Chapter One – The Fifth Day

  The sky had not changed for days—taut and low, swollen with unshed storm. It stretched grey and unmoving above the edge of Amberhollow’s eastern cornfields, where the stalks bowed dry and brown, whispering with brittle tongues. The wind had long since died. Even the birds had fled.

  A procession of grim-faced figures cut a path through the crops, each cloaked in robes the color of ash. At their center walked a prisoner—tall, unbound by struggle, yet shackled by chains forged of bronze and warded iron. They clinked and rattled with every step, not heavy enough to contain him, only enough to mark his presence.

  He walked barefoot, his feet stained crimson. His hands were soaked to the wrist, not from any fresh bleeding, but from something older. Deeper. Permanent. The red had long since become part of his skin, seeped into the calluses and cracks like ink into parchment.

  But it was not the blood that unsettled those who watched from behind the crops. It was the runes.

  His skin—once fair in the way of high elven blood—was now veiled in black ink, intricate glyphs etched from neck to ankle. They crawled, ever shifting across his flesh, like living chains beneath the skin. No two symbols remained the same for more than a moment, the patterns flickering like candlelight seen through water. They whispered, those runes. Even to the deaf.

  This was The Hollowed One.

  And he did not resist as they brought him to the post.

  A crude wooden cross stood at the center of the blighted clearing, its limbs splintered and stained, older than memory. No name was carved into its grain, no title, no prayer. It was not a place of forgiveness. It was a warning. A scarecrow's throne for the soulless.

  At its base stood a broad-shouldered man wrapped in storm-stained leather—Pevrit Thorn, last Grand Warder of the Hollowfront, and the one who had torn this creature from the shadows where it had reigned.

  His gaze never left the prisoner. He spoke just two words:

  “Bind him.”

  Warder-thralls obeyed. They drove iron hooks into the post and fastened the elf’s wrists with spiked cuffs, arms stretched wide, the blood already beading where flesh met ward-metal. His ankles were locked into a cradle of ironroot bramble at the base. His skin glistened where the runes convulsed and swam, as though trying to flee the wards closing in.

  And then, they took the hood.

  To any untrained eye, it might have been mistaken for a simple burlap sack. But it was heavier—stitched from dense woven silk, dyed the hue of dried bone and laced with threads of true silver, their patterns forming a net of binding glyphs, sigils, and silence.

  Two handlers moved to his sides. Without a word, they pulled the hood over the Hollowed One’s head, and the moment it touched his skin, the air around them seemed to thicken. The whispering stopped. Even the cursed runes paused in their motion, as if the bag itself suppressed their unnatural life.

  A hush fell. Thorn stepped forward, parchment in hand, his voice carrying like judgment carved in stone.

  “By decree of the Unified Divine Circle, under the witness of fire, field, and forgotten gods—you are condemned. You who fed hunger into the roots of the world. You who bartered souls for silence. You who hollowed your own heart to house a darker god.”

  He let the scroll drop and took a long breath.

  “You will hang here, under heaven’s gaze, until you are dead. And when the wind forgets your name, your soul will be dragged screaming into the black. There will be no grave. No legacy. You are the ash before fire.”

  But behind the veil of silver-threaded silk, the Hollowed One began to hum.

  A child’s melody. Sweet and strange. Words followed, his voice muffled yet unnervingly clear.

  “FIVE days upon the stalk, I swing and GRIN and never talk—

  The fields will bloom with BROKEN kin, my bones shall birth the dark WITHIN—

  Cut me down, I’ll BURN the sky, sow my teeth where dreamers lie—

  Raise no wards and shed no light, for I’ll return again at night…”

  Then came the laughter. Dry as dead corn. Quiet as rot.

  And from the north edge of the clearing, the wind began to turn—curling back into the field like it had forgotten its own direction.

  Something had shifted.

  And far beneath the soil, the roots began to twitch.

  The wind did not stop.

  It reversed.

  A subtle shift at first—barely a flutter—but the watchers nearest the post noticed it. Their cloaks pressed oddly against their legs, not away. The banner of the Academy, raised high above the gathered crowd, twitched once like a flinching nerve and sagged backwards, pulled toward the corn.

  With it came a smell.

  Not death. Not rot. Not the clean stink of blood.

