They call it the Collapse.
Ask ten survivors what happened that day, and you'll get ten different answers. Some swear the sky split. Others claim the ground sank. A few say the world never changed at all that it was people who did.
What's certain is this one moment, humanity stood in its cities of steel and glass. The next, we found ourselves standing in their shadows, surrounded by ruins too sharp to belong, breathing air that tasted of rust.
The Grey Wastes.
No one remembers crossing over. One heartbeat we were home, the next we were here caught between what was real and what wasn't anymore. Towers leaned like broken teeth. Streets twisted into scars. And in the fog, something moved.
The first of them were seen within hours. Too thin. Too fast. They wore the shapes of men like borrowed clothes, but wrong in ways you couldn't name until their claws were already in you. When they died, they left nothing behind but ash.
And something else.
A shimmer, like smoke laced with memory. The first survivors to touch it didn't mean to. They didn't know better. But when the shimmer sank into their skin, it left a mark—etched deep into flesh, glowing faint beneath the ribs.
The Echo Mark.
Those who bore it could do things no human should. See faster, move sharper, strike harder. But nothing came free. Every echo they absorbed brought with it fragments of something else. A twitch. A hunger. A voice that wasn't theirs whispering in the dark.
Some learned to endure it. Others broke.
The broken ones became the very creatures we now fear the ones we would later name Hollows.
Cities rose again, built from rubble and desperation. Factions formed, each claiming they knew the truth of the Collapse. Some treated Echo Marks as divine gifts. Others as curses. Many simply used them, no matter the cost.
And somewhere in those ruins, where silence weighs heavier than stone, new echoes wait.
Not all of them are human.
Not all of them want to be.