The light from the lantern arced skyward like a golden spear, splitting the night in two.
Across coastlines, mountain ridges, and the sunken archipelagos, the echoes of forgotten names rang out—not as whispers this time, but as calls.
And the world… answered.
In the lantern cities—places where rituals of remembrance had long been reduced to ceremony—elders woke screaming, clutching their chests as memories they never lived returned to them.
Lanterns that had not glowed in decades flared with light so fierce, their glass cracked in protest.
In the Tidehold Temple, Nima collapsed to her knees.
The force of what she had unleashed ran through her bones like molten truth. Her ears rang with names not her own—fragments of lives that had passed unloved, unburied, unspoken. Some filled her with sorrow. Others… with anger.
Then—a voice inside her.
"You wear the bridge, but bridges break. What are you now that the crossing has begun?"
She stood slowly.
"I'm the one who lit the sky," she whispered.
"And I'll face whatever walks through the flame."
Morya met her at the cliffs. Her eyes were wet, but her face unreadable.
"The balance has shifted," she said. "The veil is thin. Some will rejoice. Some will hunt you."
"I know."
"You may have given voice to the forgotten—but not all of them wish to be remembered."
From behind them, a cry tore through the air—a wail so ancient and sorrowful, it cracked stones along the shoreline. The tide surged unnaturally.
A shape rose from the sea.
Not a ghost.
Not a person.
But something that had once been both.
The first of the Hollowed.
Long ago, when the pact was sealed, there were those whose names were stolen mid-death—left neither here nor beyond, trapped in the folds of the world. The Hollowed were the consequence of that silence—souls too fragmented to become whole again, yet too powerful to forget what was taken.
And now, they had heard their names called—but remembered only the pain.
The creature stared at Nima with eyes that burned like salt and grief. Its voice was a tide of many:
"You broke the wall. You called us back.
Why?
Why did you not let us stay lost?"
Nima didn't flinch. "Because you deserved to be remembered."
It screamed—a sound that could unmake skin. But Morya stepped forward, holding out her staff.
"Then we must help them remember who they were… before the pain."
As the Hollowed approached, dozens more rose from the deep, following behind it—an army of the half-remembered, the undone, the unloved.
Nima knew then: this was not an ending.
It was a beginning.
The age of silence had broken.
And the age of reckoning had begun.