  Something older.

  It crept low to the ground, riding the earth itself like a miasma. It smelled of scorched parchment soaked in bile—of dried roses sealed inside crypts, their sweetness long since turned sour. Of rusted iron, bruised fruit, and old teeth left to dry in a jar. It clogged the throat, curling behind the tongue, as though something inside the body remembered it.

  One of the record-keepers, a halfling woman in slate-gray robes, gagged softly and turned away. Another—a tall, trembling scribe with a ruined hand—clutched his nose and whispered prayers to ward against possession. His breath fogged unnaturally in the air, though the day was not cold.

  And still, the figure at the post swayed gently beneath the silk-stitched hood.

  Around him, the corn had begun to bow.

  Not just to lean—but to curl inward, like fingers. The stalks drooped in time with something unseen, their leaves brushing each other in soft percussion. A rhythm. A murmur.

  A voice without sound.

  Warder Thorn did not blink. His silver-threaded mantle, heavy with sigils, rustled against his shoulders as he turned slowly to face the crowd—watchers, dignitaries, soldiers from distant baronies. Even the Grand Scholars had grown pale, their brass rings clicking against each other like insect shells.

  “Leave this place,” Thorn said, his voice steady despite the crawling air. “No eyes shall mark him. No prayers shall be spoken. Let the field be forgotten.”

  So was born the first Law of the Hollowfront.

  Do not speak his name.

  Do not walk the eastern fields.

  But even as they left, the smell remained.

  It clung to their boots. Their cloaks. Their teeth. A memory with roots.

  And far above, the sky dimmed—but no clouds moved.

  The curse had heard them.

  And it had begun to listen back.

  The first night fell like a spell spoken in reverse—sudden, wrong, and heavy.

  There was no twilight to mark the day’s end. No ceremony in the sky. One moment the clouds still clung to dusk like a mourner’s shawl, and the next—black. Not the black of night, but of wet stone, of extinguished flame.

  The cornfield fell silent.

  No birds. No crickets. Not even the hiss of wind through the stalks.

  He hung exposed beneath the post, stripped bare of dignity, of name, of everything but the hood pulled taut over his head—a bag woven of thick, silver-threaded silk, buzzing faintly with warding glyphs. Sweat clung to his skin in a cold sheen. The shifting runes etched into his flesh glowed faintly, their motion slowing in the absence of light. His hands and feet, still red-stained from blood both ancient and fresh, sagged with the weight of gravity and iron.

  Then the corn began to part.

  No footsteps. No breath. Just the sound of old stalks bending. Wilting. Rotting.

  Out of the field slithered something unseen, unseen yet felt—as though gravity leaned toward it, as though air itself retreated in its presence. The husks of the corn blackened in its wake, curling inward like fingers. Mold unfurled along the leaves, spreading wet and fast, drinking color from everything it touched.

  Then it spoke.

  “You burn slow, ember,” it whispered—not in his ears, but in the bone behind them. “You’ve made a cage of flesh and oath, but the lock is weak.”

  The Hollowed One said nothing. His fingers twitched where they were pinned.

  “You called me once. Do you not remember?” the thing purred. “You begged. You screamed. I came, little wretch. I gave. And I will give again.”

  The voice pulsed nearer, though no footfall ever touched the soil.

  “Break the Veil. Sever the thread. Unmoor your name from stitching the world, and be mine.”

  He raised his chin within the silk. The runes across his neck flared bright like embers stirred by breath.

  “No,” he hissed, voice muffled but steady. “I will not belong to anything. Not even you.”

  A long silence.

  Then—

  A sudden, violent wail—a sound like the world cracking open beneath a black sea. The thing recoiled, snarling as it withdrew, and the corn screamed with it. The rot fanned wider, a stain across the soil, corrupting every blade it brushed.

  And then it was gone.

  Leaving him again beneath the scarecrow’s post, naked and blood-streaked, the silk hood still humming.

  Alone with the promise that he would not remain so.

  Dawn did not break. It oozed.

  A sickly light crept over the field, thick as spoiled milk. Fog rose in languid coils, clutching at the post like something hungry. The ground beneath him had turned to muck, the earth soured by the rot that crawled out the night before.

  He did not sleep.

  He only whispered.

