Kael woke to silence with weight.
No heartbeat in his ears.
No wind.
No Hunger.
Only the soft hush of snow falling upward.
He lay upon a bed of white moss glowing with faint blue light.
Above him stretched a sky of smooth, pale pearl—no sun, no moon,
just a gentle luminescence that came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
The Pale Serpent was gone.
In its place sat her.
The woman rested on a stone that had not existed a moment before,
legs crossed, chin in one hand,
watching him with brille-blue eyes that reflected nothing and everything.
Her presence pulled the light toward her, scattering it like soft shards of drifting glass.
"You're safe," she said.
Her voice was the sound snow makes when it forgives the ground.
Kael tried to rise.
SFX: KRRNNCH—
Every bone complained.
The wound in his abdomen had closed into a thin violet seam,
pulsing faintly like a sleeping second mouth.
"Where…?" His voice cracked the hush like a stone thrown into still water.
She tilted her head.
"Somewhere the empire's maps burned centuries ago," she said.
"We call it the Quiet Country.
My serpent calls it home."
She stood—robes whispering though there was no wind—and offered a hand.
Her fingers were cold, but not unkind.
"I am Lirien.
Last of the Horned Silence.
Keeper of things that should not speak.
And—"
a small, nearly shy smile touched her lips—
"—the one who sent the serpent to fetch you before the tyrant finished swallowing your name."
Kael took her hand.
The moment skin met skin—
SFX: WHUMMMM—FLASH—
memory flooded him.
Not his. Hers.
He saw the Pale Serpent coiled around a cradle of starlight.
Saw Lirien, younger, singing to something small and shadowed within it.
Saw the cradle crack.
Saw empire hunters gather with chains of burning scripture.
Saw Lirien tear open the sky and hide the cradle in the space between heartbeats.
He saw himself—age seven—
standing at the edge of the Wound,
feeding it his blood for the first time,
while a distant voice whispered through the dark:
I'm sorry.
I'll come back for you when you're ready.
The memory released him.
Kael staggered, throat raw.
"You knew," he rasped.
"All this time… you knew what I was."
Lirien's smile dimmed into something heavy and sad.
"I knew what you could become
if someone didn't steal you from the song they tried to force into your bones."
She stepped back, robes pooling like moonlight around her feet.
"Your friends are not dead," she said.
"They fell into the Hollow Beneath the World.
A graveyard for things too dangerous to kill."
Her voice lowered.
"Veyra is trying to murder her way through an army of her own reflections.
Seraphine is… negotiating with what's left of Queen Elyra inside her."
Light drifted along her antler-curved adornments, scattering into blue snow.
"They will live.
But they will not find their way out alone.
The Hollow releases only what it loves.
And it loves broken things very much."
Kael rose to his feet.
The violet seam across his abdomen throbbed once—
SFX: DUM—
then settled.
"I'm going after them."
"I know."
Lirien gestured.
The moss rippled, liquefying into a pool of starlight.
One step would take him anywhere the Quiet Country touched.
But her hand pressed to his chest—gentle, unmovable.
"First," she murmured, "a choice."
She opened her other hand.
A single black feather lay in her palm—
the one the child-shaped Wound had left beneath the capital.
It pulsed like a dying star.
"Take this," she said,
"and the Hunger returns. Stronger. Whole.
Enough to tear the Hollow open and drag your berserker and your witch out by force."
Her blue eyes held his.
"Or leave it…
and walk in without the Abyss inside you.
You'll be weaker.
You may fail.
But you'll be free of the leash Cassian tried to weld to your soul."
Snow drifted upward, patient.
Kael stared at the feather.
He remembered Alcris's melted circlet.
Veyra's blood on his hands.
Seraphine burning herself to keep a promise to a dead queen.
He closed Lirien's fingers over the feather.
"Burn it."
Lirien's smile flickered—ancient, proud.
"As you wish."
She crushed the feather.
SFX: FWOOM—
Black fire—silent and cold—consumed it instantly.
The violet seam across Kael's abdomen faded to silver.
And something inside him that had been screaming since the execution platform
finally—finally—
went quiet.
The pool of starlight widened into a door.
Beyond it: darkness that breathed.
Kael stepped toward it.
Lirien's voice followed, soft as snowfall.
"When you find them…
tell the berserker the serpent still owes her a fight.
Tell the witch the Horned Silence remembers her lullaby."
Kael paused at the threshold.
Looked back.
Lirien stood alone in the endless quiet,
light folding across her form like a closing dream.
"…Thank you," he whispered.
She pressed a finger to her lips.
Shhh.
The Quiet Country folded itself shut behind him.
And Kael Voss stepped into the Hollow Beneath the World—
carrying no Hunger,
no chains,
and, for the first time in his life,
only his own will.
Somewhere in the dark ahead,
a berserker roared with delighted fury
as another reflection of herself exploded into mist.
Somewhere deeper,
a witch sang a queen to sleep with a voice made of apologies.
And somewhere between them,
a broken shadow boy
began to run.