Severin had known darkness before.
Battlefields at dusk.
Collapsed tunnels thick with dust and screams.
The long, sleepless nights after battle, when the world narrowed to breath and regret and the certainty that dawn would only make everything worse.
This was different.
This darkness pressed inward.
It did not simply surround them, it leaned, listening, heavy with expectation. Every inhale scraped his lungs raw, the air tasting of metal and ash and something faintly sweet beneath it, like rot preserved too long in stone.
Aelindra stood just ahead of him.
That was how Severin anchored himself.
Her silhouette was faintly outlined by the glow bleeding through her hands, gold threading beneath her skin like veins of living fire. The light was not bright enough to banish the dark, nothing here could, but it was enough to prove she was real. Solid. Still breathing.
Still here.
His chest tightened painfully.
She should not have been here. None of them should.
And yet the Hollow had taken them anyway.
Severin's fingers curled slowly, flexing as sensation returned in uneven waves. Every movement sent a dull ache through his bones, as though the fall had rearranged something inside him that had not quite settled back into place.
He swallowed and tasted blood.
The Crownfire stirred.
Not flaring, not yet, but restless, agitated, like a caged thing pacing the inside of his ribs. The Hollow felt it. He was certain of that. The same way the Eidolon had felt it. The same way the Herald always did.
A beacon.
A curse.
Aelindra stopped suddenly.
Severin nearly collided with her back before she turned, glow flaring instinctively, her attention snapping to him with sharp, immediate concern.
"I'm here," she said. "No one moves alone."
The words hit him harder than the fall had.
No one moves alone.
Not you will be fine.
Not we will survive.
Just: I am here.
The Hollow did not respond.
But Severin felt the shift, a subtle tightening in the air, like something ancient had adjusted its focus.
He did not like that its attention lingered on her.
Or that part of him, the oldest, most frightened part, recognized the way the mountain watched her as something dangerously close to reverence.
They moved again, carefully.
Every step deeper felt less like descent and more like intrusion. The stone beneath their boots gave way to something softer, granular, as though the Hollow's bones had been ground down into dust by time and memory. Severin forced himself not to think too closely about what that dust might be made of.
He watched Aelindra walk.
Watched the way her shoulders stayed squared despite the ache she was clearly fighting. The way her hands curled and uncurled at her sides, light pulsing unevenly beneath her skin. She was cautious, controlled, but there was no hesitation in her steps.
She was listening.
Not with ears.
With something deeper.
It unsettled him.
Because Severin had spent his entire life learning what it meant to be called.
First by Blood.
Then by duty.
Then by fire.
He knew what it looked like when something ancient reached out and decided you belonged to it.
And the Hollow had chosen her.
A low vibration rolled through the chamber beneath their feet, barely perceptible, like the echo of a heartbeat buried miles below stone.
Caelan swore softly under his breath.
Marienne tightened her grip on her bow.
Mira's charm flickered, its glow dimming and brightening in erratic pulses as if struggling to orient itself in a place where magic did not behave correctly.
Arveth walked last, his staff dragging faint grooves through the ash-like ground. His face was drawn tight, eyes unfocused in the way Severin had learned meant the old mage was listening to things no one else could hear.
"Does anyone else feel like we're being… weighed?" Caelan muttered.
"We are," Arveth replied without looking up. "The Hollow measures everything that enters it."
"That's comforting," Caelan said flatly.
"It should not be," Arveth answered.
The tunnel widened again, opening into a chamber even larger than the last. The ceiling vanished into darkness so complete Severin's eyes ached trying to trace it. Veins of dim light ran through the walls here, thicker and more defined, pulsing slowly in muted golds and bruised violets.
The glow in Aelindra's hands intensified.
She inhaled sharply, but she did not stop walking.
Severin felt it then, the pull.
Not the violent wrenching force of the Eidolon.
This was subtler.
A pressure behind his sternum, insistent but patient, like fingers resting just beneath his heart, waiting for permission to close.
He staggered.
Aelindra turned instantly, her hand closing around his wrist before he could even speak.
The contact steadied him.
The Crownfire quieted, not extinguished, but… contained.
Her brows knit together. "What is it?"
He hesitated.
There were too many truths piled between them now. Too many silences already paid for in blood and near-death.
"It's aware of me," he said finally. "Not like the Eidolon. This is… older. Slower."
Her grip tightened. "Is it pulling?"
"Yes," he admitted. Then, softer, "But it's not in a hurry."
That frightened him more than anything else could have.
Arveth stopped abruptly.
The staff in his hands trembled.
