The Hollow never celebrated. Not when one of them survived their first kill. Not when they mastered a spell. Not even when they lost a limb and kept training the next day.
But the night before the trials began, there was… something.
Not joy.
Not ceremony.
But anticipation. Like the whole Hollow was watching.
Kael felt it the moment he stepped into the main chamber, a dome of fungus-covered stone and gnarled roots that pulsed with veins of violet light. The air was hot with breath and magic, alive with whispers that didn't quite belong to the people standing around him.
Initiates gathered in concentric circles. Hooded, masked, silent. There were no names here, only ranks, only power. Most he didn't recognize. Some were older, scarred, twisted by arcane grafting and relentless combat. Others were younger, wide-eyed and shivering, trembling behind their veils.
Kael and Seret stood at the center of it all.
Two among ten pairs chosen for the final trials.
The Flayer stood on a platform of bone and obsidian, robes trailing like oil over stone. Beside him, the cult's high seeress, called Mother Salt, cradled a bundle of writhing roots that pulsed and hissed with some unknowable life. Her blindfold was soaked in blood. Her lips split in a smile that didn't match the rest of her face.
"Children of the Hollow," she whispered, voice dripping like candle wax. "You have passed the first fires. Now comes the crucible."
Kael's jaw clenched.
Seret didn't move.
"The Trials of Severance will span thirteen days. Thirteen suns beneath the stone. You will bleed. You will break. You will either ascend, or be swallowed."
Whispers echoed across the chamber like wind through a dead forest. Not voices. Roots. The ancient vines that wrapped the Hollow from ceiling to floor trembled, as though feeding on the dread of the gathered children.
"Each trial will test a different truth," said the Flayer. "Strength. Will. Pain. Deception. The fifth? You will find out."
With a flick of his hand, the roots erupted upward at the center of the chamber.
From the pulsing ground rose ten carved effigies, sculpted from bone, teeth, and blackwood. Each depicted a pair of children, featureless, but positioned as mirror images. One reaching forward. One pulling back.
Kael's effigy was scorched, its limbs cracked and smoking. Seret's half was carved with runes, glowing faint green, like her blood-colored fire. Their positioning was tense, aggressive. Not a team. Rivals.
The message was clear.
You may fight together now. But soon… you won't.
"Pair Kael and Seret," Mother Salt murmured, "step forward."
They did.
The crowd went silent.
Mother Salt reached into her chest.
Not her robe. Her chest.
Flesh parted like water, and from her ribs she withdrew a scroll sealed with thorns.
"Your first trial begins at the edge of the Whispering Roots. You have until the second bell tomorrow to find the mouth. Survive what waits within. Return with your answer."
"What answer?" Kael asked before he could stop himself.
Seret didn't look at him. Just muttered: "You're not supposed to ask."
But Mother Salt grinned wider. "A question asked in darkness is still a torch. May it burn."
She dropped the scroll into his hands.
The thorns bit deep.
Blood trickled down his wrist.
The moment it touched the roots at his feet, they surged backward, revealing a path lined with bioluminescent fungus, descending into the Hollow's oldest, most untouched tunnels.
"Begin," the Flayer intoned.
The descent was not a staircase.
It was a wound.
The tunnel that opened beneath the effigies pulsed like a living throat, lined with root-veins and fleshy moss that recoiled at their steps. The earth beneath their feet grew soft, then wet, then slick with a secretion that smelled of bile and copper. It swallowed sound. Even their footsteps became whispers.
Kael and Seret said nothing at first.
She walked ahead, knife in one hand, the other coated in slow-burning green fire for light.
He followed, scroll clenched tight, blood still dripping from the thorn-punctures in his palm.
At last, he broke the silence.
"They're going to try to break us."
"They already have," Seret replied. "This is just the part where they watch."
They passed carvings in the walls, etched by claw or chisel, it was impossible to tell. Symbols older than the Hollow. Spirals nested within sigils. Scenes of children kneeling before things that wore the skin of men but had far too many teeth.
"What's the 'mouth'?" Kael asked quietly.
Seret didn't answer at first.
Then: "Depends who you ask. Some say it's the buried god the Hollow was built to feed. Others say it's just a metaphor. A place that speaks the truth to anyone foolish enough to listen."
Kael looked at her sidelong. "And what do you think?"
She stopped walking.
Her flame cast long shadows along the wall, and in the flickering light, her silhouette trembled slightly.
"I think it doesn't matter," she said. "Because whatever it is, it's going to hurt."
The tunnel narrowed the deeper they went.
Soon, they were crawling. Roots twisted like ribs above and below them, some brushing their skin with wet, inquisitive tendrils. The light from Seret's fire began to dim, not flickering, but shrinking, as if being devoured by the dark instead of piercing it.