  The words did not belong to any known tongue anymore—some lost dialect buried beneath centuries of dust and bone. They cracked from his lips like brittle stone, the silver silk of the hood now stiff with dried sweat and blood.

  Then came the ravens.

  One at first, settling on the post above his head. Studying him.

  Then two. Then five. Then eleven.

  They circled lazily overhead before descending, talons scraping the wood, beady eyes reflecting silver as they landed on the crossbeam.

  The first beak pierced his shoulder.

  He screamed.

  The second went for the soft skin at his ribs.

  He thrashed. Kicked. He spat muffled curses through the hood, but the ravens did not fear him. They stripped bits of flesh from his stomach. One clung to his thigh and tore loose a ribbon of skin that flapped in the wind.

  By midday, his chest was a patchwork of blood and bruise.

  By sunset, they had gnawed down to tendon.

  Still, he breathed.

  Still, he whispered.

  As the last raven flew off—its belly swollen with meat—the corn began to rustle once more.

  Darkness returned not with silence, but with laughter.

  It slithered from the corn like a wound reopened. No longer seeking permission. No longer offering.

  The black god had returned.

  “I warned you,” it said. “Pain is the soil. You will bloom.”

  He did not speak.

  The silk hood turned slowly, blindly, toward the sound. The runes on his body now pulsed in time with something deeper than his heart.

  “You could have been a king,” it hissed, “but you’ll die a heretic.”

  The Hollowed One only chuckled, even as blood ran in rivulets down his sides.

  “I am already myth,” he rasped. “I do not need your leash to become legend.”

  And again, the darkness shrieked—a howling void that cracked bark from nearby trees and sent birds reeling from the skies.

  The corn blackened all the way to the tree line.

  The rot was now irreversible.

  Even the soil seemed to recoil.

  And still he whispered—chanting beneath his breath, lips cracked and bleeding through the silk. A nursery rhyme, twisted by time and intent, now spoken as liturgy:

  “Five days I’ll twist and turn,

  Five screams and none shall learn.

  Five times I’ll burn and break—

  Then Five nights, the world will wake.”

  On the third day, the flies came.

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  They followed the scent of rot and old blood, a perfume of death that clung to the scarecrow post like a shroud. It seeped into the roots of the cornfield, saturating the soil with the perfume of decay. What the ravens had not taken, the flies now came to claim.

  At first, they gathered in scattered clusters. A few landed at the corners of his cracked lips, another flitted across his open wounds like a feather on fire. He twitched at the sensation—not from fear, but from the unrelenting irritation. The silk-hooded ward over his head trapped the heat, the stench, and the buzzing in a suffocating echo.

  By midday, the swarm arrived.

  The sky darkened—not from cloud, but from wings. Thousands of them. They poured in from the edges of the forest, the stalks of dying corn, the broken husks of the field’s forgotten scarecrows. They moved as a single mass of hunger, descending upon him like smoke with teeth.

  They did not bite first. They explored.

  Their tiny legs skittered across his skin, tickling the torn muscle along his arms, probing into the hollow gaps left by the ravens. The feted elf thrashed weakly against the post; A low snarl bubbled up through his dry throat.

  Then they began to feed.

  They moved in rivers across his chest and neck, funneled into his ears, under the hood, past the silver-threaded silk and into the folds of what was left of his mouth. His flesh vibrated beneath their touch. Their teeth, so small they could not be seen, tore slivers of him away one grain at a time. The pain was so constant it no longer spiked—it simmered.

  Then came the laying.

  He felt it—not just on the surface, but beneath. Within. The wet, alien sensation of things seeding into his muscle. They implanted their young, hundreds at a time. In the soft shredded muscle of his calves, behind his ribs, beneath the folds of his armpits. Each one pulsing, twitching, like a second heartbeat that did not belong to him.

  His body was no longer his. It was a hive. A rotting altar and still, he endured.

  The sun sank low and took the warmth with it. The flies, relentless during the day, became sluggish in the chill—but they did not leave. They clung to his flesh like a burial shroud. The weight of them pressed his head forward, bent his knees, coated him in a living second skin of buzzing black.

  It was then, as nightfall swallowed the cornfield again, that it returned.

  The darkness, thicker than shadow, rippled through the rows. No footsteps. No words this time. Just the feeling—the presence—of something ancient and wrong slithering between the stalks.

