No one counted the Hollowborn.
No one wrote their names.
They were shoveled into the Ash Pits as refuse, piled beside beast carcasses, indistinguishable in death as they were in life.
When the noble scions had recorded their glory, they left.
Caravans of silk and steel departed Dravenloch, bound for safer cities where wine still flowed and pleasure still waited....cause neither ones cared...i mean what had happened had happened... right?
The Dreadmarks cultivators returned to their estates, their voices echoing with pride. The Transmutors sealed their laboratories, already dreaming of the next plague they would uncork.
What remained was ruin.
The cleanup crews came last — cultivators of lesser bloodlines, sworn not to glory but to service. They walked among the rubble with grim faces, inspecting the burning carcasses, burying corpses, purging streets with salt and smoke. Their task was not to heal Dravenloch but to erase its filth, to scrub the city of memory until it resembled something livable again.
But of course scars are not so easily erased.
The towers leaned like broken teeth. The temples reeked of ash. The alleys whispered of screams too deep to silence. Dravenloch had survived, but what remained was not life — it was rot wearing the mask of survival.
And in this rot, a single truth lingered, unnoticed, unspoken:
Sané was gone.
No record bore his name.
No chronicle spoke of his fate.
To the city, his erasure was less than dust upon the wind.
---
But ofcourse Sané was alive
The beast that seized Sané did not kill him.
Its talons pierced flesh but did not finish him; its maw dripped venom but did not devour him. Instead, it carried him upward — past smoke, past the screaming streets, past the ruined towers — into the yawning wound in the sky.
The wormhole swallowed them whole.
And the world changed.
Inside the rift, there was no sky, no ground, no air. There was only distortion, a realm where reality twisted like a blurry glass. Shapes melted and reformed in endless cycles — mountains that grew teeth, rivers that flowed upward into nothingness, forests of bone that sprouted and withered in the span of a breath.
Time fractured. Each blink lasted a lifetime. Each breath collapsed into moments. Sané's body convulsed under the weight of forces he could not name. His ribs screamed where the talon gripped him, but the pain was swallowed by something greater — the gnawing pull of the void itself.
He saw echoes of worlds that had fallen before Masta Realm.
Shattered cities drifting like carcasses in the abyss. Oceans of glass stretching into infinity. Suns burned black, their ashes scattered like sand.
And among it all, the Makers' Curse slithered.
Not beasts now, but shadows vast and formless. Their whispers crawled into his ears though no mouths moved. They spoke in tones older than stone, words that tasted of rust and hunger. But ofcourse he did not understand their meaning....but some things were clear...it desires consumption, erasure, and even the unmaking....of things.
The beast carrying him dove deeper. Its form shifted as it moved — once talon and bone, now smoke and screaming mouths. Sané dangled, blood dripping into the void, his limbs trembling, his heart pounding with the rhythm of despair.
And yet…
The emptiness inside him stirred.
It had always been there, like a hollow cavity where others bore power....but in him.. It had been curse, shame, mockery. But here, within the rift, it resonated. The void's hunger met his own, and for the first time in Sané's life his hollow chest did not feel alien — it felt akin.
He felt the rift pulling at it, feeding it, whispering into it.
Not hope. It was never hope.
But something colder...something hungrier.
Sané's mind broke and reformed a hundred times in that descent. His screams echoed and were devoured. His tears turned to dust before they left his eyes. Yet the void did not erase him. It carried him deeper, as though saving him for something yet unnamed.
And in that endless night, Sané felt a truth blooming in the marrow of his bones:
He was not empty....he was not hollow.
Instead smt was waking for him.
But Sané had not perished....he was still alive.
Deeper into the wormhole he sank, pulled not by claws now but by the rift itself. The beast that had carried him unraveled into mist, its essence scattered like chaff in the storm. Sané tumbled, weightless, into a sea of shifting void.
The deeper layers of the rift were not chaos — they were order of a different kind.
Mountains of black crystal loomed, carved with runes that pulsed like veins. Rivers of silver flame flowed upward into the darkness. Colossi of bone walked aimlessly, their hollow skulls weeping smoke. This was not random — it was structured, as though the wormhole were less a wound and more… a realm.
And there, at the threshold of its abyssal heart, Sané's hollow stirred again. Stronger. Fiercer.
Each breath dragged the rift into him. The emptiness in his chest drank it, craved it. The curse-beasts ignored him now, slithering past as though blind to his presence. He was not prey, not intruder — he was kin.
He fell to his knees upon obsidian ground that pulsed faintly with light, clutching his chest as agony and clarity clashed within him. His vision blurred. Shadows swam in his sight, but within them burned faint silhouettes, shapes that looked disturbingly like himself.....or so he thought.
The void was not consuming him.
It was mirroring him.
It was mimicking him... intending to carve his presence in them.
He opened his mouth, and though no sound left his throat, the abyss answered.
A hum, low and endless, rippled through the rift.
It shivered through stone, flame, and bone.
It welcomed him.
And so Sané, the Hollowborn, the discarded child of a great family, the nameless vagrant of Dravenloch's alleys, did not vanish in the wormhole.
He became part of it.