The birth of the Pale King of Black Hollow
The wind that passed through Black Hollow carried no warmth — only the scent of ash and memory. The ruins of the valley were silent, yet beneath that silence something stirred — a pulse, faint but persistent, as though the land itself remembered how to bleed.
Among the shattered pillars and the fallen statues of forgotten gods, a boy walked barefoot across the dust. His name was Vallen Heir, last son of a house long erased from history.
He was sixteen, and his shadow did not follow him.
It moved ahead.
I. The Child of Shadows
Once, before the Hollow became a tomb, there was laughter.
Vallen could still hear it in his dreams — his mother reading to him beneath the black-glass trees, her voice soft, her eyes bright with a sadness she tried to hide.
She had told him that the darkness was not to be feared. That every shadow was only light that had lost its way.
But that was before the Nocturnix Legion came. Before the sky turned crimson and the rivers ran black with the blood of the faithful. Before his father vanished into the mist, leaving behind only a silver crest and the words:
"Heir of Heir — protect what remains."
Now, the child of shadows had no family.
Only the whispers of the dead.
II. The Siege of Black Hollow
The Legion came with fire.
Flaming trebuchets hurled death upon the Hollow's sanctums, burning through centuries of forbidden knowledge. Their commanders sought the Arcana Umbra, the ancient scriptures that taught how to command shadow and soul alike.
They thought the valley defenseless.
They were wrong.
Vallen stood upon the ramparts, his pale hands trembling. The Shadowbinders — what few remained — formed a circle behind him, their chants echoing through the dying wind.
"Close your eyes," they told him.
"Let the darkness remember you."
When he obeyed, he felt it — the cold, the hunger, the thousand eyes that had always watched from beneath his skin. His veins turned to frost, his breath to vapor, and his heartbeat echoed like a war drum in the deep.
The shadows answered his call.
III. The Night of the Eclipse
The battle lasted three nights.
No one saw the moon again.
The first night, the shadows rose. They swallowed the archers, the blades, the horses.
The second night, the fog thickened, turning the valley into a labyrinth of illusions — every scream was answered by silence.
On the third night, the Legion prayed to see the sun again. None did.
At dawn, there were no bodies — only black mist drifting across empty armor.
And in the heart of that silence, Vallen knelt among the ruins, his hands stained with something darker than blood.
He felt hollow. Empty.
Then, from the mist, voices began to whisper — not of hatred, but of reverence.
"Heir of the Hollow," they murmured.
"Bearer of our debt."
The mist coiled around him, circling his head like a serpent made of breath. From its depths, pale hands — spectral, gentle — placed something unseen upon him.
It was cold. Heavy. Eternal.
The Crown of Mist had found its king.
IV. The Birth of the Pale King
When Vallen rose, the valley itself bowed.
Shadows bent toward him as though drawn by gravity. The air trembled; the spirits of the fallen formed ranks in silence, their hollow eyes reflecting his own.
He spoke no words — yet every soul heard him.
The war was over.
But victory felt like grief.
The boy who had fought for his people was gone, replaced by something the world would come to fear.
From that day forward, travelers who wandered near the Hollow would see only fog. Sometimes, they claimed, a figure stood within it — tall, pale, eyes dim like dying embers, crowned by a faint wreathe of smoke.
They called him many names: King of Ghosts. Lord of Silence. The Pale King.
But Vallen remembered what his mother had said long ago.
"Every shadow is light that has lost its way."
So he began to walk — beyond the Hollow, beyond the graves, into the wide, cruel world that had forgotten his name.
Not to conquer.
Not to rule.
But to seek the truth of the curse that bound him — and perhaps, one day, to find where the light had gone.
> And when the mists return, when the moon forgets its face, the Pale King shall rise again — not as death, but as memory.
— Fragment, Chronicles of the Umbra Eclipse