The Salt Hollow was a place that clung to memory like a wound that refused to heal. No one spoke of it in the taverns of Averenth, not even in drunken boasting or the careless dares of restless young men. It existed in old songs sung by the blind, in crumbling texts locked away in dust-cloaked libraries. A graveyard of gods, some had called it — though none now living could name which.
Vaelen Morghast moved through the Hollow's suffocating mist as though he belonged to it. Barefoot, his pale frame shrouded only by the tattered remnants of what had once been a traveler's cloak. His ashen hair clung damply to his brow, the salt air thick enough to sting the eyes. Every step sent a brittle crackle through the white, crystalline crust that blanketed the ground like a frost made of ancient bones.
The Threnody of Broken Stars pulsed faintly in his grasp. It hungered here. The symbols on its flesh-bound cover no longer lay dormant but shifted lazily, moving like leeches in stagnant water. Vaelen's fingers, bone-pale and bloodless, traced the edge of its cover with something like reverence — or perhaps cold calculation.
The Hollow welcomed him. Or feared him. In this place, the line blurred.
It was not a village as the old maps claimed. What few remnants of civilization lingered here had long since been devoured by salt and time. The bones of houses jutted from the ground like broken teeth, their wood long rotten, their stones eroded by the bitter air. Tower stumps sagged beneath the weight of centuries, their hollowed interiors now home to nothing but restless wind.
Even the air here was wrong.
It did not howl or wail as it might in a living world. It breathed. Slow. Measured. A steady inhalation and exhalation through the remains of forgotten structures, carrying the scent of brine, decay, and something older — a scent that clung to the memory of blood spilled beneath a dead sky.
Vaelen's cold gaze swept the ruins. The air shimmered in places, small distortions in the mist where old wards still clung to life, flickering weakly like guttering candles. Sigils etched in forgotten tongues bled faint blue or gray light, their meanings lost but their warnings unmistakable.
This was a place of power.
Not the crude, blood-wrought sorcery of petty warlocks or the brittle charms of hedge-priests, but a deep, ancient weight — a memory of things buried so long they had become part of the land itself.
Vaelen moved toward the heart of it.
A shrine rose ahead, if such a structure could still be called one. Its stones sagged beneath centuries of neglect, the salt wind having long since stripped away whatever icon once adorned its face. Streaks of old blood still marked its surface in places where no rain had come to wash it clean.
The Threnody shivered in his hands.
Here.
He knelt, feeling the brittle crust of salt give beneath his touch, cold crystals biting into his skin. The book's pages flickered, eldritch sigils blooming like malignant flowers across its parchment. The language it spoke was older than cities, older than gods. It was a language of hungers.
A ritual coalesced in his mind, not whispered by the book but remembered — though he did not know how he remembered it. Words and gestures. The offering of name, blood, and intent.
He drew the rusted dagger from his belt — the same one claimed from the corpse-littered ruins of Morghast Village. A simple thing. A tool. Its edge jagged, dulled by time but eager still.
With a steady hand, he cut his palm.
Blood welled — darker than it should have been. Thick. A thing alive with memory.
He spoke the words in a tongue that no sane man remembered.
"I claim this Hollow. By right of blood. By rite of ash. By inheritance unclaimed."
The ground beneath him shuddered.
From the altar's depths, a shape coalesced — a thing of pallid mist and clotted shadow. It had no face, only the suggestion of eyes. Limbs twisted between corpse-flesh and insubstantial fog. A warden, bound to a duty none alive remembered, now answering to the last heir of its forsaken line.
It did not speak. It did not need to.
It knew him.
It had waited.
A pact, unspoken but sealed in the exchange of blood and presence. No words, no promises. A transference. A granting.
Vaelen felt the Hollow's remaining power sink into his bones — brittle, weary magic clinging to his bloodline's mark. Knowledge bloomed in the empty spaces of his mind, fragments of old sigils, half-remembered maps of cursed places, names of things best left buried.
And then — the wind changed.
Heavy bootfalls, distant but certain.
The Choir's hounds had come.
Vaelen rose, his face a pale mask of calculation. No fear. No haste. He had what he needed.
He moved west, deeper into the mist, toward places whose names no longer appeared on maps.
The Threnody hummed in approval.
Behind him, the warden faded back into the earth, the shrine's stones weeping a thin trickle of salt. And the Salt Hollow, a place of dead gods and dying memory, waited once more.
For the world to remember it.
And for the heir to return.