"They said she smiled.
I remember her silence louder than that."
— Anonymous exile log, Year 784 post-Spiral
The cold wasn't cruel.
It was honest.
It didn't pretend to warm him, didn't whisper false comfort.It wrapped around the boy like an old truth—tight, dry, and bone-deep.
The snow had coated the path between the Hollow's stone gates and the edge of the Waste.That was as far as they took him.
No words.
No escort.
Just the severance.
The Spiral symbol on his file had been burned over — not erased, but scarred.
He walked.
Barefoot.
No sigil.
No direction.
But the Hollow still burned behind his eyes.
He thought about her the whole way.
Serah.
Not her smile, not her hand — but her stillness
She had once sat beside him during Thread Recital, her hand brushing the edge of his hand as if by accident. Her face was soft. Not quiet like the others — intentional. Like she chose to remain silent, not because of fear, but because she was saving something precious inside.
They said she smiled.
But she also dared to remember.
Her eyes had flicked to the snow the day she was taken. Not in fear.In... goodbye.
And that's what broke him.
He didn't stop walking until his feet bled.
Beyond the Hollow lay the Frost Veil — a tundra of abandoned shrines and forgotten paths. The Spiral archives once hinted that these lands were alive, conscious even. That those who walked them unthreaded slowly.
He didn't know what that meant.He just knew the air here felt less controlled.Less... dead.
He camped beneath the ribs of an old war-beast skeleton. The sky above him pulsed with blue auroras, moving unnaturally — as if trying to trace some massive invisible pattern.
He traced it too.
With frostbitten fingers in the snow.Over and over: "Serah." Until the frost bit back.
He dreamt of heat that night.Not fire. Not warmth.
Emotion.
It wasn't his. Not entirely. It was a memory. Not his own. A dream within a hollow.
A voice whispered in his ear in Veresh: "Velk-Eln Thir." (The mind that remembers hollow.)
He turned in his sleep.His back began to itch.Not like pain.Like something… stirring beneath skin.
But when he awoke — no mark. No sigil.
Just the snow.And something else: A single grey ribbon, tied to his wrist.
He didn't tie it.But she did.
The same kind Serah always wore in her hair.
He clutched it like breath.
The Frost Veil was vast, but not empty. There were shapes in the distance.Once-people, twisted by silence. Beasts born of forgotten truths.And… others.
He saw one that night.
A figure in white — neither tall nor short. Neither adult nor child.
It did not move with footsteps.It glided, soundlessly, and stared with a face carved from mirror.
It said nothing. But the air froze around it like mourning.
The boy didn't run.Didn't bow.Just watched.
And it passed him by.But in its trail, left a small sigil burned into the ice. Not on him — just on the snow.A spiral, broken through the middle.
"For the one outside the thread," it seemed to say."Not unchosen… but unrevealed."
"In exile, the Hollow boy found no fire.Only echoes.And maybe — just maybe — that was louder than the silence he left behind."