The Ritual Circle
The air had weight now. It pressed against their lungs like drowning.
Ashren stood in the center of the blood-carved circle, bones tense, eyes half-glowing. The ancient scroll hovered midair before him, its symbols ablaze in spectral fire. Chains of raw essence coiled around his limbs—not physical, not magical, but divine.
They burned every time he spoke a word of the incantation.
Selene and Liora held the outer glyphs together with force of will, hands slick with sweat and blood. One wrong line, one misplaced syllable, and the spell would rebound—not just killing Ashren, but igniting a rift wide enough to swallow the continent.
And the Hollowborn was coming.
---
The Hollowborn
It didn't run.
It didn't need to.
Every step it took devoured the world beneath it—grass, soil, memory. The Veilmar Stones cracked behind it like glass, the winds it stirred carried whispers from forgotten centuries.
It could already feel the summoning. Like a thorn in its side. Like a mocking bell it could not silence.
So it answered in kind.
It raised its hand.
And ripped open the sky.
A black storm bled into existence, lightning red and crawling, winds howling in reverse. And from its center, it began to fall—not toward the ritual, but through it.
---
Ashren
He screamed—not from pain, but the pressure of reality collapsing in on itself. The Hollowborn wasn't just near. It had reached in. Tendrils of its soul scraped across the edges of the ritual circle, testing it, cracking it.
Liora cried out. "It's too soon! The bond isn't stable!"
"Doesn't matter!" Ashren shouted. "If we wait—it wins."
He drove his palm into the final seal, his own blood unlocking the last glyph.
The Hollowborn appeared.
Not with flame.
Not with fury.
But with silence so deep the stones themselves went still.
---
Selene
She'd seen gods. Killed one.
But this… this was not a god.
It was the absence of one. The thing that gods feared becoming.
And it stood before her son.
"Pitiful," it hissed. "You wear her scars, thief. Do you think that makes you a vessel?"
Ashren stepped forward, chains dragging behind him.
"I don't want to be a vessel," he growled.
"I want to be your end."
---
Ashren vs. The Hollowborn
The clash was not sound, but shatter.
Spells older than speech cracked the circle.
Ashren surged forward with a blade made of binding light, forged from the runes of the dead.
The Hollowborn met it with a smile—and bled.
Just once.
Just a drop.
Ashren grinned.
"Gods don't bleed," he whispered.
"You're not a god anymore."