The tunnels breathed.
Not with air—air was too gentle, too merciful.
This breath was older than language, a pulse of ancient resonance that vibrated through stone, marrow, thought. The deeper Kael went, the more the trembling sank into his body like a fever that wanted to use his bones as an instrument.
He had thought the outer temple was silent.
He was wrong, the silence lived here.
It was a presence.
Kael tightened his grip on the torch. The flames sputtered wildly, shrinking whenever the cavern inhaled. He couldn't shake the impression that the light itself was afraid.
The mural-lined corridor narrowed as he descended the spiraling ramp that had no steps, only a smooth slope carved by something not quite human. The walls were etched with reliefs depicting gods: the Stormfather and his blade of lightning, the Wrathmother devouring an entire city, the Seerchild with a hundred eyes. But all their faces had been gouged out violently.
Centuries ago, Kael would later learn, they gouged themselves out—because even gods didn't dare look upon what waited below.
He felt her before he heard her.
A pressure across his skin, like invisible fingertips testing his shape. His Hollowborn core, his devouring center, usually throbbed with a hungry, primal rhythm, but now…
Now it recoiled.
Fear.
His power was afraid.
Kael stopped walking.
He exhaled shakily—just one breath—and the sound bounced wrong, stretching, warping, swallowed too fast as though the void ahead drank it eagerly.
Then he saw the door.
A colossal slab of obsidian carved into the image of a sun collapsing into itself. Ancient sigils pulsed faintly, but most had dimmed to near-dead embers. The door wasn't meant to be opened by hands.
It was meant to be sealed by belief, by fear.
And someone had already undone half of it.
Kael swallowed.
"Who broke this?" he murmured to the dark.
The dark answered with a second breath.
This one came from behind the door.
He stumbled back instinctively.
Then the sigils flickered once—violently—
CRACK!!!
A seam split down the middle.
The torch went out.
Kael's heart thundered so loudly it seemed to echo in the pitch black.
A voice whispered, barely audible.
It wasn't a growl or a hiss.
It was… curious.
It crawled across his nerves like velvet soaked in venom.
"You're late."
Kael grabbed for the dagger at his hip, even though steel wouldn't matter here.
"Who's there?"
"You know," the voice breathed. "Or you wouldn't have come."
The seam opened wider. A thin line of colorless light—if colorless even counted as light—bled out. It illuminated nothing, only erased shadow as if replacing it with something worse.
Kael tried to step back, but his feet were rooted.
The Hollowborn void in his chest twisted violently. It wanted to flee.
It couldn't.
The door screamed as it opened fully, the sound not metal or stone but something alive tearing free of its own skin.
The chamber beyond was enormous, domed, and impossibly black. Not absence, presence. A darkness so dense it had gravity.
At its center: Chains.
Six pillars encircled the room, each carved with a god's symbol.
Stormfather. Wrathmother. Heart Saint. Seerchild. Stone Titan. Shadow Serpent.
Each pillar had cracks spiderwebbing outward like lightning marks from centuries of strain.
And in the middle, suspended by chains that seemed both too thick and too thin to come from reality, hung a woman.
Her feet hovered just above the stone floor.
Her hair drifted weightlessly as though submerged in invisible water.
Her skin was pale—not human pale, not corpse pale, but the pallor of a star held behind a veil of night.
And where her eyes should have been; Not sockets, not orbs.
Just a smooth, strangely flawless stretch of skin, as though the universe had forgotten to finish making her face.
She turned her head toward him anyway.
Kael's pulse spiked. His legs finally obeyed his terror and staggered back
Then he felt it.
His Hollowborn core—his devouring void—went silent.
Completely.
"Don't" he choked. "Don't come closer"
She didn't move.
The chains did.
They slithered, tightening around her arms and ribs as though trying to restrain her reaction. As though they remembered what happened the last time she woke.
Her voice—or whatever force replaced a voice—brushed against his mind again.
"You opened the seal."
"I didn't," he said quickly. "I only— I followed the markings—I didn't know—"
"No one opens my prison by accident."
Kael's jaw clenched. His instincts screamed at him to run, but running wasn't an option. His knees felt ready to buckle under the oppressive pressure rolling off her.
"What are you?" he whispered.
She tilted her head.
It was a strange, precise movement, like an animal testing a new scent.
"I am the answer to a fear your kind has forgotten."
Kael's throat tightened.
The legends.
The myth of the Black Star.
A woman-shaped void.
The only being the gods themselves couldn't kill.
"You're… her," he murmured. "The Unnamed One."
"I have many names," she corrected softly. "But none rightfully belong to me. The gods feared giving me one."
The chains rattled violently, reacting to the rise in her energy. Stone dust fell from the crackling pillars.
"You should leave," she whispered.
"Before I unmake you."
Kael swallowed. Hard.
"I can't."
"Why not?"
Because when he looked at her—impossible, terrifying, wrong in every cosmic way—he also felt something he had no language for.
Recognition.
Like he was staring at the missing half of the doom inside his chest.
"Because I think…" He sucked in a shaking breath. "I think I'm connected to you."
For the first time, her head jerked—sharply, violently—like the statement cut through the void that was her mind.
The chains screamed.
A crack shot across the nearest pillar, spraying stone fragments.
Kael shielded his face with his arm.
"You shouldn't be possible," she whispered, her tone shifting from curiosity to something closer to horror. "Hollowborns devour power. They cannot touch a void. They die."
"Yet I'm here," Kael said, breathless. "And I'm not dead."
She lifted her hand—slowly, experimentally. The shivering darkness coiled around her arm like obedient smoke.
"Come closer," she whispered.
Kael hesitated.
If he moved one step forward, he knew—deep in his bones—his life would change in a way he couldn't undo.
He stepped forward.
The chamber trembled.
Her breathing hitched.
The chains groaned—some in protest, some in fear.
Closer, Closer.
His fingertips hovered inches from her palm.
"I need to touch you," she whispered.
"For what?"
"To know," she breathed, "if the world ends tonight."
Kael's heart hammered so hard he thought it might break his ribs.
He reached out, their fingers brushed.
A shockwave detonated through the room.
Every torch in the temple flared to life.
The sigils on the pillars blazed.
The chains convulsed, snapping taut—
And Kael's entire power—his Hollowborn core—vanished.
Snuffed out.
He gasped, collapsing to his knees.
But worse, far worse was what happened to her.
Her faceless head snapped upward as though electricity surged through her.
The Void around her exploded outward in a spiral.
She screamed.
It wasn't a human scream.
It was the sound of reality bending.
The chains, the pillars, the temple itself,
Everything shook as though the earth wanted to flee.
Then…
One chain snapped.
And in the ringing silence that followed, she whispered a single sentence:
"Kael… they're coming."
"Who?" he rasped.
Her head turned toward the stairway behind him.
"The gods' hunters."
A distant horn blasted through the tunnel.