The Broken Dreamer
The air within the Circle clung to the skin like mist before a storm—heavy, stifling, and laced with the weight of what had just happened.
Cuco had left.
No one stopped him.
But silence didn't mean peace. It meant fracture.
Echo lay sprawled across the cold stone floor, his limbs twitching in small, unnatural jerks. His chest rose and fell too quickly, as if he couldn't catch enough air to stay human. A silent scream curled his lips, but no sound escaped. His body trembled—not in pain, but in unraveling.
Nox was at his side in a heartbeat. Her hands, once steady and sure, shook as they pressed against his neck. She sought a pulse. Something solid. Something left.
Her voice came out in a whisper. "He's... gone."
"No," Isabela murmured, kneeling across from her. Blood streaked her brow, but her gaze was clear. "Not yet. But he won't come back the same."
Tariq stood near the exit, frozen. He stared at the blade still hovering at the Circle's center, its roots withdrawn like serpents waiting to strike again. The mark on his arm pulsed faintly with golden light, echoing the surge Cuco had unleashed—but it didn't burn. It warned.
Echo's body stilled for a moment.
Then convulsed violently.
A low hum filled the chamber—subtle at first, then louder, rising like a chant with no voice behind it. A sickly green glow radiated from beneath his skin, coursing through veins that now looked too thin, too brittle.
Isabela grabbed his hand, gritting her teeth against the pulse of raw power that leapt up her arm.
"Echo," she called. "Stay with me. Fight it."
His eyes didn't open.
But his voice came anyway—from deep inside, from a place not his own.
> "I've… I've been chosen."
---
The wind shrieked outside the ruined sanctuary, tearing at the sky.
Cuco didn't glance back.
His blade had fallen silent, but the quiet unnerved him more than the whispers ever had. Something had shifted—no, planted itself—inside the Circle. He could feel it rooting in the soul of the wrong Dreamer.
He should have moved faster.
But a voice cut through the air behind him.
> "Cuco."
Nox stood in the doorway, her shoulders square despite the tremble in her hands.
"I thought you'd turn back," she said. Her voice was tight, iron wrapped in grief. "That you'd try to fix this. But you just walked away. Let it break."
Cuco stopped. Rain speckled his coat. He didn't turn.
"I didn't ask for any of this," he said flatly. "Not the blade. Not the Tome. Not your trust. And now I can't unmake it."
"I'm not asking you to," she snapped. "I'm asking you to fight. Because if you don't, we're going to lose him. And maybe the rest of us too."
She didn't have to say his name. The echo of Echo still lingered in the air behind them.
Cuco closed his eyes.
"It's already happening," he said. "And it may already be too late."
---
Inside the Circle, the transformation had begun.
Echo's spine arched off the floor, and a grotesque light pulsed beneath his skin—Cuco's power, warped and twisted. The glow that once signaled life now pulsed with something colder. Hungrier.
Nox and Isabela could only watch as his body contorted, reshaped into something alien.
His eyes snapped open.
And they no longer belonged to him.
They were Hollow.
> "I am not Echo," he rasped, his voice scraping through the air like dry leaves in fire.
"I am a vessel. A servant. The Hollow has awakened in me."
The chamber quaked.
Stones groaned. Dust rained from the ceiling.
Nox took a step back. The air grew dense, thick enough to choke. Magic bled from Echo's skin, and it was no longer Dreamer magic—it was something deeper. Primal. Wrong.
> "The Hollow sees you, Nox," he whispered, or perhaps all of them whispered through him. "It has always seen you. And now you belong to me."
Tendrils of living green light burst from Echo's body, lashing out, winding across walls and pillars. The Circle was being consumed.
Not from without.
From within.
---
Cuco's steps quickened as he entered the tree line.
The forest felt alive, more than it ever had. Branches shifted as if breathing, and the ground beneath his boots pulsed faintly in rhythm with his own heartbeat.
The whisper came—not from within, but from the earth itself.
> "Come to me.
Let the root grow.
Come to the gate."
But behind the call of the forest, another voice clung to his spine.
Echo.
What have you done?
He broke into a run.
---
The Circle trembled, cracks splintering through the floor. Walls bent under the weight of vines and creeping roots. Echo's form had become monstrous, a bloated shell of twisting limbs and lightless eyes.
And the Tome—still cradled in the forest far from the storm—tugged at Cuco's spirit, calling him back.
Not to fight.
To choose.
---
Nox turned to Isabela, breath ragged, her voice hoarse.
"We can't let him live," she said. "If the Hollow takes him completely… if it spreads…"
Her eyes met Isabela's.
"We won't just lose a Dreamer. We'll lose everything."
Isabela held her gaze, expression grim.
Her reply came like a blade drawn in silence.
"We kill him. Before it's too late."