We walked in silence.
The wasteland ahead was not dead — merely pretending. Cracked soil twitched when it thought we weren't looking. Trees with no bark groaned under the weight of invisible memories. Shadows stretched too far, too thin, like they remembered being something else.
Cerrik was the first to speak.
"Why are we even going this way?"
Íria didn't answer. Her gaze was fixed on the hills — or what once were hills. Now, they slouched like giants who'd forgotten how to stand.
I tightened my grip on the scythe. Its weight felt different here. Heavier. Almost… reluctant. As if even the weapon didn't want to be drawn in this place.
"The map said this path leads to Vestur Hollow," I finally said. "There might be answers there."
Cerrik scoffed. "Or more corpses."
He wasn't wrong.
We came across the first of them near dusk. Dozens of figures, crumpled on the ground like discarded paper. Not decomposed — just hollowed. Skin stretched tight, eyes still open, mouths frozen in the shape of their final scream. No blood. No wounds.
Just… absence.
"They weren't killed," Íria whispered. "They were emptied."
Cerrik knelt by one, muttering something in his tongue. He reached to close the eyes, but the moment he touched it, the corpse collapsed into dust.
Not ash.
Memory.
"What did this?" he asked.
I didn't know.
But I could hear it now — something wet dragging across stone. Something that clicked with hunger.
Behind us.
"They're not alone," Íria muttered, already drawing her twin knives.
From the cracks in the earth, they came.
The Hollowed.
Things made of flesh, but not life. Each moved like marionettes pulled by forgotten regrets. Their limbs were elongated, their faces featureless — save for the carved symbols of loss etched into their skin.
I didn't wait.
The scythe moved before I did, arcs of pale silver cutting through the dry air. The first Hollowed lunged, mouth wide with silence, and I struck — severing it at the neck.
No scream.
No resistance.
It simply deflated.
Another came, faster. Íria met it midair, blades slicing through its knees, then throat. The creature writhed like a broken sentence and fell still.
Cerrik fought beside us, his spear humming with heat. He moved with precision, stabbing into their chests, one after the other, even as more emerged from the shadows.
Dozens.
Then hundreds.
They crawled from beneath the sand, from cracks in the sky, from behind our own footsteps.
"Fall back!" Íria shouted.
But there was nowhere to fall back to.
Then I heard it — the sound beneath the sound. The chant.
It wasn't coming from the Hollowed. It came from the land itself.
A chant in a language I didn't know, but that knew me. It scraped against my skull like broken hymns. The words vibrated inside my bones:
> "The empty march. The empty feast.
Let meaning rot. Let vessels weep."
My vision blurred.
The Hollowed no longer attacked.
They bowed.
To something behind them.
A figure rose from the cracked earth — not formed, but rewound into existence.
A Hollow King.
He wore no crown, only a mask made of shattered mirrors. His hands were stitched to the pages of forgotten scriptures, and his ribs pulsed with the faces of those he had devoured. He moved like an echo that never ended.
Cerrik froze. Íria stumbled.
The air turned thin, brittle — like glass waiting to break.
He spoke.
But the voice wasn't his.
It was mine.
"Elías," it said, from within me. "You should not be here. Not yet. Not whole."
I couldn't breathe.
The Hollow King raised a hand, and the Hollowed began to march again — not toward us, but around us. In a circle. A ritual. A sealing.
The ground glowed with symbols older than any tongue.
"We have to stop this!" Íria shouted, stepping forward.
"No," I said. "We can't."
"But we—"
"We have to break it."
I plunged the scythe into the center of the glowing sigil. Light bled upward like a reverse wound, ripping through the spell. The Hollowed shrieked — a soundless cry. The Hollow King stumbled, his mask fracturing.
And just as quickly…
They were gone.
Dust.
Silence.
Darkness.
We stood in a field of stillness, the ritual broken, the monsters dissolved.
But something had changed.
I looked at my hand.
A new scar, shaped like a letter I didn't recognize, had burned itself into my skin.
A warning?
A promise?
I didn't know.
But I knew this:
We were being watched.
Not by gods.
Not by beasts.
But by the story itself.
And it was deciding.
---
Question for the reader:lf the path forward is a story already written… can the one who walks it still change its end?