Then they heard it.
A voice.
Not words. Not sound.
But emotion.
Loneliness.
Desperation.
Guilt.
It bled from the walls.
Kael froze.
"Do you hear that?" he whispered.
Seret looked at him, and for once, she seemed pale beneath her usual mask of cold fire. "It's not real. Don't listen."
"But it sounds like, " he stopped.
Because the next voice… was his mother's.
"Kael… where are you? I can't find you. Please… baby, answer me…"
He gasped, knees buckling.
Seret grabbed his collar and yanked him forward. "Don't listen to the roots. They remember everything. That's how they feed. Keep moving."
But Kael looked back.
Just for a second.
And saw her.
A woman, wrapped in white and blood, standing at the edge of the shadows.
Her face, warm, broken, real.
"Kael," she wept. "It's so dark. Don't leave me again…"
He almost stepped toward her.
But Seret slapped him across the face, hard.
"Don't. It's not her. It's the Hollow."
He blinked, and the figure was gone.
Only roots remained.
They reached the chamber near dawn.
It wasn't a room.
It was a cathedral carved into living stone.
Columns of bone stretched into blackness above. Pools of still water reflected nothing. And at the far end stood the mouth.
A massive stone face, half-swallowed by the roots. Its lips were cracked, crooked, gaping open in a scream that would never end. No eyes. No nose. Just that impossible, yawning maw.
And inside it, something moved.
A shape. Shifting. Breathing.
Waiting.
Kael stepped forward, every instinct screaming run. But his feet moved anyway.
Seret followed, slower. One hand on his shoulder. The other, still flaming.
When they reached the mouth, a voice poured out, not from the face, but from inside their minds.
"To pass… speak the name you have buried."
Kael's breath caught.
Seret stared at the mouth, jaw clenched.
Neither moved.
The voice came again, harder.
"Speak. Or be devoured."
"Speak. Or be devoured."
The voice was not a suggestion. It was a command wrapped in inevitability, like gravity, or fire, or the scream that follows a knife's kiss.
Kael swallowed hard.
Seret stared ahead, unmoving. Her lips parted, but she said nothing. Her flame began to flicker, but she didn't notice.
Kael took a single step forward.
The mouth loomed above him, ten times his height, cracked lips curled into agony. The air grew colder, wetter, and so dense it was like breathing through cloth soaked in blood.
"The name you buried," the voice hissed again. "Say it. Or become it."
His throat constricted.
He knew the name. Of course he did. He had swallowed it every night since that day. Since the fire. Since the screaming.
Since she was taken.
He opened his mouth.
"…Mother," he whispered.
Nothing happened.
The mouth did not move.
The voice came again, softer now. "Not the name she gave you. The one they gave you. The one you hide from even yourself."
Kael's heart stuttered.
His knees buckled.
Seret turned to him, eyes wide with sudden realization. "Don't say it," she whispered, voice sharp. "You don't have to, "
"I do," Kael said hoarsely. "It's the only way."
And then he spoke it.
The name they gave him in the Hollow.
The name the cult had carved into his spine during the first night of silence.
The name he had buried so deep he only heard it in nightmares.
"Veyr."
The mouth opened wider.
The roots screamed.
And the ground beneath Kael collapsed.
He fell without falling.
There was no gravity, only pull. The roots seized him, coiling around his limbs like serpents of blood and wood. They didn't crush him. They peeled him.
Skin. Memory. Thought.
Images shattered around him: his mother's face. A white horse. The sound of fire. The sting of betrayal. The first time he killed. The first time he laughed afterward.
The roots dragged each memory into themselves like starving mouths.
Seret screamed his name, his true name, but it was too late.
Kael was gone.
Swallowed by the Hollow.
Swallowed by himself.
Darkness.
No air.
No pain.
Just a hollowed echo of everything he once was.
And then… something whispered.
Not from the mouth.
Not from the roots.
From within.
"Do you want to come back?"
Kael didn't speak.
He remembered.
Seret's hand, reaching for his. Her voice. The smell of her fire. The heat of her fury. The quiet comfort when they sat together in silence, side by side after a kill neither of them wanted to celebrate.
He reached toward it.
Clawed upward.
And screamed.
The mouth spat him out in a spray of black bile and steaming root-flesh.
Kael landed on his hands and knees, coughing, shaking, eyes wide and bloodshot. His fingers trembled. His arms were covered in fresh scars, new ones, in patterns he didn't recognize.
Seret dropped to her knees beside him.
"Kael," she said, voice small. "You came back."
But he didn't answer right away.
He looked down at his hands.
Then up at the mouth.
Then at her.
And finally whispered, "No. I didn't."