The salt-crusted cliffs loomed ahead, jagged walls of brittle white rising against the endless dusk. Vaelen moved with measured steps, every sense attuned. The Threnody of Broken Stars pulsed faintly beneath his cloak, its pages heavier than they should be — as though the air itself thickened with each stride.
A wrongness stirred.
Not a sound. Not a shape.
But the kind of pressure that made the skin crawl and the old bloodlines whisper warnings in the marrow.
The Hollow was waking.
A fissure yawned open between the cliffs. A narrow, winding path led down into a shallow basin where shattered bone pillars jutted from the ground like broken teeth. The mist here coiled unnaturally, thicker, almost oily in its clinging weight.
And then — movement.
A ripple in the fog.
A wet, rattling breath.
Vaelen stilled.
A figure crawled from the mist, malformed and wretched. Once human, perhaps, though time and whatever foul thing birthed it had stolen that claim. Flesh sloughed in strips, bones too long for the frame. A single, bloated eye glistened in the half-light. Chains of salt-crusted bone hung from its arms, etched with the Choir's sigils.
A Hollow-born.
A guardian.
Its voice gurgled, thick with rot.
"Vaelen Morghast… child of the Betrayer's Line… you trespass where blood must not walk."
He didn't answer. The Threnody's glyphs shimmered at his side. He drew his blade — a simple thing, but in his hands, death's surest promise.
The creature lurched forward.
Not fast, but relentless.
Its claws raked the salt, sending up plumes of white dust. Shadows clung to its limbs like oily smoke.
Vaelen moved.
A step to the side. A flick of the wrist. Steel met rotting flesh with a wet crack. The thing screeched — an ugly, high keening that made the mist shudder.
It swung a talon. Vaelen ducked beneath it, driving his dagger up beneath its jaw. Bone split. A gout of blackened blood burst free, stinking of decay and old sorcery.
But it didn't fall.
It laughed.
A wet, rattling sound.
"You think steel will stop what lies beneath the Hollow's heart?"
The chains around its wrists snapped upward, moving as if alive — writhing tendrils of bone and salt. One lashed out, catching Vaelen's forearm. The burn was immediate, the sigils etched in the bone biting into flesh.
His mind remained cold.
Pain was an old companion.
He twisted, wrenching his arm free with a ragged tear of skin. Blood darkened the salt at his feet.
The Threnody hummed.
A word formed on Vaelen's tongue — one never meant for mortal speech. He spoke it.
"Thraek'vul."
A pulse of withering cold radiated out. The chains shrieked, blackening in an instant. The creature howled, stumbling back.
Vaelen lunged.
No flourish. No wasted motion.
The dagger drove into the creature's remaining eye. The hilt cracked against bone. It shuddered — then fell.
Silence reclaimed the Hollow.
Vaelen stood over the corpse, breath steady, the sting in his arm already forgotten. He knelt, pulling a crude sigil-stone from the creature's neck. The markings were old — older than the Choir, older than even the Namebearers.
A fragment of something long buried.
A map. A seal. A warning.
He would unravel it.
The Vault awaited.
And beyond it… whoever still remembered his bloodline's curse.
He rose.
The mist parted.
Vaelen Morghast moved deeper into the Hollow, and the darkness closed behind him.
The Salt Hollow stretched further than memory. Beyond the ravine, the mist thickened, curling in pale tendrils around jagged salt pillars. The air hung heavy with the scent of old blood and scorched earth — though no flame had touched this ground for centuries.
Vaelen moved like a wraith, his bare feet silent against the brittle crust. The Threnody of Broken Stars pulsed faintly beneath his cloak, as if the book itself hungered for what lay ahead.
And he felt it too.
A presence.
Not men this time.
Not the Choir's hounds.
Something older.
A whisper brushed the edge of his thoughts — words in a language dead before the first kingdoms fell. The mist parted ahead, revealing a structure half-buried in salt. Once a temple, perhaps. Now a ruin, gnawed to bone by wind and time. Faded reliefs of figures in torment clung to the walls.
At the threshold stood a creature.
Tall, gaunt, flesh stretched tight over a frame too long, too thin. Its face was a crude mockery of humanity, salt-crusted horns curling from its brow. Eyes like pits of endless hunger.
