Hollow's Reach was a place of death wrapped in half-forgotten history. Its cobblestone streets were slick with the remnants of rain, but also with blood. Years of violence—civil wars that crumbled nations, rebellions that crushed entire families, and forgotten pacts that tore apart the fabric of the land. In Hollow's Reach, the past didn't just fade; it bled into the present.
It was a place where you could die in a gutter and no one would notice for days. Where you could become a nobody, a faceless existence lost to the world.
Ash hated it. But he hated what it represented even more—his powerlessness. Everyone else had a place. Everyone else had a name. Even the most broken among them carried it like a shield. A piece of themselves. But he?
He had nothing.
The Forgotten Tower loomed in the distance. A jagged silhouette against the gray sky, its towering spires reaching out like the fingers of a dead god.
Getting inside wasn't easy. The Tower had long since been locked away, its entrance hidden in plain sight. The ruling families claimed it as theirs, and though no one really believed they still held dominion over it, no one dared trespass either.
Ash did.
Through alleys coated in dust, beneath the crackling whispers of forgotten souls, he slipped past the guards—silent, invisible, a wisp in the wind. His feet barely touched the ground as he wove through broken doorways and past rotting wood. He was familiar with the city's underbelly. He had to be.
As he approached the base of the Tower, a sudden gust of wind swept through the narrow streets. The faint, creeping sensation of being watched pulled at his senses.
The cage.
It was there.
He found it almost by accident.
An abandoned hall in the depths of the Tower, hidden from prying eyes, guarded only by the faintest remnants of an old spell. His hands trembled as they traced the bars of the thing that sat in the center of the room.
It wasn't metal—not really. The cage was alive. Breathing.
Ash touched the bars.
A ripple of heat surged through his fingertips. The floor beneath him shook. And then, there was a voice. No, not a voice—a presence—that surged into his mind, old and eternal, as though it had been waiting for him, for centuries, for eternities.
"You are empty." The voice echoed inside his skull. "Perfect."
The thing inside the cage didn't speak in words, but in concepts. In ideas that twisted his mind. Power. Truth. Absence.
Its eyes—if they could be called eyes—opened. Blinding. Empty.
"Step away," it said. "Forget this ever happened."
Ash didn't understand. He couldn't. He wasn't supposed to understand.
But he did the one thing he knew how to do in this world:
He reached out.
He touched.
The world went white.