The Hollow was not a place.
It was a wound.
A fracture in reality, stitched together by longing, grief, and things older than gods.
Sarah followed Ace through a field of their memories—half-real, half-rotted. The swing where they kissed for the first time. The woods where he first told her about the spiral. The hallway where she almost left.
Each place echoed with a distorted version of them.
Laughter stretched too long. Faces blurred. Eyes missing.
Ace walked ahead, but slower now.
Every step cost him something. A twitch in his fingers. A change in his voice. And the spiral burned brighter on his chest.
She ran to him. Grabbed his hand.
He looked down at their joined fingers like it hurt him.
"I don't remember how your voice sounds anymore," he whispered.
"You're hearing it now."
"I'm hearing something."
He pulled away.
And turned toward the spiral forming in the center of the sky.
It pulsed like a sun.
And beneath it—a door.
This one was different.
No stone. No seals.
Just light.
Pure, white, eternal.
Ace took a step toward it.
Sarah screamed.
"No! That's not the way home."
His back was to her.
"It's the only way I still feel anything," he said. "Everything else... it's leaving me."
She moved in front of him, blocking the path.
"If you walk through that, you won't just forget me—you'll forget yourself."
His gaze was glassy. But a tear fell down his cheek.
"What if that's kinder?"
Sarah reached up, took his face in her hands.
"No. You told me to close the door. You gave me that choice. Now I'm giving it back."
She kissed him.
And in that kiss, the Hollow shook.
The spiral dimmed.
The door behind them began to crack.
And the memory of rain turned to ash.
The Hollow screamed.
A voice—not Ace's—rose from the dirt.
"HE IS OURS. HE OPENED THE WAY."
Sarah stepped in front of him again.
"No," she said. "He remembered love. That means he's still human."
The sigil on her back flared once more.
And the Hollow began to burn.
They ran.
Through the door.
Through the field.
Through the memories collapsing behind them.
Each step took another piece of the place that had once held them captive.
They didn't stop until the stone sealed shut behind them, and the spiral on Ace's chest disappeared.
For good.
In the silence that followed, they lay side by side on the floor of the basement.
Ace stared at the ceiling.
"I feel empty," he whispered.
Sarah took his hand.
"No," she said. "You feel free."
He turned to her slowly.
"You came for me."
"Always."
They burned the sigils.
Every one.
They sealed the house. Salted the doors. Marked it for demolition.
No one would ever walk into that threshold again.
And the spiral—once a whisper in their bones—was nothing but memory.
Epilogue
One year later, Sarah and Ace sat on a hill outside the city, far from the house, far from the Hollow.
The sun set gently over the grass.
He turned to her, quiet.
"Do you think it's really over?"
She leaned her head against his shoulder.
"I think love is the only thing stronger than what waits in the dark."
And below the earth, deep where no door could reach—
The Hollow slept.
And kept nothing.
Except its silence.
THE END.