A Salt Warden.
A relic of the old wars, when gods still bled.
It spoke — not aloud, but into his mind.
"Thief of names… Mourner of dead gods… Turn back."
Vaelen's lips curved faintly.
Not fear. Not awe.
Calculation.
"It still guards the threshold," he mused. They still fear what lies below.
He drew a symbol in the air with one bloodied fingertip, its lines shimmering with dull crimson light. The Warden's eyes flickered.
"Your masters sleep, beast," Vaelen said, his voice like a blade drawn slow. "This Hollow belongs to me now."
The thing hissed. Mist thickened.
A single step, and it lunged — claws like scythes.
Vaelen moved sideways, impossibly fast, dragging a sigil from the Threnody's cover. It burned against the mist as he whispered a word.
"Vaur'keth."
The world pulsed.
The creature faltered mid-strike, its body jerking like a puppet as unseen chains clamped around its limbs.
Vaelen didn't hesitate. He stepped forward, dagger in hand, driving it through the Warden's eye. Salt and thick grey ichor spattered the ground.
The corpse collapsed.
He knelt by it, retrieving a bone talisman from its neck — old, marked with a broken god's glyph. Worthless to most.
But Vaelen's gaze lingered on the ruin ahead.
Beyond it lay the reliquary.
A vault of ancient relics, bones of god-things, and a fragment of the dead sun.
It was why the Choir sent men. Why the Salt Wardens still stirred.
He rose, tucking the charm away, and stepped into the ruin.
The air inside was colder, heavier — every breath a struggle, as if the walls themselves resented his trespass. Symbols shifted at the edge of vision.
Vaelen smiled faintly.
The old world was never dead.
It merely waited.
He would carve his name into its bones.
And when the Choir came again — when the Pale Order marched — when ancient, slumbering things woke in fury — he would meet them not as a man.
But as the one thing even gods learn to fear.
The Forbidden One.
The reliquary's air was heavier still.
Each step Vaelen took stirred ancient dust and the lingering taste of despair. Symbols adorned the walls — glyphs of dead gods and kings lost to the passage of forgotten ages. The floor was cracked, but at its center stood an altar of jagged obsidian, gleaming with a sickly inner light.
On it: a fragment of something vast and broken.
A shard of the dead sun.
And it spoke.
Not in words, but in memories, old as the Hollow itself.
Fire raging in the sky.
Cities turned to glass.
Legions of pale figures chanting in tongues not meant for men.
Vaelen's pale eyes drank it in, feeling the pulse of it behind his ribs.
Not fear. Not awe. Hunger.
He placed a hand upon the shard.
The world lurched.
A storm of images. Faces he'd never seen, yet knew.
A woman with silver hair, eyes like storm-wracked seas — her name lost to him, but a tether pulling tight around his soul. A promise made. A bond severed.
Mother…?
The vision vanished.
A voice, smooth as silk, spoke from the darkness behind him.
"You shouldn't be here, Vaelen Morghast."
He turned, dagger half-drawn.
A figure stepped from the shadows.
Clad in tattered robes, her face hidden beneath a bone mask, slender hands cradling a staff of blackwood entwined with pale thread.
Not one of the Choir.
Not a Warden.
An Echo-Born. A child of salt and shadow.
"I walk where I please," Vaelen murmured, voice low.
She tilted her head. "You awaken things you don't understand."
"I understand enough."
A tense pause.
Her next words barely a whisper. "You carry the mark of the Forbidden One. You don't belong to the Hollow's cycle. You… disrupt it."
His smirk was a blade's edge.
"Good."
Another pause — and then she lowered the staff.
"Others will come. Worse than Wardens. Worse than Choir-men. You cannot stand against them alone."
"Then let them come."
She hesitated — a flicker of something unreadable behind the bone mask.
"Not all enemies come with blades drawn. Remember that."
With that, she turned, vanishing into the mist-swallowed corridor beyond.
Vaelen stood alone once more, his pulse steady, eyes cold.
He took the shard, tucking it beneath his cloak.
Let them come.
The world would remember his name.
And the dead would make room.
[To be continued…]