ECHOES OF THE HOLLOWED GODS
"All gods fall. Some scream. Some whisper. And some… wait." — Inscription at the edge of the Wyrmscar Vaults
---
The Hollowroots Sanctuary had begun to rot.
The moss that once bathed the hidden sanctuary in lavender luminescence now pulsed erratically, like a dying heartbeat. Roots trembled with unseen tension, groaning beneath Elara Duskveil's feet. She stood alone at the edge of one of the dreampools, her pale reflection fractured across its mirrored surface. Fragments of herself shifted—one crowned in twilight and wrapped in starlight, another bleeding endlessly with a ruinous sigil scorched into her chest. None of them looked away.
Behind her, Riven sat beneath a low arch of bone-root, silent. The revelation of the Dreamwound Archive lingered like a thorn in his soul. The blood in his veins carried more than lycanthropic curse—it was a vessel, an ancient prison meant to hold something wild, monstrous. Something that stirred now with every beat of his heart.
"Elara," he said quietly. "How much of us is ours?"
She didn't turn. "I don't know. But I'll find out."
The air in the sanctuary whispered in threads of crumbling magic. The ancient protections that once sealed the Hollowroots against the world's decay were weakening. Even the sanctuary wanted answers.
Far beyond the roots, past the twilight-cloaked valleys and salt-stained peaks, the corpse of a chapel groaned in the fog. Its bones were held together not by stone, but memory. There, a man emerged from a pit of ossified corpses. He was once a warlock, ambitious, foolish—but now his eyes burned with something older. His voice belonged to another.
"I see it," he rasped. "The Hollowed Gate. The Nine Breaths. The Blood That Was Promised."
He walked without stumbling. The mist parted as if fearing him.
Aamon Thereon Bloodbane had returned.
But not in body. That had long been sealed.
He moved through a host. A vessel. An oracle of bone.
At the far rim of the Ashmar Peaks, Aeron Vale stood at the mouth of a mirror that had never reflected light.
It wasn't glass, but time sealed in shimmerstone. The Mirror of Dural. Inside it, Aeron saw himself—twisted by vengeance, crowned with hollow flame, wings of bone where shoulders should be. A revenant no longer bound by purpose, but hollowed by it.
A flicker behind him.
He turned. Faeblood watchers—thin-limbed, elegant, inhuman—stood at the edge of the cliff. They said nothing.
"You're waiting for me to become him," Aeron said.
The tallest nodded, their face unreadable. "Not become. Fulfill."
Their figures scattered into moths.
---
In the Veilspire, the Faeblood Conclave convened. No voice spoke aloud. Only scent, light, and memory passed between emissaries. Their leader, the Mothking, stood unmoving in robes of silken cocoon and dust.
One figure—horned and translucent—cast the question:
"Do we act?"
"Do we serve?" said another. "Or consume?"
The Mothking, shimmering with fragments of dream, responded without mouth or sound:
"The Breathless King has found flesh again. The Balance is bleeding. The child of Nyxis walks. The beast howls. The revenant dreams. What we began will complete itself... with or without our blessing."
---
In the crumbling chapel, the oracle of Aamon stood atop a glyph-scorched floor. Shadows pooled like oil, drawn to him. Around him knelt former Pale Synod mages, exiled vampires, and feral beastkin.
"I am Aamon Thereon Bloodbane," he said through the oracle's mouth. "I was sealed. Now I breathe."
They bowed.
The Cult Of Aamon had risen anew.
---
Elara and Riven traveled through the Mirevales, where time bent around memory. The trees whispered secrets in languages older than language. They found the Chapel of Silence—an ancient stone crypt half-swallowed by swamp. Inside, murals peeled from the walls, revealing pre-Hollowed depictions: beings consuming stars, a crowned figure fracturing into multitudes, rivers of blood flowing backward.
Elara pressed a hand against one cracked mural. It pulsed.
The Hollowed Gods ruled not by song but by silence. Those who remembered them were cursed to dream.
A voice behind them.
They turned. A woman of inked skin and moonlit eyes.
"You are children of blood and curse," she said. "The Hollowed Gods want you gone. The Faeblood want you awakened. I want neither."
"Who are you?" Elara asked.
"I'm the last to remember what forgetting cost us."
She vanished into mist.
---
Aeron stood at the grave of his first death, seeking clarity. The soil here remembered him. Buried beneath was a sliver of bone—a relic of the oath he once swore. He touched it.
Pain surged. The Twilight Between tore through him.
And something entered.
His scream echoed through the mountains.
In the sanctum of the Eclipsed Moon Order, veiled figures debated.
"They awaken."
"They war."
"They bleed the veil."
Then one voice, cold and final: "Then we no longer watch. We act."
The veils turned to ash.
The Order of the Eclipsed Moon had chosen war.
---
Elara and Riven reached the Ashmar Sanctum, carved into a ravine of bone and crystal. There they found Aeron—half-shadow now, eyes flickering with twilight embers.
The oracle of Aamon stood across from them.
"You are threads in an unraveling tapestry," the oracle intoned.
Riven's claws erupted.
Elara's fangs extended.
Aeron summoned the Revenant Blade, its edge crying out for answers.
Above, a blackened moon bled tears of soot.
The Hollowed Gods echoed across the veil.