They fled the Mirror House as if the pristine walls themselves were on fire. They ran blindly, scrambling back up the treacherous black rock of the valley, not looking back. The image of the painting was burned into Lio's mind: the perfect family with the perfectly shaped hole where his sister was supposed to be. It was a truth more terrifying than any monster. It fractured the last, fragile bonds between them. Ira was a man in a waking coma, his hope for a perfect past snatched away and replaced by a riddle his broken mind could not solve. Sera was a pillar of taut, silent terror, her composure shattered by the portrait's terrible pronouncement.
They stumbled through the deepening twilight of the alien mountains for hours, driven by pure fear. It was the light that they saw first, a cold, unnatural luminescence spilling from a vast, sunken crater ahead. It wasn't the warm, dancing light of a fire, but a steady, phosphorescent blue green glow, like the bioluminescence of the deepest, most monstrous sea creatures. Then came the sound: a low, continuous, sibilant whisper, like thousands of voices sharing secrets in a library the size of a city.
Sera froze, holding up a hand for them to stop. Lio's heart hammered against his ribs. He knew that sound. It was the sound the Hollow had made, magnified a thousand times. Cautiously, they crept to the crater's edge and looked down.
The sight was a tableau from a fever dream. The crater floor was filled with Hollows. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the tall, smoke like figures glided through the eerie green light, which emanated from strange, glowing fungi clinging to the crater walls. They weren't fighting or hunting. They were… trading.
Makeshift stalls, formed from what looked like obsidian and bone, were arranged in a loose circle. This was a place of commerce. This was the Hollow Market.
Horrified and fascinated, Lio watched from the shadows. He saw a gaunt, shivering woman approach a Hollow at one of the stalls. She whispered something, her expression a mask of anguish. Lio couldn't hear the words, but he knew she was giving something away—the memory of a child's laugh, the name of a lover, the feeling of sun on her skin. The Hollow listened, its blank face impassive. When she was done, it extended a long, thin finger and pointed her toward a path leading out of the crater. Information for a memory. The woman sobbed once, a dry, racking sound, and staggered away.
At another stall, a man with a desperate look in his eyes held out a piece of dried, rotting fish. A Hollow considered it, then shook its head slowly. The man, frantic, then offered his own hand. The Hollow placed its fingers on his temple. The man's face went slack, his eyes glazing over with a vacant, blissful look. When the Hollow removed its hand, the man stumbled back, a bewildered, empty smile on his face. He had forgotten his hunger, or perhaps his own name. The Hollow, in return, ignored the fish and gave him a small piece of the glowing fungus. A light to carry into his new, emptier darkness.
The constant, overlapping whisper was the market's murmur, the sound of countless stolen moments—regrets, joys, fears, and identities—being bartered like common currency.
Suddenly, the whispering near them quieted. A single Hollow, taller than the others, turned its void like eyes directly toward their hiding place. It had sensed them. Sensed their memories, rich and whole and un traded. Lio felt a psychic pressure, a cold, curious probing at the edges of his mind. They were exposed.
It was Ira who broke. His face, already a canvas of despair, twisted into a look of final, terrible decision. He wanted the peace he'd seen on the memory seller's face. He wanted the blissful emptiness. He let out a low moan and began to stumble forward, down the slope, toward the market. Toward the promise of forgetting.
"Father, no!" Lio hissed, grabbing his arm. Sera lunged for his other side, but he was lost to them, a man seeking the ultimate anesthetic.
Before they could wrestle him back, Mina stepped past them. She walked calmly to the edge of the slope, in full view of the market and the tall Hollow that was watching them. She was small and unafraid. She looked down at the gathering of monsters, at the surreal commerce of souls, and spoke.
Her voice was not loud, but it carried with an impossible clarity through the crater. She said a single word. It was the same word of power Sera had used to banish the first Hollow.
The effect was instantaneous. The tall Hollow did not recoil in fear. Instead, it inclined its head in a gesture that looked unnervingly like a nod of acknowledgement, of respect. It turned away, and the whispering in the market resumed its previous volume. They had been seen, judged, and dismissed. They were not customers. They were not for sale.
Mina turned and walked back to them, taking her father's unresisting hand. Sera and Lio, stunned into silence, followed her as she led them along the crater's edge, past the eerie, glowing market where life's most precious currency was traded away for scraps. Lio looked back one last time at the nightmarish bazaar, and understood that survival in this world wasn't just about finding food or shelter. It was about the grim calculus of what pieces of your soul you were willing to sell to see another sunrise.