The eclipse was a black coin on the sky when they reached the outer crypt gate.
Vaeloris's royal necropolis had been carved into the roots of the palace hill centuries before the first king ever dreamed of thrones. Marble arches, bronze gates, statues of forgotten monarchs whose names had been erased by time and moss. All of it now stood cracked open like an old jaw.
Riven stopped at the threshold and rolled his shoulders.
"Feel that?" he asked quietly.
Kael did.
The sigil on his chest had begun to itch, then burn, then ache in a way that had nothing to do with wounds. It was the feeling of a leash tightening from the inside.
"Clock's running out," Riven said. "Less than three hours now. After that, the Hollowing drags me back unless you pay the toll."
Kael's mouth went dry. "What toll?"
Riven didn't answer immediately. Instead he placed one palm against the bronze gate. Lightning crawled across the metal, tracing runes that flared sickly green before dying again.
"Everything has a price, Kael. You broke the first chain. That bought us twelve hours of freedom. Keeping me longer means giving the storm something it wants more than my obedience."
He turned, eyes suddenly ancient.
"Your blood, your years, your memories, or your voice. One of those. Maybe more later. That's how it always starts."
Kael stared at the gate, then at his own scarred hands. The sparks that had danced there all morning were dimmer now, flickering like candle flames in wind.
"I'm not losing you," he said. The words surprised him with their certainty.
Riven's grin was soft and terrible. "Then let's make these hours count."
He kicked the gate. Bronze screamed and tore from its hinges.
They descended.
The air grew colder with every step. Torches long dead still hung in iron sconces; Riven touched one and lightning leapt from his fingers, igniting blue-white flame that cast no warmth. The stair spiralled down past burial niches where kings and queens lay in shattered sarcophagi, their gold melted into puddles, their bones black and brittle.
Halfway down, the walls began to weep.
Not water.
Black threads seeped from the stone, thin at first, then thicker, pooling on the steps like spilled ink that moved with purpose.
Riven snarled. "Hollowtide's early. It smells the grace period bleeding out."
The threads rose into vague human shapes—faceless, reaching.
Riven swung the butcher's cleaver. Lightning followed the arc, shearing the shadows apart. They re-formed behind him.
Kael's dagger woke in his grip, edge glowing faint violet. He slashed at the nearest thread; it parted with a sound like tearing silk and did not re-form.
"Good," Riven grunted. "Obsidian cuts deeper than steel here. Keep moving."
They ran.
The stair ended in a vast circular chamber lit by a single shaft of eclipse-light that fell from a crack high above. In the centre stood a stone bier. On it lay a woman.
Not a corpse.
Sylvara of the Tempest Bloodline was perfectly preserved—skin pale as winter moonlight, hair the colour of stormclouds before rain, arms crossed over a breastplate of living bronze vines. Around her neck hung a collar of black iron and green stormglass. Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell in slow, deliberate breaths.
The second relic.
Between them and the bier, the Hollowtide had already gathered into a single figure.
It wore Garrick's face.
Not a perfect copy—eyes too dark, mouth too wide, skin rippling like water under black silk—but close enough that Kael's heart stuttered.
The thing smiled with Garrick's broken teeth.
"Wretch," it gurgled, voice layered with a thousand stolen throats. "You left us to rot."
Riven stepped forward, cleaver raised. "He left you to live. You're the ones who chose to feed the dark."
The Garrick-thing tilted its head.
"Twelve hours almost gone, giant. When the boy pays the price, we'll be waiting inside whatever he gives up. A memory. A voice. A piece of soul. Plenty of room for all of us."
It spread arms that unravelled into ribbons of night.
Riven's knuckles whitened on the cleaver. "Over my corpse."
"Again," the thing laughed.
Kael felt the sigil burn hotter. Two hours left. Maybe less.
He stepped past Riven.
The Garrick-thing's empty eyes tracked him.
Kael stopped an arm's length away.
"You're not him," he said quietly. "Garrick died trying to save me. You're just the Hollowing wearing his skin like a coat."
The thing's smile widened until the cheeks split.
"Then come closer, little ghost. Let me show you what's left of him."
It lunged.
