Chapter 14 - The Hollowborn Ritual

The house above had forgotten warmth long before the Three reclaimed it. Its windows were blind. Its halls were airless. Its floors held no memory of footsteps or breath or lives once lived. Nothing lingered here, not even ghosts. The fields beyond it lay fallow, brittle grass bowing to the slightest wind as though exhausted by something older than seasons. No traveler came this way. No path led to welcome. This place endured because it had been abandoned by everything except the void.

Below, the cellar waited.

It did not breathe or whisper or shift. Waiting required hope. This room had none.

Thalen descended first. The lantern in his hand cast a thin, reluctant glow that reached only far enough to prove how much darkness remained untouched. The air pressed against him as a cold weight. It had lain on him for years, the same weight he had known as a boy sitting on a doorstep long after dusk, waiting for hands that never returned. That memory slipped across his thoughts like a shadow passing under a door. He set it aside with the same numb practice he used for every memory that hurt too much.

Corvin followed. Each step was steady, measured, deliberate. His breath remained even, but a tightening crept into his chest, a faint constriction as though the cellar itself judged his presence. He had felt this before, the sensation of being watched by something that did not care if he lived or died. He had been six the first time he felt it, standing alone in a quiet room while his mother closed him in darkness to teach him stillness. He had learned. Silence became the companion he trusted.

Maedra came last. Her fingers brushed the wall with a familiarity born not of comfort but of certainty. Stone had never lied to her. People had. She had learned early that walls held better than arms, and that touch always came with cost. The air welcomed her with its indifference. She preferred it that way.

The cellar opened as a hollow shaped by neglect. Damp clung to stone in thin, unmoving sheets. The ceiling sagged the way grief sags, heavy but unwilling to break. Shadows pooled in corners without curiosity or intent.

Around the slab, twelve robed witches knelt.

Their chant formed a thin line of sound stretched past recognition, more vibration than voice. Their breaths came in the shallow rhythm of habit carved by old wounds. None remembered a time when silence had been kind. None remembered when choice had been theirs. Their kneeling had begun years ago, long before they understood what kneeling meant.

One among them, a woman whose hair had long since grayed beneath her hood, felt her lips tremble on an inhale. Not from fear. From memory. She thought, distantly, of a day when her mother once brushed dirt from her hands after a fall. The memory dissolved before she could hold it. The chant reclaimed her breath.

The slab held the husk.

It resembled a body only in outline, its birch-twig frame bound by black thread in patterns that understood nothing of anatomy and cared even less. The limbs were fractions too long. The chest too narrow. The angle of the jaw not quite human. A mimicry of life without its knowing. It lay in stillness, not waiting to wake but existing in a state that neither accepted nor rejected creation.

At its feet sat a mound of dark soil, sagging inward as though carrying the memory of too many graves. At its head rested a bowl of water that reflected nothing, its blank surface more honest than mirrors.

When the Three stepped to the edge of the runes, the husk twitched. A small jerk of its fingers, sharp and precise. A movement that acknowledged their presence the way a wound acknowledges pressure.

Thalen’s throat tightened. He said nothing. In that twitch he recognized himself, hollow and shaped without choice.

Maedra inhaled slowly. The lantern’s flicker caught a brief shimmer behind her eyes, a memory of sitting in an empty room, listening to her own heartbeat because it was the only sound she trusted. She extinguished the thought before it could become pain.

“We continue,” she said.

Her voice carried no emotion. Emotion had no place here.

Corvin nodded, though doubt grazed him like a cold fingertip along the spine. The husk’s emptiness stirred something in him, recognition. A sameness that troubled him for only a heartbeat before discipline devoured the thought.

They took their positions. Thalen at the feet. Corvin at the head. Maedra at the center.

The Twelve did not look up. Their chant was their world.

Thalen opened the iron coffer. Inside lay fragments of Aelwyn bone, pale and webbed with hairline fractures that had not existed before the ritual began. The bones vibrated softly, not a sound but a pressure behind the eyes, like a memory trying to speak. They resisted the work. Resistance changed nothing.

Maedra touched the mound of soil. The earth trembled beneath her fingers. For a moment she saw herself at six years old, hands coated in mud as she dug behind a house that had never felt like hers. She had buried a broken doll there, believing the earth might return something whole if given something ruined. Nothing had grown. Nothing ever had.

She withdrew her hand.

Corvin looked to the wrapped bundle near the husk’s head. Black thread coiled tightly around it revealed nothing of its origin. The air around it thinned, as if distance lived inside the object instead of space. He felt a faint pull behind his ribs, the same quiet ache he had felt as a child the first time he understood no one was coming back for him.

Nothing moved.

Then the bundle twitched. The husk turned its head toward it. The water rippled. The soil collapsed inward. The bone fragments pulsed, once, sharply.

Corvin steadied his breath with effort.

Maedra lifted her hands. Thalen followed. Corvin raised his voice.

The chant reshaped itself around them, low, scraping, precise. The cellar shifted in response. The walls leaned inward, not closing but discerning what mattered and erasing what did not. Damp flattened. Stone smoothed. Space narrowed to the slab, the runes, the witches, and the hollow figure receiving their efforts.

Pain arrived quickly.

Maedra’s skin cracked at the nails, thin threads of dark spreading beneath the surface. Each fracture was familiar, echoes of wounds she had learned to hide as a child. Thalen’s bones ached as though hollow spaces inside him were widening. Corvin’s vision dimmed at the edges, black creeping inward with a quiet certainty that losing pieces of himself changed nothing. He had lost more before.

The Twelve felt it too.

One witch’s hands began to tremble. Another leaned forward until her forehead nearly touched the floor. A third swayed, not enough to break position, just enough to acknowledge that despair had weight.

Still they chanted.

They pushed through the tremor that rolled through the husk. They did not pause when the soil sank. They did not falter when the bowl’s ripples widened into perfect rings that faded without sound.

Time eroded into something shapeless.

Breaths thinned. Thoughts flickered like dying embers. Pain layered upon itself until pain became background. The cellar felt smaller with each cycle of words.

Corvin’s knees weakened. Maedra’s hands shook at the wrists. Thalen felt his spine bow under an ache that belonged to more than his body.

Hours passed.

None spoke their doubts. None broke rhythm. None asked the question forming in the quietest part of themselves, what might their lives have been had anyone once chosen to hold them instead of teaching them how to endure loneliness.

The husk twitched again.

A crack formed along its shoulder. Another across the ribs. A third down the length of a twig-made forearm.

The void pressed closer as a certainty of separation that asked for nothing and offered nothing.

Corvin staggered. Maedra steadied herself against the slab. Thalen closed his eyes a moment and saw a child waiting on a doorstep for twilight that never brought anyone home.

He opened them. And kept chanting.

Their despair poured through them and into the shape on the stone.

This was not power. This was inheritance. Abandonment turned ritual. Loneliness turned craft. Despair shaped into creation.

The Hollowborn would not be a creature separate from them. It would be them, distilled into form.

When the final cycle ended, the cellar fell silent.

The Twelve sagged, shoulders shaking with breaths they had forgotten to take. The Three held themselves upright by will alone, the weight of despair pressing against their thoughts until even breathing felt like labor.

A final crack split across the husk’s chest. The bundle rolled half an inch toward it.

The movement was small. Its meaning was not.

Maedra watched the bundle settle. She felt no triumph. No satisfaction. No fear.

Only recognition.

What they had made had begun to move toward the world.

Nothing warm could come from them. Nothing hopeful could rise in this place.

The Hollowborn would be born of despair because despair was the only thing they had ever had to give.