The city of Dravenloch never slept. It reeked...like the gutters. It groaned..like a dying beast. Its alleys bled. Lanterns swung above crooked bridges where rain and piss mixed in the gutters, and smoke hung low enough to choke the breath from a man's lungs. The nobles called it the "cradle of empire." To the hollowborn who rotted in its bones, it was nothing more than a pit.
Sané had lived here for fifteen years. Fifteen years of waking with hunger clawing his belly, fifteen years of dodging the boots of cultivator heirs, fifteen years of learning the single truth carved into the marrow of the realm:
Hollows were not people. They were tools.
The Transmutors made sure of that.
The Transmutors were the city's pulse. Men and women wrapped in robes stitched with silver sigils, their hands always stained with the colors of their brews: sickly greens, luminous blues, burning reds. They were alchemists of ascension. Their concoctions sharpened a cultivator's fangs, thickened their marrow, forced their bodies into stages higher than birth had allowed. Nobles paid fortunes for a single vial. Dynasties traded entire villages for a chance at a breakthrough.
But Transmutors did not toil with their own hands. They needed labor. They needed vessels. They needed the hollowborn.
Every dawn, chains rattled down the alleys as hollowborn children and youths were dragged from their hovels, gathered like cattle, and sold for day's wage. They scrubbed cauldrons that seared skin to the bone. They crushed herbs until their nails split. They carried barrels of boiling fluids that left scars along their spines. Some were used in experiments — their bodies forced to drink unfinished potions that either burned them alive or left them screaming, mindless, in the gutters.
No one asked their names. No one cared for their deaths. Hollows were cheap.
Sané was one of them.
At fifteen, his shoulders were already roped with scar-tissue, his palms leathery from grinding stone and root. His back carried welts that never healed, each strike of the overseer's whip leaving a memory. He had learned not to scream anymore. Screaming amused them. Silence made them impatient — which was better....or so he thought.
That morning, he stood in the Gray Market — the hollowborn quarter, a square lined with cages and poles where labor was sold. The sun had not yet risen, but torches licked shadows into long spindles. He stood barefoot in mud, chain biting his wrist, among two dozen others his age or younger.
A Transmutor's runner — fat, pale, lips cracked with too much powder — inspected them like meat. He lifted Sané's chin with a rod.
"This one looks strong." He said.
The overseer sneered. "Strong enough to carry your waste. Don't let the eyes fool you — they're hollow."
The runner spat. "All hollow are the same. Give me four. The rest can rot."
Chains jerked. Sané stumbled forward, shoved into line with three others — a boy with sunken cheeks, a girl with cropped hair, and another older hollow with one ear missing. Together, they were marched across the city's veins toward the Transmutors' district.
Dravenloch's heart was built in tiers. At the top, polished towers of one of the ruling families glimmered with glass and iron — high enough that the wormholes in the sky seemed almost reachable. In the middle, the merchant guilds fattened themselves, their houses fat with silk and coin. At the bottom, below the bridges and canals, were the hollows....left there to tend for themselves.
The district they entered stank of chemicals. Smoke bled from every chimney, acrid and sharp enough to sear lungs. Shops bore glyphs of warning: Do not breathe, do not touch, do not drink. Behind barred windows, hollowborn labored like shadows, their skin blistered, their eyes dull.
Sané was shoved into a stone hall. The floor was slick with spilled reagents, the walls dark with soot. Rows of cauldrons bubbled, each attended by laborers with broken spines. The overseer barked orders.
"Crush the roots. Grind the scales. Carry the vats. No sloth, or you'll taste the whip."
Sané took his place at a grinder — it was a massive wheel of stone that turned slow, it was heavy, unrelenting. His hands ached as he pushed, grinding serpent scales into glittering dust that stung the air. The dust clung to his tongue, bitter as bile.
Hours passed like years. The heat made sweat sting his scars. His muscles trembled, but he did not stop. If he slowed, the whip would fall. If he collapsed, another hollow would replace him, and he would be left for rats.
The girl beside him fainted. The overseer laughed and dragged her body aside. No one helped her. No one could.
By dusk, Sané's vision blurred. His stomach growled, empty since yesterday. The overseer threw him a crust of bread blackened with mold. He caught it, swallowed it dry, and returned to the wheel.
This was life for a hollow. Endless labor. Endless cruelty. Endless survival without purpose.
Yet somewhere in him, deep in the hollow of his chest, a voice whispered. It was not hope. Hope was for fools. It was something else — darker, heavier. A hunger that no bread, no warmth, no kindness could fill.
Sané ignored it. He had to. In Masta Realm, the only law was birth. And he was born with nothing.
For now.
The wheel slowed as the overseer's whistle cut through the hall. Sané lifted his hands from the grinder,his fingers were raw and bleeding, his knuckles split. But He did not look up — looking up meant meeting eyes, and meeting eyes meant punishment.
"Bring the hollows," the overseer barked.
