Chapter 6 – The Hollowed
The Shroud pulsed around him like a living wound, its rhythm a slow, malevolent thrum that resonated in his bones. Black mists, heavier and colder than before, coiled around Kai's legs, pressing into his lungs as though the very air conspired to choke him. His muscles burned, his body screamed for a rest that this endless twilight refused to grant. The shifting ruins of this forgotten world bent and twisted at the edge of his vision, dragging him ever deeper.
He realized then, with a certainty that chilled him more than the fog, that this place wasn't merely testing him. It was digesting him.
"You do not escape until you are reshaped," whispered an unseen voice, a sound that was at once as soothing as a mother and as cruel as a torturer.
Kai stumbled into a courtyard of shattered statues. Here, the mist thinned slightly, revealing a gallery of horrors. Stone faces, once proud heroes or forgotten gods, were caved in, their features gouged out by some ancient grief until only eyeless sockets remained. A profound stillness hung over the place, a silence that felt older than the stones themselves. But it wasn't empty. Something moved among the ruins.
At first, he thought they were just shadows, tricks of the light in the oppressive fog. But then one of them raised its head. Its face was a smooth, horrifying blank, the flesh melted like warm wax, as if a divine thumb had simply erased its identity. Yet a gaping, vertical hole split its chest from sternum to navel, and from that dark cavity poured a torrent of ceaseless, overlapping whispers.
The Hollowed.
They crawled from the bases of the broken statues, unfolding like puppets made of bone and smoke. Each one was misshapen—limbs too long and ending in splintered claws, jaws unhinged as if from a silent, eternal scream. Their very presence scraped against Kai's mind, a psychic friction that tugged at the edges of his sanity.
Hollow, hollow, empty, hollow, they chanted without tongues, the words echoing directly in his thoughts.
One lurched forward with an inhuman, stuttering speed. Instinct drove Kai to raise his arm to block. The creature's claw passed through his guard as if it were immaterial, then solidified just as it made contact, carving a deep gash across his forearm. Pain, sharp and blinding, exploded up his arm. He grit his teeth and struck back with the trench knife he clutched, driving the blade deep into the Hollowed's torso.
The steel met no resistance. It passed through the creature's body as if cutting through water.
The Hollowed only tilted its blank head, and a wave of mocking, soundless laughter filled his mind.
Bleeding, cornered, Kai felt something shift deep inside him. The nightmarish, branching scar across his chest—the mark the Shroud had seared into him upon his arrival—began to burn with a cold, black fire. His vision tunneled until all he could see was the gaping hole in the Hollowed's chest, an abyss within an abyss, whispering promises of ruin.
His body moved before his mind could object.
He pulled.
Not with his hands, not with his knife—but with the scar itself, with a feral, desperate need that had been born in this place. The Hollowed reeled back, and for the first time, its psychic voice became a genuine shriek of agony. Black, smoky essence rushed from its chest-wound, drawn across the space between them in visible tendrils that plunged directly into Kai's bleeding arm and the burning scar on his chest.
The taste of it was unbearable and intoxicating, like swallowing lightning and ash. It was the flavor of profound emptiness, of forgotten memories and a soul worn thin. His skin shuddered, his veins turning a stark, visible black for a terrifying instant. Then the Hollowed collapsed, its form desiccating and dissolving into a pile of fine gray dust.
Kai gasped, clutching his chest. The searing pain in his arm eased, replaced by a surge of cold, alien strength. He watched in horror and fascination as the edges of the gash on his arm crawled back together, not healing fully, but sealing enough to stop the bleeding.
I… devoured it.
The realization made him nauseous. His body still trembled with the aftertaste of that essence. It was undeniably power—but it was a parasite's power. It didn't belong to him.
The other Hollowed had paused, their eyeless heads tilting in unison, as if recognizing a predator who had just made its first kill. The whispers changed, the mockery gone, replaced by a desperate, hungry chorus.
Feed. Feed. Make us part of the feast. Feed.
His scar ached. His gut twisted with a profound, gnawing craving that was not his own. A dark, insidious part of him wanted to lunge forward, to pull the essence from every last one of them, to gorge himself on their emptiness until there was nothing left but his own power. The promise of it sang at the edge of his mind, a sweet and terrible siren's call.
But the more he resisted, the more the hunger gnawed at him, threatening to turn its teeth on his own soul.
Kai understood then: this wasn't a gift. It was a leash. The Shroud had planted something inside him—a seed of hunger that might one day consume more than just his enemies.
Still, to survive this courtyard, he had no choice but to taste it again.
Kai raised his knife with one hand, its familiar weight a small comfort. With the other, he clenched his fist over the scar on his chest, a gesture of both defiance and acceptance. He would not surrender to the hunger—not yet. But neither could he escape the damnation of using it.
The test wasn't over. It had only just begun.
And somewhere in the suffocating dark, the voice whispered again—soft, pleased, and utterly cruel:
"Devour… and be devoured."