They left Echo Town behind, but its silence followed them, clinging to their backs. The discovery of their own misplaced past had fundamentally altered the family's gravity. Ira was a collapsed star, his energy and light extinguished, leaving only a dense, silent core of despair. He followed his wife dutifully, his gaze fixed on the muddy ground. Sera, now their tacit leader, moved with a somber grace, her head held high against the oppressive fog, as if she were marching toward a destination she had long ago accepted. Mina walked beside her, her hand tucked safely inside its "new" red mitten.
Lio felt as though the ground beneath his feet had become thin and brittle. The world had escalated its assault from the merely impossible to the deeply personal. First the compass, then the maps, then the echoes of their own lives laid out like a breadcrumb trail. He was no longer trying to rationalize it; he was simply trying to endure it.
The fog, which had briefly granted them the clarity of the village, returned with a vengeance, coiling around them in thick, wet tendrils. The world shrank to a few feet in every direction. It was in this sensory deprivation that Lio first heard it. A whisper, threading through the mist, that sounded disturbingly like his own voice. He stopped, turning his head, but saw nothing. It must have been the wind, he told himself, or a trick of his own exhausted mind.
He started walking again, faster this time, but the feeling of being watched intensified. He caught a flicker of movement in the periphery of his vision—something impossibly tall and thin, dark against the grey, gone the instant he tried to focus on it. A cold that had nothing to do with the damp air began to seep into his bones.
Up ahead, Mina stopped humming. She stood perfectly still, her head tilted as if listening to a distant radio signal. "He says to be quiet," she whispered, her voice tight. "Something hungry is awake."
The path ended abruptly at the edge of a deep, sudden fissure in the earth, a dark crack steaming with mist. It was at least twenty feet across, forcing them to a halt. They were exposed. Trapped.
And it emerged.
It didn't stride or crawl from the fog; it felt more like the fog itself had decided to coagulate, to pull itself together into a single, horrifying shape. It was tall and unnaturally slender, its limbs too long, its form indistinct as if woven from shadow and smoke. It had no discernible features, no mouth, no nose, only a smooth, blank expanse of a face. And then it turned its head toward them, and Lio saw its eyes. They were not eyes. They were holes. Two perfectly round, black voids that did not reflect light but consumed it. They were punctures in the fabric of the world, and looking into them felt like looking into a starless night sky. This was a Hollow.
It didn't roar or snarl. It made no sound at all as it glided closer, its attention locking onto Lio with a palpable, psychic weight. He felt pinned by its gaze, a specimen under a microscope.
Then, it spoke. But the voice came from all around him, a disembodied whisper that wore the stolen sound of his mother's voice from a day long ago, a day spent on a beach before the world began to sink.
"Don't be afraid of the water, Lio. It's just the world breathing."
Lio flinched. The memory, once warm and comforting, now felt cold and alien. As the Hollow spoke, he could feel the edges of the memory fraying in his mind, the genuine warmth of his mother's hug turning thin and papery.
The Hollow tilted its head, and the voice changed, becoming a perfect imitation of his father's, full of a pride that now seemed like a bitter joke.
"You have a good eye for the lines, son. You'll be a great mapmaker one day."
The memory of his father's workshop, the smell of ink and parchment, the weight of his hand on Lio's shoulder—it all dissolved into a faint echo. He was watching his own past being scooped out of him, leaving a cold, clean vacancy behind. The creature wasn't just repeating his memories; it was eating them.
Finally, it used his own voice, whispering the words from his nightmare.
"The maps… they were like pale fish, just drifting in the dark."
Lio gasped, a wave of dizziness washing over him. He felt lighter, dangerously untethered. He was becoming a stranger to himself.
Ira simply stared, his face blank, too lost in his own fog to see the one in front of him. Mina, however, took a half step forward, her small face fierce. "You can't have him," she said, her voice a tiny bell in the oppressive silence. "His name isn't on your list."
The Hollow paid her no mind. It drifted closer to Lio, its void like eyes promising a final, blissful emptiness. But then Sera acted.
She stepped in front of Lio, shielding him. In her hands, she held not a weapon, but one of Ira's maps—the living, breathing chart that had broken him. She held it up, and in the gloom, the shifting lines on the parchment began to glow with a faint, silvery light. The Hollow recoiled as if burned.
Sera's voice rang out, sharp and cold and powerful, speaking a single word that was all hard edges and guttural stops—a word from no language Lio had ever heard.
The effect was immediate. The creature let out a silent, wrenching shriek. Its form destabilized, unraveling like thread, the smoke and shadows dissolving until nothing was left but the thick, impassive fog.
The unnatural cold receded. Lio stumbled back, pressing his hands to his temples, trying to grasp the memories that now felt like stories he'd read about some other boy. They were there, but the emotional core had been ripped out of them. He looked at his family. His broken father. His strange, fearless sister. And his mother, the quiet woman who had just banished a demon with a living map and a word of power.
He realized with a terrifying certainty that the sinking world was the least of their problems. The real monsters didn't just drown you; they stole you from yourself, piece by piece, until nothing was left but a hollow shell.