  The corn bowed in its wake, the yellow stalks curling black. The flies froze, their wings silenced by fear not learned, but remembered. They knew. Even insects knew.

  “You suffer well,” the voice said from somewhere just beyond sight.

  The Hollowed One raised his head—barely. His muscles trembled with the effort. His skin cracked under the movement, flaking off like burnt paper. His lips split, dry and hollowed, but he did not speak. His face remained hidden beneath the warded hood, but his senses were sharp, still capable of hearing the familiar hissing voice.

  “You were meant to fall sooner,” the thing hissed. “Even the dead do not hold out this long.”

  The corn rustled unnaturally. Not with wind, but with something crawling.

  “You do not need to be alone. Let me in. Let me make you more. I can burn away the pain. Make you clean. Make you pure.”

  The Hollowed One coughed once beneath the hood, a wet sound lined with bile and blood. Maggots dropped from his nose and slid down his chin, wriggling as they fell. Still, he did not yield.

  The thing’s voice grew colder. Hungrier.

  “You will beg before it is over. You will claw at your soul and wish you had taken my hand.”

  From within the warded hood, he whispered something. Not a plea. Not surrender.

  “No gods. No masters.”

  The darkness reared. It shrieked not in sound, but in atmosphere—a rupture in reality, a tear in the breath of the world. Then, without another word, it retreated.

  The stalks where it passed were left black and cracked. The flies did not move again until the cold faded.

  And the Hollowed One remained—silent, buried in agony, rotting, alive.

  Waiting.

  The next day was silent.

  The air felt heavy—unnaturally still. The cold that followed the departure of the darkness pressed close to the earth, seeping into the very bones of the Hollowed One. He could feel the weight of it, the absence of the thing that had tormented him for so long. The whispers, the cold promise of release, had vanished, leaving only the buzz of dying flies and the remnants of his suffering.

  The field stretched out before him, empty except for the broken corn and the wreckage of his ordeal. The air smelled of rot, but it was no longer thick with the suffocating stench of decay. Only the faintest trace lingered, as if the earth itself had tasted his suffering and, for the moment, was content to leave him in peace.

  Yet peace was a fleeting illusion.

  The flies were gone, their bodies scattered, their buzzing reduced to the faintest echoes. But in the deep recesses of his body, the babies had begun to hatch. The smallest of the maggots, the ones embedded within his muscle, stirred and wriggled, their tiny forms squirming as they fed. Their tiny bodies, pale and translucent, crawled through the ruptures in his skin, seeking the remaining morsels of what was once living tissue within him.

  He could feel them as they dug deeper, their tiny teeth gnawing at the surface of his muscles. First, they fed on what little surface body fat remained, their hunger insatiable. Then, they began to consume his muscle. Slowly, agonizingly, the flesh that had once made him whole began to vanish, consumed by the tiny creatures that had taken root in his very core.

  His body was no longer a vessel of life, but of a slow, methodical destruction. Yet still, he endured.

  His heart, beating with a pulse so weak it barely moved the blood, refused to stop. His body, ravaged and torn, continued to fight the inevitable. The maggots devoured him—piece by piece, layer by layer—but his anger, an ember buried deep within the darkest corners of his soul, fueled him.

  He could no longer breathe. The pain had long since stolen the need for air, the jagged breaths having faded into a hollow rasp that echoed from within his cracked throat. Yet the anger within him kept the last flickers of life alive. His heart still beat, though it did so in a slow, agonizing rhythm, pumping only enough blood to keep his mind from slipping into nothingness.

  There was nothing left in his body but the echo of rage. His limbs had long since ceased their ability to move, yet the pulse of fury within his chest, now thick with blood and decay, refused to die. It was the only thing he had left.

  The maggots, those hungry little things, grew bolder as his body weakened. They had devoured what little fat remained; their hunger now focused on muscle, tendon, and bone. His form was hollowing out, the flesh sucked dry of life. But they could not claim everything. The darkness—the force that had created him, that had whispered promises into his broken mind—could not claim what still burned within him.

  His eyes, clouded with filth and blood, remained open beneath the hood. They were no longer clear, no longer fully able to focus, but still they burned with a ferocity that would not die. The pain became constant, a ceaseless pulse of agony that mixed with the rot and decay, until there was nothing in him but raw, blistering hunger for vengeance.