"We are at a threshold," the old mage said. "From here on, the Hollow does not simply observe."
Aelindra's gaze lifted. "It engages."
Arveth looked at her sharply. "Yes."
Something passed between them then, recognition, and unease.
Severin saw it.
The Hollow did too.
The chamber ahead sloped downward into a vast basin of blackened stone, its surface etched with ancient markings half-eroded by time. At the center stood a formation that made Severin's breath catch painfully in his chest.
A pillar.
No, not a pillar.
A spine.
Stone curved upward in a slow, twisting arc, rib-like protrusions branching outward and vanishing into shadow. The veins of light converged there, feeding into it, pulsing faintly as though something beneath the stone still breathed.
Severin knew, with a sick certainty, that if he touched it...
No.
When he touched it
Something irrevocable would happen.
Aelindra stepped forward without realizing it.
The glow in her hands flared brighter than it ever had before, gold threading up her wrists, faint lines tracing her forearms like a map only the Hollow could read.
Arveth inhaled sharply. "Aelindra, slowly."
She stopped, breath shallow. "It knows me."
"Yes," Arveth said. "And that should terrify you."
She swallowed. "It doesn't."
That was the moment Severin understood.
The Hollow was not reacting to her power.
It was reacting to her absence of something.
Fear, not gone, but altered. Broken open, reshaped, no longer a barrier but a door left ajar.
She had healed him once at terrible cost.
The Hollow remembered.
It remembered the kind of magic that did not demand worship.
The kind that did not conquer.
The kind that endured.
A deep sound rolled through the chamber, not a roar, not a voice, but resonance, like stone answering stone.
The spine pulsed.
Severin's knees buckled.
Aelindra caught him again, her arms strong despite the tremor running through her.
"No," she said fiercely, not to him, to the Hollow. "You don't get to take him."
The pressure surged.
The Crownfire flared in protest.
Pain lanced through Severin's chest as heat bloomed beneath his skin, fire threading his veins, answering a call it had been bound to obey long before he had been born.
He screamed.
Aelindra screamed with him.
Her hands blazed.
Not healing.
Not destruction.
Something else entirely.
The Hollow shuddered.
For the first time since they had fallen into its depths
It hesitated.
And Severin realized, with a mix of terror and awe, that whatever the Hollow remembered…
Whatever it recognized in Aelindra.
Had the power to defy even the Crownfire.
And somewhere deep beneath the mountain, something ancient began to reconsider a fate it had thought inevitable.
Severin felt it before he understood it.
Not the mountain's weight, not the cold gnawing through his boots or the ache lodged deep in his bones, but the shift. A minute change in the pressure of the hollow, like a held breath released and taken again with different intent. The Range was listening. And now, it was thinking.
He swallowed and forced himself to stay upright.
Every instinct he had, soldier's training, royal conditioning, the hard-earned reflexes of survival, screamed at him to catalogue threats, to plan, to move. None of that helped here. Down here, strategy felt small. Fragile. The Crownfire coiled uneasily in his chest, restless in a way that made his skin prickle, like embers stirred by an unseen wind.
It wasn't reaching outward.
It was reacting.
Severin's gaze kept finding Aelindra without his permission. The faint gold at her hands painted the stone with soft light, and the hollow responded to her in ways it never had to him. He had been pulled here, dragged, claimed, hunted but she was…recognized.
The difference mattered.
He hated that a part of him felt relief.
Another part felt something closer to dread.
If the depths knew her, then whatever waited below had always known of her too. And if that was true, then the danger she faced was not incidental. It was written. Old. Patient.
His fingers curled at his side, resisting the urge to reach for her again, to anchor himself in something solid and human. He had already leaned on her too much. Every time the Crownfire flared or faltered, it was her presence that steadied it, her touch that quieted the pull. That imbalance frightened him more than the dark.
I am not your burden, he told himself fiercely. Not hers.
Yet when the hollow pulsed, subtle, vast, aware, his breath caught, and it was Aelindra's steadiness that kept his knees from buckling.
Severin closed his eyes for half a heartbeat and listened inward.
The Herald was distant. Furious. Searching.
Whatever lay beneath the mountain was closer.
And it was not calling to him.
That realization landed heavier than any fear. He had spent so long being the thing pursued, the key, the tether. For once, he was not the center of the storm.
Aelindra was.
Severin opened his eyes and made a quiet vow as the hollow breathed around them: whatever ancient fate was shifting below, whatever choice the depths were reconsidering, it would not take her unchallenged.
Not while he still drew breath.
Not while the Crownfire answered his will.