Corin didn't ask Maer to explain.
He didn't need to.
The memories had already begun to surface—slow, jagged, like frost creeping through old wood.
He sat outside the house, watching mist curl through the trees. The forest was quiet, but not still. It listened.
He remembered the first time they called him monster.
He was five.
A woman bent down to tie his shoe, then froze. Her gaze locked on his face. Not his mouth. Not his expression.
His eyes.
One pale silver. One pale gold.
She recoiled.
He hadn't done anything. He hadn't said anything. He'd just looked up.
That night, his parents stopped letting him play in the square.
—
They told themselves it was for his safety.
But Corin remembered the way his mother flinched when he laughed. The way his father avoided eye contact. The way they whispered when they thought he was asleep.
"He's not right," his mother said once. "He doesn't blink like the others."
"He watches too closely," his father replied. "Like he sees something we don't."
Corin didn't understand.
He only knew that when he cried, no one came. That when he asked questions, they changed the subject. That when he dreamed, he woke up alone.
—
They left him.
Packed their things one morning, quiet and fast. No goodbyes. No explanations. Just a note to the elders: We can't raise him. He's not ours anymore.
Corin was seven.
He stood in the doorway of their empty house, holding the note.
The village didn't take him in. They fed him, sometimes. Let him sleep in the shed behind the grain store. But they didn't speak to him unless they had to.
They called him the boy. Then the marked one. Then the Hollow's child.
He wasn't marked.
He was just born.
—
The Hollow was supposed to take everything.
It ravaged crops. Swallowed livestock. Bent trees into shapes that made no sense. It whispered through the wind, made children cry in their sleep.
But it didn't take Corin.
It watched him.
Followed him.
And one day, it spoke.
Not in words. Not in voice.
In presence.
He was nine, sitting beneath the twisted ash tree at the edge of the woods. He'd run there after a villager threw a stone at him. His lip was bleeding. His hands were shaking.
The wind shifted.
The tree bent toward him.
And the Hollow wrapped around him like mist.
He didn't scream.
He didn't run.
He whispered, "Are you lonely too?"
The wind stilled.
The tree stopped creaking.
And something ancient settled beside him.
—
Maer found him sitting on the steps, eyes distant.
"You remembered," she said.
Corin nodded.
"They said I was cursed," he murmured. "That I was born wrong."
Maer sat beside him. "You were born different."
Corin looked at her. "And that was enough."
Maer didn't deny it.
"They feared what they couldn't explain," she said. "And fear makes monsters out of people."
Corin's hands curled into fists. "They abandoned me."
"They erased you," Maer said. "But the forest doesn't forget."
—
He remembered the night they took him.
Blindfolded. Bound. Dragged through the woods.
His mother wasn't there.
His father wasn't either.
Just the elders. Just the villagers. Just the ritual.
They called it a sacrifice.
They called it tradition.
They called it mercy.
But Corin remembered the way the wind screamed when they left him.
The way the trees bent toward him.
The way the Hollow didn't swallow him.
It sat beside him.
It waited.
It stayed.
—
Now, sitting beside Maer, he felt the weight of it all.
Not just the abandonment.
The inheritance.
"They called me a monster," he said.
Maer looked at him. "Then show them what a monster remembers."
Corin didn't answer.
But the forest did.
A low hum rose from the trees—not angry. Not cruel.
Just awake.
And this time, it sounded like a friend.