The storm came without warning. One moment the sky was a quiet gray veil, and the next it cracked open with a roar, pouring buckets of cold rain onto the narrow streets of Tinswood. Trees bent under the weight of the downpour, and gutters overflowed with muddy water. People scattered, pulling up hoods or diving into shops. But one figure stood still in the chaos, drenched to the bone and unmoving.
Seventeen-year-old Callum Rooke stared at the envelope in his hand.
His fingers were trembling—not from the cold, but from the name scrawled across the aged parchment in black ink, soaked but still legible.
To the Last Heir of the Hollow.
No stamp. No address. No return name. It had simply been sitting in the mailbox of his foster home when he came back from school that evening. Every instinct told him to toss it, to forget it, to burn it even—but something ancient and buried deep in his gut screamed not to.
The paper was thick, old, and smelled faintly of cedar and smoke. Callum glanced over his shoulder. The street was empty, save for the rain and the hiss of tires on wet asphalt. He tucked the letter into the inside of his hoodie and ran.
He didn't stop until he reached the rusted gate of the Fennick foster house.
He burst through the door, water pooling around his sneakers.
"Callum!" Mrs. Fennick's shrill voice echoed from the kitchen. "You're dripping all over my floors!"
"Sorry!" he called, already halfway up the stairs.
His room was small—barely large enough for a twin bed and a desk—but it was quiet. Safe, at least. He shut the door, locked it, and drew the curtains. The storm outside raged louder now, like it knew he was about to uncover something forbidden.
He sat at his desk, pulled the letter from his hoodie, and held it under his desk lamp. The seal was an unfamiliar sigil—three rings, overlapping like a Venn diagram, surrounded by thorns.
His thumb hesitated over the seal.
Then he broke it.
The paper inside was thicker than the envelope and handwritten in elegant, almost inhumanly neat cursive.
To the last of the blood,
The Hollow remembers. It stirs, and it calls for its heir.
At the turning of the black moon, come to the place your mother died.
Bring nothing. Trust no one.
There are those who would kill to keep you ignorant.
The Hollow does not forget.
—R.
Callum's blood froze. He didn't remember much about his mother. She died when he was three, or at least that's what the social worker had told him. There were no photos. No keepsakes. Not even her full name. Every time he asked, the answers got vaguer.
But now... this.
"The place your mother died," he whispered.
He had no clue where that was.
Except... maybe he did.
When he was eight, during one of his many short stays with a temporary family, a woman had whispered something strange to him while he was half-asleep.
"Your mother bled under the Hollow's eye. Don't go looking, child. It looks back."
He had written it off as a dream. Until now.
He stared down at the letter, heart pounding like a drum in his chest. The Hollow. It was real. And it wanted him.
Lightning split the sky outside, flooding the room in ghostly white light. A low, distant howl echoed over the hills.
Then he heard it—a tap.
A soft, rhythmic tapping on his window.
He turned slowly.
There was a crow. Jet-black, sleek, and far too large, sitting on the windowsill with rain glistening off its feathers. It tilted its head and peered at him with one golden eye.
Tap. Tap.
It knocked its beak against the glass again. Then, as if satisfied, it took off into the storm, wings cutting through the rain like knives.
Callum stood frozen for several minutes, the letter still clutched in his hands.
He didn't sleep that night. Not really.
Instead, he sat on his bed with the letter on his lap, the words burned into his memory. Every now and then, he glanced at the clock. Midnight came and went. Then one. Then two.
By four in the morning, he had made up his mind.
He stuffed the letter inside his backpack, along with a flashlight, his phone, and a pocketknife he once took from a hardware store just because it made him feel safer.
He left without a word.
Mrs. Fennick wouldn't care. None of them ever did. As long as the check came in each month, they could pretend he wasn't there.
The town of Tinswood was sleeping as Callum walked its cracked sidewalks, passing dark storefronts and dim streetlamps. He wasn't sure where he was going, only that something inside him knew the direction—like a string tugging at his ribs, pulling him eastward.
Out of town.
Into the woods.
By sunrise, he had walked nearly five miles along an old forest trail half-buried in fog. The air was colder here. Still. Too still.
Birdsong was absent. No wind. Just silence.
The woods thinned near an old, iron gate.
It stood crooked, wrapped in vines, attached to the crumbling remains of a stone wall. Beyond it was a field—flat, wide, and empty, save for a large, gnarled tree standing dead center like a sentinel.
Callum froze.
He had never been here before, yet every part of him whispered this is it.
The Hollow.
Something in the air shifted.
A sound, like whispering leaves, yet none moved. The clouds above thickened unnaturally, dimming the morning light until the field looked like twilight.
He passed through the gate.
The moment his foot touched the soil, a pulse ran through him. Not pain—but pressure, heavy and alive, like stepping into a different world.
His legs carried him toward the tree. Each step sunk into the damp grass. Thunder rumbled again in the distance, though the sky remained dry.
When he reached the tree, he saw it.
Carved into the bark, barely legible beneath moss and time, was a name.
Elaria Rooke.
His mother.
A sudden gust of wind tore across the field, and with it, something sharp and shrill—like laughter. But not human.
Callum spun around.
The field was no longer empty.
Figures stood at the edges of the tree line. Hooded. Still. Dozens of them, motionless in the fog.
Watching.
Callum backed toward the tree, heart hammering.
One of the figures stepped forward.
A woman.
She wore a cloak of deep green, the hood casting her face in shadow. But when she spoke, her voice echoed all around him, like a choir whispering in sync.
"You came. The Hollow opens."
Then, from beneath her cloak, she pulled something small.
A pendant.
He recognized it instantly—it was the one he saw in a photo years ago, buried deep in a case file: his mother's necklace.
"You carry the blood of the Hollow," she said. "The others will come now. And not all seek to welcome you."
Callum stepped forward. "Who are you?"
The woman hesitated. Then she removed her hood.
Her eyes were pitch black, like a bottomless well.
"I am your blood," she said softly. "And your test."
Before he could speak again, the ground beneath him cracked.
A burst of light—green, cold, and humming with magic—erupted from the roots of the tree.
Callum screamed as it swallowed him whole.
Then everything went dark.