answer.
She just walked through.
I followed.
Because down here—
You don't get to hesitate.
You either keep moving.
Or you stay hanging.
The stone shimmered as we passed through it.
Not light. Not heat.More like remorse.
Like it hated letting us leave.
The corridor that followed was narrower than I expected—ribbed walls, damp with condensation that smelled like copper and burned herbs. My shoulder brushed the side once and it vibrated—a low hum, like I'd triggered a chord only the dead could hear.
Violet walked ahead of me now.
She hadn't spoken since the mirror floor.
Since she watched a reflection of herself slit her own throat and smile as she bled.
Her jaw was set.
Her breathing was calm.
But her soul was screaming.
I kept pace.
Because that's what you do when you're crawling through hell beside someone you care about.
You don't drag them forward.
You don't tell them it'll be alright.
You just walk the same pace.
So they're never alone—even when their mind starts tearing at the seams.
We passed through an arch made of fused jawbones, each one still lined with shattered teeth.A single glyph burned above it.
I didn't recognize the script.
Violet did.
"It says Remember us only when you're ready to forget yourself."
I didn't ask how she knew.
Some things don't need answers down here.
The final room was a sphere.
Perfect. Round. Wrong.
The walls were covered in skin-like fabric, stitched and stretched, pulsing with the slow beat of a dead heart refusing to quit. Hanging from the center—
A single body.
Rotating.
Spinning gently.
Its arms extended.
Its face obscured by a mask made of bone.
We circled it once.
Didn't touch it.
Didn't speak.
But I felt something the longer we stared.
Not fear.
Not curiosity.
Familiarity.
This wasn't an enemy.
This was… a vessel.
A container of what the Spiral couldn't digest.
A leftover piece of something too dangerous to consume, and too sacred to kill.
Violet whispered:
"Matte…"
"Yeah?"
"We're in its stomach."
"The Spiral?"
"No…"
She turned to look at me.
Her eyes weren't glowing. But they weren't the same, either.
"The Hollow.All of it."
I looked back at the body.
It didn't breathe.
It didn't twitch.
But the longer I stared, the more I saw—
It wasn't faceless.
It had mine.
And hers.
Both.
At once.
Swapping in and out of focus like echoes bleeding through time.
I don't remember leaving the room.
Only the way my boots sounded different on the stairs afterward—softer, like the floor was letting us go.
By the time we emerged from the final threshold, there was no celebration.
Just a hallway of silent faces carved into obsidian.
Eyes closed.
Each one we passed… opened.
Just a little.
As if they were counting us.
The exit was sealed by a spine-laced gate that opened at our approach.
Beyond it?
The edge.
The final stretch of The Hollow.
A crimson fog that pulsed with heat.Ruins crumbling over the horizon.And a sky that didn't know if it was night or dying daylight.
We stepped out.
No words.
Only the sound of wind.
And somewhere in the distance—
drums.