There was no ascent. No bridge of fire. No staircase of brass. Only a blink — and then Joe stood at the peak of the world.
The summit was narrow, carved from obsidian so dark it reflected no light. Around it, a sky of void spun slowly, swirling with faint, golden spirals that looked like sleeping galaxies. Above him loomed a sphere — massive, cracked, hollow — suspended in the air like a shattered moon held together by will alone. It radiated silence.
Chains descended from the sphere's base. Some anchored into the summit. Others dangled freely, swaying in a wind Joe couldn't feel.
He wasn't alone.
Echoes stirred around the edge of the summit — not illusions, not memories, but versions of himself. Each one bore a piece of his past, his pain, his potential.
One knelt with a sword in his chest and blood on his hands.
One floated, eyes blind, mouth sewn shut with truth he had never dared speak.
One stood proud, cloaked in white flame, but his hands trembled.
Joe walked past them all.
None moved.
They were not here to fight.
They were here to witness.
In the center of the summit, resting atop a black pedestal of petrified bone, was a mask.
White. Smooth. Perfect.
And terrifying.
Joe approached it. The closer he came, the more the summit hummed — not with sound, but with memory. Every memory. Not just his. Thousands. Millions. It was the weight of stories that had reached this place and failed.
A voice rose from the cracked sphere.
Not loud. Not cruel.
Just empty.
"Welcome, Veilborn. You stand at the threshold of permanence. The summit of becoming."
Joe's breath caught.
"I'm not becoming anything," he said. "Not anymore."
"All things become. Even starlight dies to become dust."
The echoes of himself watched silently. Their eyes glowed faintly with different colors — gold, red, blue, silver. Each one represented a path. A choice.
Joe stepped to the mask.
It bore no features. Just a blank surface. He reached toward it—
—and flinched.
Memories flooded his mind.
Of how easy it would be to hide again. To become what people expected. To be the savior, the villain, the martyr. All he had to do was wear the mask.
The voice spoke again.
"This is the face the world will remember. Choose it. Etch it. Wear it."
Joe lowered his hand.
"I didn't come here to be remembered."
"Then why come at all?"
He looked to his palm. The seven eyes were still shut, resting.
"I came to stop forgetting."
He turned away from the mask.
And the summit changed.
The ground cracked. The echoes vanished. The cracked sphere above trembled.
A new presence emerged from the shadows — not a voice this time, but a figure. Featureless, tall, robed in ash and veiled in wind. Its face was a window — and through it, Joe saw himself: frightened, fragile, five years old and hiding in a closet while his house burned.
He froze.
"You're not the Hollow," he whispered.
The figure tilted its head.
"No," it answered, in the voice of his sister. "I'm what you buried."
Joe stepped back. Pain coiled in his throat.
"I can't fight you."
"You already did. You just never stopped."
The figure took another step forward.
Each step echoed with a memory: The first time he stole to eat. The night he begged the sky not to let her die. The moment he realized no one was coming to save him.
"You carry me," it said. "You built this path from me. You earned your power through me. I am your foundation."
Joe clenched his fists.
"I'm tired of building from pain."
"Then build from me. Don't run from it."
The wind roared suddenly, pulling debris from the summit. The mask shattered without being touched. The echoes reappeared — only now they were different.
Not broken. Not distorted.
Whole.
One stepped forward. Joe recognized it instantly. It was who he would have been had nothing ever gone wrong. A boy full of light and no understanding. A version of himself who never had to fight.
Joe nodded.
Then turned away.
He walked to the edge of the summit.
The Hollow sphere opened.
Inside, stars burned like embers in a dying fire. The chains that held the summit began to unravel, lifting the platform slowly toward the sphere. Toward whatever lay beyond.
Joe breathed deeply.
No words were offered.
No test announced.
Only space.
He turned one final time to the echoes of himself.
Some smiled.
Some wept.
Some simply watched.
He whispered, "Thank you."
Then faced the opening above.
And leapt.
He fell through nothing — and everything.
Through flame, through time, through memory.
The Hollow did not consume him.
It unfolded.
Layer by layer, it revealed truths too vast for language: what the Spiral had once been before it shattered; what the Warden had once protected; what the flame in his chest meant.
The world he had come from had never been whole.
He wasn't here to change it.
He was here to finish it.
Joe landed on a glass plain.
Beneath his feet: stars.
Above him: an anvil.
A forge of silence.
A blade resting in air.
Waiting for his hand.
He walked toward it slowly.
The pain in his chest subsided, replaced by a warmth he had only felt once before — the day his sister had told him, "It's okay to break. Just don't forget how to build."
He reached the blade.
It was not sharp.
It was right.
It fit his grip perfectly.
And when he lifted it, it did not glow.
It remembered.
The final image of the Hollow Summit was not of a battle. Not of glory.
It was of a boy-turned-man, standing beneath a broken sky, blade in hand.
Not to fight.
To forge.
To wake what had always been asleep.
End of Chapter 15: The Hollow Summit