Chains clinked. From the cages in the corner, a group of hollowborn youths were dragged out. Their wrists were bound, their eyes glazed with fear. Sané recognized one of them — a boy barely twelve, called Ryk. They had shared scraps of bread once, fighting over crusts like dogs. Ryk's cheek still bore the scar from where a Bloodfang heir had branded him with a hot coin.
The Transmutor entered. His robes were crimson, trimmed with gold threads that shimmered with embedded sigils. His beard was stained green from the fumes of his craft. His eyes glowed faintly, the mark of a man who had drunk too many of his own brews and survived.
In his hands, he carried a vial. The liquid inside was black — not the black of shadow, but of depth, the kind that swallowed torchlight and reflected nothing back.
"This," the Transmutor said, his voice thick with pride, "is Phantom's Draught. A new elixir for the Dreadmark line. It shall carve the sigils deeper, sharpen their strength, draw marrow from the abyss itself. And what better vessels to test it on than hollows?"
The overseer chuckled. "They'll die quick."
The Transmutor smiled thinly. "They always do. But their deaths will write knowledge."
Sané's gut twisted. He knew what was coming. He had seen it before — too many times. The Transmutors tested their potions on hollows because they were cheap, expendable, and their emptiness made them perfect blanks to measure against. If the elixir burned them alive, it was written down. If it twisted them, it was written down. If it worked — which it never did — it was stolen back and refined for a noble heir.
Ryk was chosen first. He struggled, kicking, shouting, but chains pinned him down. The Transmutor forced the vial against his lips and poured.
The boy gagged. His body convulsed, back arching so violently his spine cracked. Black veins spidered across his skin, bulging, writhing, as if something inside him tried to crawl out. His scream cut the hall like a blade.
Sané looked away. But he could still hear it. The scream rose higher, became a shriek, then choked into gurgling silence.
When the sound died, Sané forced his eyes back. Ryk's body was a husk. His eyes were wide, staring, his chest hollow as if the marrow had been sucked dry. The overseer kicked him aside like trash.
"Failed," the Transmutor muttered, scribbling notes into a leather tome. "Next."
The second hollow, a girl no older than ten, sobbed. She begged. Her words were lost under the overseer's laughter. The vial touched her lips. She convulsed. Her body split with black fissures, blood pouring like tar. She collapsed, twitching once before falling still.
"Failed. Next."
It continued. One by one, the hollows died. Some burned alive, skin flaking like ash. Some bloated and burst. Some shriveled into skeletons in the space of a breath. Each death was another line in the Transmutor's book.
When it ended, the floor was littered with corpses. The smell was unbearable — iron and rot, smoke and bile.
Sané's stomach knotted. He had seen this before, but it never dulled. Every time, he told himself he would not care. That caring was weakness. That hollows who hoped deserved their fate. And yet, when he saw Ryk's body — the boy who once shared bread — something inside him shifted.
The emptiness in his chest stirred. Not hope. Not grief. Something else. Something darker.
The Transmutor closed his tome. "Enough for today. Dispose of the failures. And you—" his finger jabbed toward Sané, "—clean the grinders."
Sané lowered his head, fists tight. But he obeyed.
---
The bodies were dragged outside and thrown into the Ash Pits — mass graves where failed experiments smoldered in lime and smoke. The air above the pits was thick with flies. Sané worked beside the overseer's men, shoving the dead into the flames, their skin cracking as fire devoured them.
One of the overseers laughed. "Imagine being born hollow. No worth, no name, no chance. Just bones for firewood."
Another spat. "Better they die here than steal bread from real men."
Sané said nothing. He shoved Ryk's body into the pit. For a moment, he hesitated — the boy's eyes stared at him, wide and empty. The flies buzzed. The fire reached up. Then Sané pushed, and Ryk was gone.
The emptiness in Sané's chest whispered again. Louder this time.
Why not you?
He ignored it.
When the pits were closed, night fell over Dravenloch. Torches lined the streets, shadows dancing on stone walls painted with sigils of the ruling families. Somewhere above, laughter echoed from noble balconies where wine spilled and women sang. Somewhere beyond, wormholes pulsed faintly in the night sky, glowing like wounds in the heavens.
Sané lay in the alley where he slept — a corner between two broken chimneys, roof leaking, ground cold. He wrapped himself in a ragged cloak stolen from a corpse. His stomach gnawed at itself.
He stared at the sky. The wormholes pulsed. He thought of Ryk. He thought of the Transmutor's laughter. He thought of the emptiness.
The realm had declared him useless. The families had thrown him away. The Transmutors had chained him as a tool.
But the emptiness whispered still.
Not hope. Never hope.
Hunger.
---
Sané closed his eyes. Tomorrow would be the same. More grinding. More labor. More deaths.
But deep in the marrow of Masta Realm, something shifted. The wormholes widened. The Makers' Curse stirred. And in the heart of one hollowborn boy, hunger began to grow teeth.