The sky above the Veiled Expanse churned with stormlight—clouds stained a bruised violet, lightning veins crawling like dying nerves across the heavens. Wind howled across the ruined stones, carving shrieks through the crags. And Kael stood at its edge, staring into the mouth of a forgotten world.
Black Hollow.
Once a monastery. Then a fortress. Then a prison so vile the old kingdoms erased it from their maps. Now, it was a myth whispered only by the damned.
Veylan lay behind him, tied to a broken column, leg bleeding.
"You're insane if you think you'll make it out alive," Veylan rasped.
Kael didn't turn. His coat snapped in the wind like a warning.
"I'm not here to come back. I'm here to take her with me."
Veylan grinned through blood. "You think she's the same? You think ten years in that place didn't twist her into something else?"
Kael walked forward, each step swallowed by mist and shadow.
"Then I'll remind her who she is."
The Descent
The path into Black Hollow was not marked by signs, but by bones. Scattered, splintered. Some clawed into the walls like they had tried to escape. Kael didn't flinch. He passed them like monuments, each a grim echo of the suffering left behind.
He reached the first gate.
A rusted arch of iron, flanked by statues of blindfolded monks—faces eroded by time. He pushed it open, metal screaming against the silence. As he stepped inside, a darkness swallowed the light behind him.
It was not just shadow—it was silence incarnate.
Kael drew his dagger, the one with his wife's name etched on the hilt: Elira.
Echoes of the Hollow
The inner halls were twisted remnants of purpose. Cracked tiles, broken pews, walls smeared with forgotten prayers. It smelled of damp parchment and old rot.
He moved carefully.
Footsteps echoed too loud in this place. But something else echoed back.
Laughter.
Not joyous, not childish. Cold. Hollow. Wounded.
He paused at a forked corridor. Something moved to his left—a flicker of white.
He pressed himself to the wall, heart steady, and waited.
A figure appeared at the end of the hall. Thin. Pale. Shackled.
It saw him.
And screamed.
Kael lunged before it could alert others, slamming it into the stone. But as he looked into its face, his breath caught.
Not a creature.
A person.
A prisoner.
Eyes sunken. Skin starved. But the brand on her wrist was clear: a name etched in fire—Kael's surname.
One of his family.
A cousin thought dead. A child then—now a woman, broken but alive.
She looked up at him, gasping, whispering through cracked lips:
"He said you'd come…"
The Hollow Holds More
Kael pulled the chains free with a grunt. She collapsed into his arms, sobbing silently. He didn't ask how she survived. Not yet.
"How many more?" he asked.
"Three… four… I don't know. They took names. Hid us by blood."
Kael's grip tightened.
This place was more than a prison.
It was a vault of lineage—of names erased from the world, stored like trophies.
Not just revenge. Not just rescue.
Now it was war.
To be continue...