Kael met it with the dagger.
The blade sank into the thing's chest and kept going, as though the darkness had no substance. For one heartbeat the Garrick-face flickered—real eyes, real pain, real plea.
Then the darkness convulsed and tried to pour itself down the blade into Kael's arm.
Riven roared and brought the cleaver down in a lightning-wreathed arc that severed the connection. Black threads whipped free, hissing like snakes.
Kael stumbled back, gasping. The dagger was drinking again—drinking too much, too fast. Violet light crawled up his wrist, burning cold.
Riven grabbed his shoulder. "Focus! You take its power, it takes yours. Cut the flow or it'll hollow you out!"
Kael clenched his teeth and forced the dagger downward. The light dimmed, but the cold stayed.
Across the chamber, Sylvara's eyes opened.
They were the green of lightning seen through leaves.
She sat up slowly, bronze vines creaking across her armour. The collar around her throat pulsed once, angry red.
Her voice was wind through high branches.
"Who dares wake me before the final eclipse?"
Riven bowed his head—not submission, but respect. "One who broke his own chain, Beastmaster. And the boy who made it possible."
Sylvara's gaze found Kael. Something ancient and weary softened behind the storm-green.
"So the fracture begins," she murmured. "I felt the throne shatter. Felt the old laws scream."
She swung her legs off the bier and stood. The collar flared again, chains of red light snapping tight around her throat, trying to drag her back down.
She snarled, teeth too sharp for human. "Not today."
Kael stepped forward. "We have less than two hours. Riven says—"
"I know what he says." Sylvara's eyes flicked to the sigil burning on Kael's chest, then to the identical one on Riven. "And I know the price."
She walked to the edge of the bier, every step leaving frost on the stone.
"The collar will let me fight for twelve hours, same as him. After that, one of you pays. Or I go back to sleep for another thousand years."
The Hollowtide surged, forming a wall of writhing faces—Garrick, Lira, the little brother, dozens more Kael didn't recognise but somehow knew.
Sylvara looked at the wall, then at Kael.
"Choose quickly, StormBorn. They're done asking."
Kael's hand tightened on the dagger until his knuckles bled.
He looked at Riven. At Sylvara. At the faces of the dead wearing hunger like masks.
Then he did the only thing that made sense.
He walked straight into the Hollowtide.
The darkness closed over him like water.
Riven shouted. Sylvara cursed in a language older than mountains.
Inside the dark, the voices were gentle.
Give us a memory, little ghost.
Just one.
The day your mother left you in the gutter.
The night you first stole bread and cried because it tasted like shame.
Give us one and we'll let your friends live.
Kael kept walking.
The voices grew angry.
Give us your voice. You never needed it anyway.
Give us ten years of your life. You'll still have enough to suffer.
Kael kept walking.
The darkness thickened until he couldn't see his own hands.
Give us Riven, the voices whispered, sweet as poison.
Let the giant take the price. He's died before. He won't mind dying again.
Kael stopped.
For the first time since the cistern, he spoke aloud.
"No."
He lifted the dagger and cut his own left palm open to the bone.
Blood—bright, human, defiant—spilled across the obsidian blade.
"I pay," he said. "With my blood. Not his. Not hers. Mine."
He drove the dagger into the heart of the darkness.
The Hollowtide screamed.
Light exploded outward—violet, white, furious. The faces shattered like glass. The chamber flooded with stormwind that smelled of pine and lightning and open sky.
When the light faded, Kael was on his knees in the centre of the chamber.
The Hollowtide was gone.
His left hand was a ruin of torn flesh and white bone, but the bleeding had already stopped. The sigils on his chest and Riven's chest both pulsed once, satisfied.
Riven stared at him, something like horror and pride warring on his face.
Sylvara knelt, gently lifting Kael's ruined hand.
"Foolish child," she whispered. "You just paid for both of us. Forever."
Kael managed a tired smile. "Then you'd better make it worth it."
Above them, the eclipse flickered—the first time it had ever faltered.
Sylvara rose, bronze vines blooming across her armour like living things.
Outside, something vast roared in pain and rage.
The Hollowing had tasted its first real wound.
And it did not like the flavour.