  And he endured.

  He no longer needed breath. His body was a husk, a vessel of suffering, but his mind remained sharp. As the maggots continued their feast, he began to feel the rage slip through the cracks of his form. It burned brighter with every inch of muscle they consumed, every drop of blood they drained. The hollowing, the draining, the constant gnawing of the babies—they could consume his flesh, they could tear his body apart.

  But they would never break the rage inside him.

  The following day was a brutal contrast to the dark, oppressive stillness of the previous one. The clouds that had clung to the sky like a shroud, heavy with the scent of decay and rot, parted at last. In their place, the sun rose, searing the land with its harsh, unrelenting light. The heat it carried amplified the stench of death, causing it to cling to the very air itself.

  The cornfield, once lush and verdant, now stood as a witness to his suffering. The stalks seemed to recoil, their leaves withering under the sun’s hot gaze, as if they too could feel the agony in the air. The Hollowed One’s body, already battered and broken, was now exposed to the heat, and the once-fluid, bloody parts of his flesh began to stiffen and dry, the last remnants of his being cracking and flaking away like old leather.

  In the sweltering silence, he could feel the pulse of the curse—a presence that seemed to breathe alongside him. Then it came. The darkness, once again.

  It slid through the air, crawling into his mind like a vile whisper that teased at the edges of his sanity. This time, it offered no promises of a future, no veiled hope of release. It merely offered more. More power. More agony. More retribution.

  And this time, he did not refuse.

  His body was already a grotesque shell of what it once had been, but the offer of power beyond what he had ever known called to him. What remained of his muscles, sinews and bone, withered and cracked further as his consciousness lapped greedily at the offering, at release. His lips cracked into a grin, a twisted thing of bone and muscle, but his eyes—those glowing pools of despair and rage—burned with a fevered light. He gave what little remained of himself, what had been left to him after days of torment.

  With the surrender of his essence, his body began to burn.

  It was not like any fire he had known before. The flames that consumed him were black as ink, as if the very air around him had caught fire, smoldering with something foul and unnatural. It was an agony unlike any he had ever felt, but it was a welcome one. The flames washed over him, sizzling and popping as they devoured his remaining flesh, and with each agonized scream he let out, the fire grew hotter, more intense.

  The fire did not just burn his body. It consumed him. Every layer of skin, every vein, every fragment of muscle that had once made him a man was turned to ash. The hunger of the flames spread until his bones too began to blacken and crack, as if they could not withstand the weight of the curse, he had placed upon himself.

  His screams mingled with laughter, an unholy sound that echoed across the desolate fields. His bones, those final remnants of his physical form, smoldered under the wrath of the fire. The flames seemed to grow wild, taking on a life of their own as they licked at the sky, reaching higher and higher until, in one final, explosive moment, the fire spread outward—blasting a massive, blackened circle into the very heart of the cornfield.

  It stretched out for a hundred feet, a scar upon the earth that would never heal. And as the fire raged around him, consuming the last of his essence, he sang. A song that was more curse than chant, more promise than prayer. The words were twisted, an ancient rhyme like a child's lullaby, but twisted with a darkness that only he could shape.

  The fire lashed higher, but the Hollowed One’s voice rose above the crackling inferno. His form, skeletal and half-consumed by flame, barely resembled the man who had once been. What remained was a wretched, twisting shape of bone and ember, a nightmare born of rage and hunger. His skin, long gone, left only smoldering fragments of what had been his body. The air was thick with the stench of burning flesh and charred bone, but still, the Hollowed One sang, his voice a low, rasping whisper that soon became a guttural chant.

  He was no longer singing for himself. His eyes, the grotesque stains on his hood, were twitching in the fiery winds, and as the flames clawed up his bones, the Hollowed One sang directly to the Veil—binding his curse to the very world, a legacy that would burn forever.

  “Veil of dark, of flame and dust,”

  “I speak, I bind, I place my trust,”

  “To you, O shroud that wraps the land,”

  “Bind me now by fate’s own hand.”

