Aeroth's sky had changed.
Zara felt it before she saw it—something shifting in the very bones of the city, in the streets where shadows pooled unnaturally, in the wind that carried whispers of names no longer remembered.
She had undone the Circle's rewriting, fractured their grip on history itself. But the consequences were unraveling faster than she anticipated.
She wasn't just a threat now.
She was a beacon.
And something was answering.
Noel strode beside her, eyes sharp, scanning the ruins they traversed. The tower had collapsed behind them, but the echoes of its fall still trembled in the walls of nearby buildings. The scent of scorched parchment lingered in the air—memory wards burning, sigils bleeding their stolen truths into the wind.
"You feel it too, don't you?" he muttered.
Zara didn't answer. She didn't need to.
The streets had emptied. Not because the people had fled, but because something had already taken them.
She stopped walking.
Noel halted beside her.
Everything was silent.
Not the kind of silence that came after battle.
The kind that waited.
Then the wind shifted.
And the street changed.
It didn't blur, didn't dissolve like the glyphs in the tower. It warped—bending inward, curling like fabric being twisted around invisible hands. The cobblestones beneath them pulsed. Zara stepped back, pulse quickening.
"They've already started," she murmured.
Noel frowned. "Started what?"
The air split open.
A gaping wound of darkness carved itself into the road ahead, jagged at the edges, too unnatural to be mistaken for magic.
Not an illusion.
Not an attack.
A summoning.
Noel swore under his breath and pulled his blades free. Zara held her ground, dagger humming with latent energy. The wound deepened.
And then they emerged.
The Hollowed.
At first, they resembled nothing more than silhouettes—figures stretched too thin, their limbs flickering between forms like they couldn't decide on a shape. Their faces were missing, replaced by shifting voids where expressions should have been.
Zara knew them.
She had seen them in the Archive.
These were not living people.
These were erased people.
Fragments of those the Circle had successfully rewritten, emptied out and repurposed into something new.
A Hollow Warden stepped forward, its body flickering between bones and cloth, its hands twisted into jagged claws.
"They're here for the feast," Zara realized aloud.
Noel stiffened. "What feast?"
"Their own," she murmured. "They don't consume flesh. They consume existence."
The Hollow Warden moved first.
It didn't charge like an ordinary enemy. It bled forward—liquid darkness stretching unnaturally, closing the distance faster than physics allowed. Noel spun, parrying its jagged limbs, but his blades sliced through nothing. The creature didn't react—it simply kept moving, forcing him back.
Zara didn't hesitate.
She lunged.
The dagger flared in her grip as she struck, but the blade didn't meet resistance.
It met absence.
The Warden's body unraveled, shifting, reshaping around her strike. A whisper coiled through the air, low and hungry.
She had been right.
The Hollowed didn't eat flesh.
They consumed presence.
And they were starving.
The dagger trembled in her grip, responding to the unnatural creatures with something close to recognition.
It was time to change tactics.
Zara stepped back and inhaled deeply, feeling the resonance stir in her chest. The city was listening to her now—it had been since the tower.
She could feel it waiting.
The Hollowed advanced, their silhouettes flickering through the broken street, their hollow faces watching without eyes.
And Zara sang.
Not a melody.
Not a scream.
A command.
The resonance surged outward, slicing through the street like invisible fire. The Hollowed paused, their bodies trembling, their shifting limbs hesitating for the first time.
Zara knew now.
They had been erased.
Their identities had been consumed by the Circle.
But they were still echoes.
And echoes could be called back.
Her voice burned through them like memory reawakening, carving through the Hollowed like fire carving through paper.
Some twitched.
Others cracked.
One screamed.
Not in agony.
In recognition.
And then the street trembled.
Something stronger was coming.
Something older.
Zara turned her eyes toward the end of the road, where the wound in the air had deepened into something else.
A doorway.
And beyond it—
A voice.
Not the Hollowed.
Not the Circle.
Something waiting.
Something that remembered.
Something calling her name.
The Hollowed shuddered once.
Then, they bowed.
Noel exhaled sharply. "Zara."
She swallowed hard.
This wasn't victory.
This wasn't survival.
This was acknowledgment.
She had awakened something beyond Aeroth's ruined streets.
And now, it was watching.
***
Zara stood at the edge of the crumbling road, breath steady despite the unnatural pressure in the air. The Hollowed had bowed, but it wasn't submission. It was recognition.
Something else was coming.
The wound in the fabric of reality had widened—no longer a mere tear, but a gateway stretching into nothingness. From its depths, whispers spiraled into the wind, threading through the air like silk unraveling.
