Mordren walked like a man who'd forgotten he was old.
No — that wasn't right. He walked like a man pretending to be old who occasionally forgot to keep pretending. His shuffle would smooth into something fluid and precise for three steps, then he'd catch himself and add the stumble back in. Like watching someone wear a costume that didn't fit anymore.
We passed the garrison checkpoint at the treeline. The two hunters on duty glanced at Mordren — the usual mix of pity and dismissal the town reserved for its resident drunk — then looked at me with something worse.
Why is the Hollow following the drunk into monster territory?
Neither stopped us. A Hollow and a drunk walking into the forest wasn't their problem. If anything, it simplified the math they'd been doing since yesterday.
The forest swallowed us in three steps. That's how it worked in the Reaches — the treeline wasn't a gradual transition. One moment you were in cleared land. The next, ancient pines closed overhead like a jaw and the Aether mist thickened until the air itself tasted silver.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Somewhere nobody will see."
"See what?"
Mordren stopped. Turned. Those sober eyes pinned me against the nearest trunk without him moving a muscle.
"Tell me what happened last night. After the ceremony. When you were alone."
The cold thing pulsed behind my ribs. I hesitated — not because I didn't trust him. Because saying it out loud meant admitting it was real.
"I saw pages," I said. "Infinite pages. In a language I've never learned. And my name was written in the center. Like it had been there forever."
Mordren's expression didn't change. But his hands — those trembling, wine-shaking hands — went completely still.
"How long has the cold been in your chest?"
"Always. As long as I can remember."
"And the dreams? The world ending?"
My throat tightened. "How do you know about—"
"Because I had them too." He said it the way you'd say the sky is blue. Fact. Ancient. Exhausting. "Different world. Same ending. Same silence. Same waking up somewhere that wasn't home with something vast and broken lodged behind your ribs."
The forest was very quiet.
"You're a Hollow," I said.
"Was." He held up his hand. In the Aether-thick air, I could see it — faint, barely visible. A shimmer around his fingers. The ghost of something that used to be there. Like looking at the outline of a painting that had been scraped off its canvas. "Shattered my own grimoire thirty years ago. Only way to hide from the people hunting us."
"Hunting us."
"Every Hollow born in the last eight hundred years has been found and killed. Infants. Children. Teenagers who'd barely awakened. A secret order embedded in every major institution on this continent — hunting, finding, erasing. Quietly. Efficiently. Completely." He watched my face. "You're the first one they've missed in decades. And they won't miss you for long."
The Aether mist curled between us. Somewhere deeper in the forest, something heavy moved through undergrowth. The sound was closer than comfortable.
"Why?" I managed.
"Because the last Hollow who reached full power tore a hole in the continent that still hasn't healed." Mordren's voice was flat. Reciting history he'd lived inside. "Eight hundred years ago. The Shattered Reach — you've heard of it. A wound in reality the size of a kingdom. Thousands dead. And the people who survived decided that no one should ever have that kind of power again."
"But you said Hollows are being created. The dreams. The dead world. Something is sending us here—"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Mordren almost smiled. It looked like it hurt.
"That's your third question. And I told you — you'd need it later." He turned and kept walking. "Right now, you need something more immediate than answers."
"Like what?"
"Proof that you're not broken."
He stopped at a clearing. Small. Maybe thirty feet across. The Aether mist was dense here — thick enough that the air shimmered like a heat haze and my skin tingled where it touched. A natural Aether pocket. The forest was full of them in the Reaches.
Mordren crouched. Picked something up from the base of a tree.
A beast core.
Small. Dull amber. Maybe Tier 1 — the crystallized Aether from a dead common-grade beast. Worth a few coins at market. To a normal person, useful for minor grimoire fuel.
He tossed it to me. I caught it.
It was warm.
"Hold it," Mordren said. "And reach for that cold thing in your chest. The presence. The weight. Reach for it the way you did last night — not with your mind. With your need."
I closed my fingers around the core. Pressed my other hand to my sternum. And reached.
Not with thought. With the desperate, raw, aching want that had been building since the Awakener said Hollow and the world stopped looking at me. The want to be something. To matter. To have a single page in a book that everyone said was empty.
The cold answered.
It rose like a tide — not violent like last night, not the hurricane flood. Controlled. Focused. Flowing from my chest down my arm and into my palm where the beast core sat.
The core cracked.
Light bled through the fractures — not the golden glow of a normal grimoire inscription. Something rawer. Wilder. A light that didn't have a color I could name.
And I felt it happen.
A word — no, an understanding — carved itself into existence somewhere inside me. Not in my head. Deeper. In that infinite space I'd glimpsed last night. One inscription etching itself onto one page of a book with no end.
Iron Skin. Rank 1.
I knew what it did without being told. Reinforcement. Hardening. The ability to take a hit that should break bone and walk away bruised instead. Basic. The simplest combat inscription a hunter could have.
And it was mine.
The beast core crumbled to dust in my palm. The light faded. The forest settled.
I stood there breathing hard, staring at my hand, feeling the inscription humming inside me like a new heartbeat layered over the cold.
One page filled. In a book with no limit.
Mordren watched me with an expression I'd only understand much later — pride and grief and terror braided so tightly together they looked like the same thing.
"How does it feel?" he asked.
"Like I just ate sunlight."
"Good." He turned toward the deeper forest. The Aether mist was thicker ahead. The sounds were closer. Heavier. "Because something's been tracking us for the last four minutes and I need to know if you can take a hit."
The undergrowth to our left exploded.