The door sealed behind him with the soft, irrevocable thunk of a coffin lid sliding shut.
Kael stepped into nothing—
and kept stepping.
There was no up.
No down.
Only the slow, patient breathing of a place that had learned how to digest entire histories.
The Hollow Beneath the World.
It looked like the inside of a scream caught mid-birth.
Shattered realities drifted around him like wounded stars:
—An upside-down cathedral burning upward, fire falling like rain.
—A battlefield where every corpse was still swinging its weapon, locked in eternal recoil.
—A child's bedroom peeling itself open, wallpaper curling back to reveal rows of tiny, perfect teeth.
Every shard whispered his name.
Each voice almost familiar, almost intimate, almost his.
Kael kept walking.
The silver scar across his abdomen—the grave where his Hunger once lived—burned cold with every step.
Cold, but steady.
Real.
His.
He had no shadows now.
No wings.
No abyssal storm curled beneath his ribs.
Just a body full of old scars
and a promise he refused to break.
Somewhere in this graveyard of erased truths,
Veyra was laughing while she murdered herself a thousand times in a thousand mirrors.
Seraphine was singing a dead queen to sleep with apologies that tasted like burning memories.
He would find them.
Even if the Hollow loved him too much to let him go.
Even if it tried to keep him as its newest favorite ruin.
A shard drifted toward him.
A mirror the size of a doorway.
Its surface rippled like black water trying to remember how to drown.
Kael's reflection stared back.
But the reflection still had violet eyes.
Still had shadow wings.
Still had the Hunger swirling behind its smile.
It tilted its head.
Then it smiled with his mouth.
"Hello, empty thing," it said in his voice—
but deeper, hungrier.
"Looking for pieces you threw away?"
Kael didn't break stride.
The reflection followed, step for step, like a perfect insult.
"You'll never drag them out without me," it whispered.
"You're just meat now.
Weak.
Mortal."
Kael's scarred fingers curled once.
"I've always been meat," he said, voice low and steady.
"I just stopped pretending the monster made me special."
The reflection's smile cracked—hairline thin, but there.
Behind it, something vast shifted in the dark between shards.
A shape built from every scream the Hollow had ever eaten.
It opened eyes that were not eyes.
And looked at Kael the way a starving man looks at bread someone swears is poisoned.
Kael stared right back.
"I'm here for my berserker and my witch," he said.
"Give them back."
A heartbeat.
A silence.
"Or I'll walk until I find them—
and I'll burn every piece of you that tries to keep them."
The Hollow laughed.
A sound like a thousand coffins slamming open.
Then it leaned close, the dark curving around him like a mouth,
and whispered his name—
soft, intimate,
the way a lover whispers it
right before sliding the knife in.
Kael smiled.
Not a kind smile.
Not a sane one.
A smile carved from a man who had already lost everything,
and discovered that losing it a second time
meant there was nothing left to fear.
He stepped forward.
The Hollow rippled.
Shuddered.
And for the first time in ten thousand years,
something deep inside it felt the first cold, unfamiliar touch
of fear.