  The fire roared as if it responded, licking hungrily at his bones, while the words he spoke were no longer mere sounds but the weave of his curse, a knot tied to the world itself. The words bled from his mouth as though they were formed from the very blood and bile of his broken body. They twisted in the air, each syllable another thread drawing the curse deeper into the Veil, each phrase an eternal knot forged in fire.

  “Through the smoke, through ash and flame,”

  “Mark my name and seal my claim,”

  “Let The Hollow's memory cease,”

  “In silence deep, my curse's release.”

  His bones groaned under the intensity of the fire, the very marrow of him screaming as his form began to collapse into itself. Yet he pushed forward. The curse had to be woven completely—his soul was bound to it. The Veil itself, the very fabric of reality, had to be tethered by his dying breath. He would be the curse’s eternal architect, its everlasting root.

  “Let none escape, let none be free,”

  “May all who walk the Hollow see,”

  “The fog that falls, the chains that bind,”

  “May madness seed and death unwind.”

  As his ribcage cracked and crumbled, his form twisted further in agony. But the fire, though all-consuming, did not stop his voice. The dark eyes on his hood blinked in time with the fire’s flicker, darkened with the weight of his words, growing larger as the curse took shape. The Veil would never forget this curse—this was the Hollowed One’s final act.

  “Mark the land with endless grief,”

  “Let there be no reprieve,”

  “Where once the road may twist and wind,”

  “The Hollow’s name is left behind.”

  The Hollowed One’s voice cracked as the fire surged. The earth beneath him groaned, blackening, cracking in response to his song. The curse poured from him with a force that shook the air itself. He was giving everything—his final breath, his final will—to the Veil. His body was now consumed by flames, reduced to ash, but his curse would remain, wrapped around Amberhollow and the land beyond it, forever tethered to the Veil.

  “No path shall break, no soul shall leave,”

  “The Hollow shall take all who grieve,”

  “My name, my curse, shall be your fate,”

  “The Hollow shall bind you, never late.”

  The last remnants of his bones shattered, consumed by the fire, and yet still the song echoed from the burning remains of his voice, a twisted echo in the wind. His body had been reduced to nothing—only bones and ash. But the fire had not taken his spirit. The Veil trembled, as though acknowledging his presence, as though it could feel his curse wrapping itself around its threads.

  The Hollowed One’s final breath left him with the last phrase. His skull, cracked and burning, crumbled away in the flames, leaving only an echo of what had been.

  “Let none forget this bitter slight,

  “The Hollow is bound by endless plights.”

  The last of his voice, now reduced to a faint whisper, was carried off by the wind as the flames burned out, leaving nothing behind but the vast, blackened scar in the earth—a ring of charred soil and broken corn stalks. The air was still. The curse was complete.

  The Hollowed One was gone, but his song lingered in the wind, forever part of the land, forever tied to the Veil. The curse would live on, whispering through the fog and the shadows, a reminder to those born of Amberhollow that there would be no escape.

  Prologue Chapter 2

  The air was heavy with smoke, clinging to the earth like a suffocating shroud. The fire that had ravaged the cornfields the night before had left a blackened wound in the landscape, a jagged circle of scorched earth stretching a hundred feet across. From above, the sight was both striking and unnatural—what had once been a thriving, vibrant expanse of crops now lay in ruin, reduced to cinders and ash. The smoke billowed upward in twisting tendrils, as if the very sky had been stained by the curse that had consumed the field.

  A battalion of wardens from the Hollowfront descended upon the scene. Their silvered armor gleamed under the pale light of the morning sun, a stark contrast to the bleakness of the land below. They moved with purpose; each step deliberate as they combed through the remains of the inferno. Powerful warders, their robes marked with intricate sigils, carefully examined the field, their eyes scanning for anything that might reveal the nature of the fire—or what had caused it.

  As they sifted through the ashes, a warden, his hand steady, reached into the charred earth and pulled out something unexpected. A thick silk hood, woven with silver threads, perfectly intact despite the hellish fire that had consumed everything around it. The bag, dark with bloodstains, was unmistakable. It was the execution hood—the very one used to seal the Hollowed One’s mouth, preventing his cursed words from escaping. The realization was immediate, and a shiver ran through the group. The Hollowed One’s influence had never truly died. The air around them felt heavier with the presence of something malevolent, as if the bag itself carried the weight of the curse within it.