They weren't words.
They were memories.
Not hers.
Not Noel's.
The voices of Aeroth itself.
Zara swallowed, feeling her grip tighten around the dagger. The Hollowed remained motionless, their jagged forms flickering with fractured light, waiting for what came next.
And then, it stepped through.
At first, it looked like another Hollow Warden—its figure sculpted from shifting void, its movements smooth and deliberate. But it was different. Taller. Colder. More solid, yet somehow less real.
Unlike the Hollowed, its form did not flicker.
It was deliberate.
Shaped.
Chosen.
Noel tensed beside her, blades angled slightly, prepared to strike. But even he hesitated. The air around the being bent, reality curving inward with each slow step it took forward.
Zara knew instinctively that this was not a creature of blind hunger.
This one was here for her.
It stopped just beyond the fracture, the wound in the world still pulsing behind it like a dying star. The Hollowed remained bowed, unmoving, waiting for its command.
It watched her.
Or at least, she thought it did.
It had no eyes, no discernible features beyond the void-stretched semblance of a human form. But she felt its gaze like ice against her spine.
A voice spilled from its absence.
"You remember now."
It wasn't a question. It was a certainty.
Zara's breath hitched, the phantom echo of the Singing Grave still burning in her skull. The phonograph. The reflection of the crib. The fire.
She had reclaimed her past.
And now, something had come to claim her.
Noel shifted slightly, his voice low. "Zara, what is this?"
She didn't answer. She wasn't sure.
The being took another step forward. The Hollowed did not move.
"You were born for this," it continued, its voice layered with something deeper, something ancient. "The Circle tried to silence the scream, but it has never truly faded."
Zara steadied herself, lifting the dagger slightly. The weapon thrummed beneath her fingers, responding to the force before her.
"You are mistaken," she said. "I am no one's tool."
The figure tilted its head slightly, as if considering her words.
"That is what they told you. That is what they needed you to believe."
A pulse rippled through the air, the gateway behind the figure bleeding deeper shadows into the street. Noel muttered a curse, shifting his weight to prepare for whatever was about to happen.
Zara clenched her jaw. "I don't believe in fate."
The figure exhaled—though it had no lungs, no breath. The sound was a sigh formed from absence, stretching through the tension thickening in the air.
"You misunderstand, Echo-Bearer."
Its limbs flexed slightly, shifting as it lifted a single hand. The Hollowed trembled in response, their bodies flickering, shifting, consuming fragments of the world around them.
"You have already chosen."
The street cracked beneath its words.
The wound behind it deepened.
And then—
The Hollowed moved.
Not toward her.
Not toward Noel.
They turned inward, facing the void they had come from. Their bowed forms straightened, their broken silhouettes shifting, changing, bending into something new.
Shapes formed.
Faces she recognized.
No—faces she had tried to forget.
Her mother's eyes burned through the dark.
Her father's hands, stretched and ghostlike, reached toward nothing.
Echoes.
Not creatures.
Fragments of lost souls torn from the world, woven into the Hollowed's essence.
The truth hit her like cold iron.
These were the remnants of the erased.
The ones who had been rewritten so thoroughly that only pieces remained.
The being before her had not summoned monsters.
It had summoned memories.
Zara took a step back.
Noel cursed. "Zara, what—"
She couldn't speak.
She knew what was happening.
The Circle had stolen these lives, consumed their histories, reshaped them into tools.
But now, they were being offered back.
Her mother's gaze locked onto her, hollow yet familiar. The figure of her father remained still, hands trembling, waiting.
Zara's grip tightened around the dagger, breath sharp, thoughts racing.
She had spent years running from the past.
Now, the past was reaching for her.
"You will take them back," the void-being whispered.
It wasn't a request.
It was a prophecy.
The Hollowed stood frozen, waiting, watching. The air swelled with a silent pressure, expectation curling through the ruined street.
Zara could.
She knew she could.
She had reclaimed herself.
Now, she could reclaim the others.
But at what cost?
Her fingers twitched. The dagger pulsed. Noel exhaled sharply, realizing what was happening.
"Zara, don't."
She wasn't sure she could stop.
Her voice burned at the edges, her existence folding inward, the weight of every erased scream pressing against her ribs.
If she took them back, she wouldn't just be Zara Lune.
She would be every one of them.
She would be all the lost voices.
She would be the last of the erased.
Her mother's hand stretched toward her, fingers trembling, waiting.
Zara took a breath.
And chose.