The morning after you're declared worthless, the sun still rises.
Inconsiderate of it, really.
I lay in bed longer than I should have, pressing my palm to my sternum where the cold thing had gone quiet again. The vision — infinite pages, my name burned into alien text — felt distant now. Not gone. Just... sleeping. Like it had shown me one card and folded the rest against its chest.
Downstairs, my parents were being aggressively normal. Mom had made twice the usual breakfast. Dad was talking about the weather with the kind of forced enthusiasm that meant he'd been awake all night figuring out what to say to me.
I loved them enough to pretend it was working.
"Rain coming in from the east," Dad said as I sat down. "Might push some beasts downhill. Garrison's already doubling patrols."
"Good," I said, eating porridge I couldn't taste.
Mom watched me the way you watch something you think might shatter. I wanted to tell her I was fine. I wanted to tell her about the vision — the infinite pages, the name, the grief that wasn't mine. But how do you explain that your empty grimoire might not be empty when the entire town just watched you get branded with the one word nobody comes back from?
Hollow.
I finished breakfast. Went outside. And learned exactly what that word meant in practice.
Greyhaven wasn't cruel. I want to be clear about that.
Nobody spat at me. Nobody threw anything. Nobody cornered me in an alley to remind me of my place in the world's hierarchy.
They just stopped seeing me.
The butcher who'd slipped me extra cuts since I was eight didn't meet my eyes. The kids I'd grown up beside found fascinating things to look at in the opposite direction when I walked past. Mrs. Harlen, who'd taught me to read and told me I was clever, crossed the street.
Not malice. Reflex. I was a Hollow. In a frontier town where your grimoire was the difference between contributing and consuming — between someone who fought the beasts and someone who hid behind the people who did — I'd gone from neighbor to burden in the space of a single word.
The hunters were the worst. Not because they were unkind, but because I could see them calculating. One more mouth that couldn't earn its keep. One more body to protect when the next beast surge hit. Their eyes did the math and I didn't like the answer.
I was sitting on the low wall behind the tanner's shop, studying the Aether mist on the distant treeline and feeling sorry for myself in a way I'd allow for exactly one more hour, when Thessyn found me.
She dropped onto the wall beside me. Said nothing for a full minute.
"So," she finally said.
"So."
"Ninety pages."
"Heard about that. Some girl from a border town. Probably insufferable about it."
"Completely insufferable." She paused. "You're not going to ask how I'm feeling about it? Most people have been asking how I'm feeling about it. Constantly. With tears."
"How are you feeling about it?"
"Like I want to hit something with lightning until it stops existing. But that's most days." She looked at me sideways. "You're supposed to be the one falling apart. You're ruining this by being functional."
"Give me an hour."
"I'll wait."
We sat there. The Aether mist shifted on the treeline. Somewhere in the forest, something roared — distant, deep, the kind of sound that made your ribs hum. A Tier 3, maybe. The garrison would handle it. Or it would wander off. Life in the Reaches.
"Your grimoire did something," Thessyn said quietly. "During the ceremony. The Awakener's book went insane when he touched you. Everyone's pretending they didn't see it."
"I know."
"That's not what Hollow means. Hollow means nothing happens. Empty book, empty future, end of story." Her jaw tightened. "Something HAPPENED, Zael."
I pressed my palm to my chest. The cold pulsed once. Faint. Acknowledging.
"I know," I said again.
"So what are you going to do about it?"
The honest answer was: I have no idea. I have a grimoire that's supposedly blank but showed me infinite pages last night in a language from a world that stopped existing. I have a dead world's grief living behind my ribs. I have a name I didn't write carved into a book I can't open.
"Figure it out," I said. "Starting today."
"Good." She hopped off the wall. "I'm going to go terrify the garrison with lightning practice. Come find me when you've figured out something worth showing me."
She walked away. Didn't look back. Didn't need to.
That was Thessyn. She didn't do comfort. She did expectations. And somehow that was exactly what I needed — someone who looked at me and saw unfinished business instead of a closed case.
I spent the next three hours trying to make my grimoire do literally anything.
I sat in my room. Pressed my hand to my chest. Concentrated. Meditated. Begged. Threatened. Tried to recreate the feeling from last night — that flood of cold grief and alien recognition.
Nothing.
The thing behind my ribs was silent. Patient. Maddeningly, impossibly patient. Like it was waiting for something specific and my fumbling didn't qualify.
I was on the verge of punching a wall when I heard the knock.
Not on the front door. On my window. Second floor.
I opened the shutters and found myself face to face with a man who smelled like cheap wine and old regret.
Mordren.
Up close he looked worse than from a distance — weathered skin, bloodshot eyes, a tremor in his hands that could've been alcohol or age or something else entirely. His clothes were stained. His hair was grey and uncombed. He looked like the last page of a story nobody wanted to finish.
But his eyes. His eyes were sharp and clear and completely sober.
"You're going to have questions," he said. His voice was rough gravel. "I'm going to answer exactly three of them. Choose carefully."
I stared at him. The town drunk was crouching on my windowsill at midday with the balance of a cat and the eyes of something that had seen the world's teeth up close.
"How did you get up here?"
He closed his eyes. Exhaled through his nose.
"That's one. Wasted. Two left."
"Wait — that doesn't—"
"Two. Left." He held up two fingers. "Choose. Carefully."
The cold thing in my chest pulsed. Not in warning. In recognition. The same way it had pulsed when the Awakener's grimoire tried to tear itself apart reaching for me.
It recognized Mordren.
I looked at this broken old man balanced on my windowsill with his wine-stained shirt and his steady, steady eyes, and I asked the only question that mattered.
"What am I?"
Mordren studied me for a long time. Something moved behind his expression — grief, recognition, and a fear so old it had fossilized into something that almost looked like calm.
"You're the thing that keeps me up at night," he said. "Come with me. And don't tell anyone where we're going."
He dropped from the windowsill. Two stories. Landed without sound.
I looked down at a man who should've shattered both ankles and was already walking toward the treeline.
One question left. And something told me I'd need it later.
I climbed out the window and followed the drunk into the woods.