The stone monolith split with a sound like a thousand panes of glass shattering at once, though no shards fell. Instead, a cold, otherworldly light bled from the fracture — not light, not darkness, but something deeper, a colorless hunger that devoured meaning.
Vaelen Morghast did not flinch. His small, pale frame stood steady, the cursed book clutched to his chest as the world warped around him. The trees bent away from the Gate, as though the forest itself recoiled from what it glimpsed beyond. The wind ceased, the storm hushed, and in that breathless moment, even the distant dead dared not stir.
From the split stone, a mist poured forth — thick, pale, and writhing as if it possessed a mind of its own. It reached for Vaelen like a thousand skeletal hands. When the tendrils touched his skin, his body seized with violent tremors, but his expression remained placid. His blood knew this place. His blood had waited.
A voice slithered into the hollow space behind his eyes.
"Enter, seed of Vael'Zhaur. Claim what waits in the hollow."
Without hesitation, Vaelen stepped forward.
His foot crossed the threshold, and the world inverted.
The forest, the storm, the corpse by the stone — gone in a heartbeat. The earth beneath his feet became a shifting plane of glass-like obsidian, and above him, a sky of churning violet void where no stars dared to hang. A thousand vast, dead shapes drifted in that false sky, neither alive nor dead. Eyes without number stared down from between clouds of ash, and though they never blinked, Vaelen felt their attention.
The air tasted of ancient bones and despair. The ground beneath him sang in a language older than language itself, vibrating through his soles into his blood.
The Hollow Between.
A place that was not a place. A wound in the fabric of reality, a sanctuary and prison for the forsaken knowledge the old gods dared not unmake.
At the heart of this realm stood a figure.
Neither wholly man nor wholly god, its form shifted like smoke and flame, bones showing through half-rotted flesh. Its head was crowned with rusted antlers, and its eyes were twin suns — ancient and merciless.
Vaelen's steps slowed as he approached.
The book pulsed in his grasp.
The being spoke, and though no mouth moved, its voice hammered directly into Vaelen's mind.
"You have trespassed, child. Blood of the Betrayer. Heir to the Womb Beneath Stars."
The words splintered something inside the boy. His bones ached. His veins burned with unholy heat. He fell to one knee, blood trickling from his nose and ears.
But he did not scream.
The entity regarded him in silence, then extended a hand made of smoke and glass.
"Take your burden. Take your gift."
From within its palm, a single object formed — a shard of black crystal, shaped like a fragment of a mirror. Its surface showed not Vaelen's reflection, but countless versions of him: older, twisted, glorious, monstrous.
He reached out.
The moment his skin brushed the shard, a thousand lifetimes poured into him. Memories of wars yet to come. Forbidden rituals. Forgotten names. The taste of void-light. The scent of dying stars. Knowledge far beyond the capacity of a mortal soul. His mind splintered.
And then reformed.
The boy's small body remained. But his gaze, when he lifted it, no longer belonged to a child.
He stood.
Unbroken.
The entity inclined its head.
"We shall watch, Vaelen Morghast. The path ahead is paved in ash and devoured worlds. Walk it well."
The Hollow shuddered. A great bell tolled in the unseen distance, and cracks spiderwebbed through the obsidian plane.
The being vanished.
And Vaelen spoke for the first time in the language of the old gods.
"Draem'valkaar."
The Hollow Between collapsed.
Back in Averenth
Eryndor the Pale jolted awake in his sanctum, his warding circles flaring with blood-colored light. Every relic on his walls screamed in unison. Across the city, scholars, seers, and cultists clutched their heads as the world shifted imperceptibly.
A tear had opened. And something — someone — had crossed through.
"It's begun," Eryndor whispered.
He wasn't sure whether to fear it or fall to his knees in worship.
At the Morghast Ruins
The shattered Gate stood silent once more. The mist receded. The corpse before it was little more than dust now. A single footprint marked the ground where Vaelen had vanished, and from the shadows, unseen eyes blinked open.
The Choir of Pale Ash would soon learn what their ancient sin had preserved.
The boy was no longer a boy.
And in the west, a blood-red star ignited in the sky where none had hung before.
The world itself shivered.
Vaelen Morghast had taken his first step beyond mortality.