The Crown's Teeth didn't return that night.
Not out of mercy.
Out of calculation.
Auren's act had changed something—not just in the village, not just among the resistance—but in him.
That light had not come from strength.
It came from a void.
And something… had answered it.
That Night
Auren stood alone outside the burned temple where the girl had first hummed the fractured melody. The cracked Shards still hovered in the air, orbiting slowly around the stone altar like moons around a dead sun.
His hands glowed faintly. Not golden. Not violet.
Pale silver. Almost hollow.
Lys approached quietly, her cloak wrapped tightly. She didn't ask what he was doing.
Instead, she sat beside him.
"You're changing," she said at last.
"I don't know into what," he admitted.
"You do," she replied. "You're just afraid to name it."
Later, in the quiet hours before dawn, Auren returned to the strange door beneath Rivenhart's crypts—in memory.
Not with his body.
With his pulse.
With his Shard.
He didn't know how he entered it again. Only that the walls of his mind cracked open, and the circle—the broken one—waited.
Inside, he found voices.
Not human. Not whispering.
But… echoing.
Like the sound of a cathedral collapsing in reverse.
He followed them deeper.
Until he saw a mirror.
No frame. Just floating, suspended in dark light.
And inside it, he saw himself.
But his eyes were not his own.
They glowed with the hollow light.
And around his neck was a collar of glass, broken in places, leaking slivers of memory.
He raised his hand to the mirror.
The reflection raised something else.
A blade. Forged of memory.
And it whispered:
"You are not Shardborn.You are Shard-Made."
Back in the waking world
Auren shot up, breath ragged, the dream clinging like frost to his bones.
He stumbled to his feet, half-mad with questions. But in his hand, clenched without realizing…
Was a sliver.
A piece of the mirror.
It pulsed.
Not with warmth.
But with hunger.
The Next Day
They buried another of the scouts. Voidburned from the inside. Whatever had cracked the Choir below the earth was now seeping into the surface.
Darien's patience thinned by the hour. "We pull back. Report. We're not an army."
Lys shook her head. "If we leave now, the Crown will cover it up. Again. We need evidence."
Auren spoke quietly. "Then we go deeper."
Caelen snapped. "You want to throw yourself into the same ruin that's killing our people?"
"No," Auren said, eyes steady. "I want to understand it. Because it's calling to others like me. And if we don't reach it first, someone else will."
Darien laughed bitterly. "Like who?"
Lys didn't laugh. Her voice was cold.
"Like the ones who already know what it is. And want it kept buried."
Descent
The next cavern wasn't on any map.
It wasn't even visible from the surface—until one of the Choir-touched children pointed to the stone and said,
"The Hollow sings beneath."
Auren led the descent.
No one argued.
Not after the last few days.
Not after the way even seasoned Shardbearers flinched when he passed too close.
The hollow light had changed him.
They reached the base after two hours. It wasn't a cavern.
It was a city.
Fused into the rock.
Walls of broken crystal. Monoliths of glass bones. Statues of forgotten kings with Shards half-embedded in their chests like unfinished songs.
And at the heart—
A throne.
Empty.
Except for one thing:
A mask.
Smooth. Obsidian. Faceless.
And beside it, carved into the stone in glyphs none could read but Auren somehow understood:
"Here fell the first who tried to hold the Hollow.And rose again… as its echo."
Auren Reaches
He stepped toward the mask.
Caelen warned him.Darien shouted.Lys whispered, "Wait—"
But the moment his fingers brushed the stone—
He remembered.
Not his memories.
But memories of a thousand others.Warriors. Tyrants. Children. Choirborn.
All touched by this force.
All devoured.
It wasn't just a Shard.
It was the gap between Shards.
What the world tried to forget.
And it remembered him.
"You are its heir," the voice thundered."Because you were broken.And because you chose not to stay that way."
Auren fell to his knees, screaming.
And when he rose, the silver in his veins blazed.
The mask had vanished.
But a faint imprint of it lingered over his face—shimmering and invisible—until the light caught him just right.
Elsewhere
High Arbiter Valen knelt in a dark chamber lined with teeth of crystal.
Across from him, a figure cloaked in Voidsteel whispered,
"It has begun."
Valen closed his eyes.
"Then the Hollow has a voice again."
[End of Chapter 10]