  "To Pevrit Thorn," Captain Sorn ordered, his voice cold and unwavering. "Now."

  The wardens, understanding the gravity of the find, carefully placed the hood into a protective container, ensuring it was handled with the utmost caution. Their eyes flickered with unease, but they dared not speak it aloud. There were only a handful of people in the world who could make sense of what had happened here, and the first name on their minds was the man

  Beneath the Hollowed One’s castle, the air was thick with the scent of ancient dust and the faint hum of forbidden magic. The vault, a vast, labyrinthine chamber carved deep into the rock, was the final resting place of the Hollowed One’s remains—and the place where his cursed artifacts had been sealed away for centuries. The walls were lined with shelves, each one holding grotesque trinkets, twisted items of dark power, and remnants of the Hollowed One’s twisted reign. His collection had been vast—an assortment of relics that echoed with the horrors of the past.

  On one shelf rested a twisted, bone-like staff, its surface covered in veins of dark gold that pulsed faintly with malevolent energy. A shard of obsidian, as black as midnight, sat beside it, carved with runes that seemed to shift when viewed from different angles. There was a tattered book bound in skin—a grim tome of ancient, forbidden rituals—and a vial filled with a viscous, swirling liquid that seemed to move on its own, as though it were alive. These were the remnants of a cursed existence, relics of a being whose sole purpose had been to bring ruin to the world.

  The vault had once been the Hollowed One’s sanctuary, a place where his influence could grow in secret. But now, as the wardens worked, the room was nothing more than a tomb for his dark legacy. The bloodstained silk hood, now sealed in a protective container, would join the rest of the cursed collection. It was a grim task that lay before the wardens, but one that was necessary.

  As Pevrit Thorn, the Grand Warder, oversaw the sealing of the vault, the warders around him worked with practiced precision. The walls were etched with intricate runes, ancient symbols designed to contain the evil within. There were no mistakes allowed. The fate of Amberhollow—and perhaps the entire world—rested on their ability to lock the Hollowed One’s curse away forever.

  The work was slow, meticulous, and grueling. Dozens of warders moved in synchrony, carving deeper into the vault’s walls, their tools glowing with the arcane light of warding magic. The rumble of stone against stone filled the air as the warders reinforced the ancient seals, their movements precise as they etched every rune with a mixture of magic and sweat. The vault, a vast and intricate network of stone, was to be sealed not just by wards, but by fire—an explosive fire that would bury the remnants of the Hollowed One so deep beneath the earth that even time itself would struggle to uncover them.

  The Grand Warder, Pevrit Thorn, stood at the center of the chamber, overseeing the ritual with a solemn expression. His eyes, sharp and calculating, never left the warders as they worked. His presence alone commanded respect, his authority unquestioned. The artifacts of the Hollowed One were dangerous, each one a key to unlocking untold horrors. To prevent their release, they had to be sealed beyond reach—deep below the earth, where no mortal hand could ever disturb them.

  When the final seals were carved and the vault was ready, the lead warder stepped forward, carrying a vial filled with a glowing, viscous liquid. The liquid was no ordinary substance—it was a volatile mixture of explosive powders and alchemical compounds designed to enhance the fire runes that would seal the vault. The warder dipped his brush into the liquid and began to paint the runes, the symbols glowing as they took shape. The fire runes shimmered in the dim light, their energy building as the warders finished their work.

  The time had come.

  "Light them," Thorn commanded.

  With a single motion, the lead warder ignited the first rune. A brilliant flare of light erupted from the vault’s walls, the sound of the explosion deafening as it tore through the air. The fire surged across the room, cascading over the other runes and igniting them in rapid succession. Each rune burned with a ferocity that rattled the stone, shaking the very foundation of the castle. The ground trembled beneath their feet as the blasts rippled outward, each one more powerful than the last.

  The vault, now sealed by the combined force of the fire runes and the explosive seals, was buried deep beneath the earth, its contents locked away in a prison of flame and stone. The final explosion sent a shockwave through the mountain, burying the Hollowed One’s legacy so far below that even the deepest waters could not reach it.

  As the echoes of the detonations faded into silence, the warders stood, their faces grim. The Hollowed One’s curse had been sealed, Pevrit Thorn looked down at the vault and for a moment, the darkness no longer stirred.