ASHES BORN OF SILENCE
REVERBERATIONS IN THE HOLLOW
Riven
The first thing Riven felt was not pain—but a scream lodged in his throat that was not his own.
It came in pulses, like a heart trying to remember its rhythm after drowning. He staggered through the blackened expanse of the ruined ridgeline, ash grinding under his boots like powdered bone. His ears rang. His eyes bled light.
"—Elara—"
The name tore from his mouth, not as speech, but as a psychic convulsion. Her presence hit him like a storm buried beneath skin. She wasn't gone—but something in her had changed. She was distant, yet tethered. Soft, fragmented images danced behind his eyes, her hands bound in shadow, her breath shaking, her soul lit by something ancient and venomous.
The bond between them had never been stable. It was forged in desperate blood during the Trial of Descent, but now it burned unanchored, chaotic, refusing to be ignored.
Riven fell to one knee, his claws half-shifted, mouth filled with the taste of silver and sorrow. His shadow rippled unnaturally behind him, stretching in directions that defied sunlight.
"She's trying to block me… or something is."
His fingers dug into the scorched soil. Through his fractured link to her, he caught flashes—Aamon's voice, calm and serpentine; Elara's silence, coiled like a held breath. There were no walls in this tether anymore. Only wounds, raw and unraveling.
His scream finally came, primal and jagged, and it shattered the nearest dead tree into splinters.
Aeron Vale
Aeron did not awaken so much as return—and it was not to himself.
He stood in the ruin's heart, though his body remained collapsed near a cracked obelisk bearing Old Tongue glyphs. His mind floated within a vision, not induced by magic, but forced, dragged into memory by the cataclysm that had cracked the fabric of revenant fate.
Before him stood a forest of swords—countless, ancient, rusted into the soil of a dreamscape where light did not fall. Shapes stood among them—soldiers without flesh, cloaked in history's dust. And at the center:
A figure.
Tall. Shrouded. No eyes, no mouth. Only a mask carved from petrified ash.
"Do you remember your Oath, Forgotten Son?"
The voice was a chorus of all those Aeron had slain.
He tried to speak, but blood ran from his mouth. He wasn't here to talk.
The vision shifted—the sky cracked, and beyond it, something writhed.
The Revenant Oath: To bear the sins of time, to walk when memory rejects you, to remember what the world has chosen to forget.
"The Hollow stirs, Revenant. What you sealed now awakens. Your curse was never to guard the living... but to warn the dead."
Aeron's body jerked in the real world as the vision seared through him. When his eyes opened, they were black with starlight, and his shadow no longer matched his form.
Serah Vael
She gasped.
The air she dragged into her lungs was wrong—too thick, too hot, too full of voices. Serah's body convulsed as she sat up, her back arching like she'd been struck by lightning.
She remembered the light. The Vault. The seal Elara had shattered.
She remembered him. Aamon's voice. His presence.
But she had not died.
Serah touched her chest. Still whole. Her body glowed faintly, etched with glyphs she didn't recognize, like divine circuitry reborn through suffering.
"I am not dead because I was never meant to live," she whispered.
Then it came. Not pain. Not fear.
The source.
It flowed into her like a storm hidden beneath light—her divine matrix awakened, threads that had been dormant since her creation now thrumming like the chords of a forgotten celestial instrument.
She heard the song of her design.
She felt the presence that had once crafted her—divine, calculating, absent.
And then—
Something else answered.
Not the gods.
Not Aamon.
Something... beneath the Vault.
A breath. A tremor.
The Hollow did not only awaken Aamon.
It had gestated another.
Her eyes snapped open.
A shriek split the horizon.
New POV: The Hollowborn
The creature had no name. Not yet.
It rose from the crater of the Vault like a child forced through stone, a thing shaped from collapsing realities, bloodless but somehow alive.
It had no eyes. No skin. Only runes, scorched into the muscle of its shifting form. Every movement it made echoed like a prayer recited backward.
It was not Aamon.
But it was born of the same awakening.
Where Aamon was will, it was instinct.
Where he had intent, it had hunger.
Where he remembered godhood, it remembered nothing.
Only purpose: to consume the silence between all things.
Its first steps shattered the rock. Its howl carried no sound—but trees burst into flame at its passage.
Back to Serah – Communion
Serah stood, swaying, as the vision of the Hollowborn crawled across her divine sight. It was connected to the Vault—not by spell or blood, but by conceptual resonance.
A piece of the Hollow God that had never been sealed.
A piece that remembered pain without cause, hunger without name.
"I was not made to stop you," she whispered to it through the air, trembling.
"But I will."
A single feather of light flared behind her shoulder, burnt gold, then violet, then gone.
And the Vault ruins breathed.