It began with a sound no one could place.
Not thunder. Not an earthquake.
A low, wet groan—as if the world itself were shifting on its spine.
In Lyothara, children stopped playing. Elders dropped their cups. Even the wounded in the healing tents fell silent.
Then the ground split.
Not violently. Not all at once.
But in thin, black lines that spiderwebbed from the base of the Great Tree outward—through courtyards, across streets, under barracks.
Where the cracks opened, cold mist rose. Not white. Not gray.
A mist the color of drowned stars.
And it carried whispers.
"We remember light… and we hunger."
In the Chamber of Roots, King Aerion stared at the fissure now running through the marble floor.
"It's coming up," Elyar Morindel whispered, kneeling beside it. He dipped his fingers into the mist—and jerked back as if burned. "It's not void. It's… absence. Pure, hungry absence."
Lira clutched the breathing book to her chest. "Valenthis wasn't the Hollow. He was the lock. And whatever is down there… it's the key turning."
Prince Kaelin rushed in, armor smeared with soot. "The western wall—the stone is crumbling from within. Not siege damage. It's… rotting."
Thorin followed, axe in hand, face grim. "The dwarven runes are fading. Like the stone forgot how to hold itself together."
Malrik appeared in the shadows, voice tight. "Darien hasn't returned. And the goblin camps are quiet. Too quiet."
Aelarion, who had stood silent by the Tree, finally spoke—his voice hollow with dread.
"It's not rising. It's waking. And when it opens its eyes… it will unmake everything that remembers fear."
Outside, the cracks widened.
In the market square, a fissure swallowed a fountain whole. The water didn't drain—it vanished, as if erased from memory.
In the barracks, two elves touched the mist—and screamed as their tattoos of the Great Tree faded from their skin, leaving blank, pale flesh behind.
Worst of all, the Tree itself began to bleed.
Thick, golden sap oozed from its bark—not warm, but cold. Where it pooled, the stone blackened and crumbled.
"The Tree is trying to fight it," Lira realized, tears in her eyes. "But it's fighting something that doesn't exist in our world. How do you wound a memory?"
Deep beneath the city, in the oldest vaults where elven kings were buried, the tombs began to open.
Not by force.
By invitation.
From within each sarcophagus, skeletal hands reached out—not to attack, but to point east, toward the Tree.
And from their jaws, a single word echoed through the tunnels:
"Feed."
On the eastern ridge, Darien watched the city tremble.
He'd escaped the camp, bleeding from a dozen goblin arrows, his ash-hand barely holding together. But he hadn't gone far. He couldn't.
Because he felt it too—the pull from below. A hunger so vast it made the First Hollow seem like a child's nightmare.
He knew what was coming.
And he knew Lyothara couldn't survive it.
Stumbling forward, he raised his good hand and made the signal only Malrik would understand: three short flashes of violet light from his failing ash-hand.
"I'm alive. But the real enemy is rising."
Then he turned and limped toward the city gates—not as a hero returning, but as a warning made flesh.
Inside the Chamber of Roots, Lira opened the book one last time.
The pages were no longer blank.
No longer cryptic.
They showed a single image: the Great Tree, roots torn, branches burning…
and beneath it, a shape with too many eyes, too many mouths, none of them real.
Beneath it, one sentence:
"When the First Fear wakes, only a sacrifice of true names can seal it again."
She looked at the King. At Thorin. At Kaelin.
Then she whispered the question that would haunt them all:
"Whose name is true enough to give?"
Outside, the mist thickened.
And the cracks reached the Tree's roots.