The descent wasn't a journey now. It was a summons.
Riku's footsteps echoed along the smooth-cut rock passage, the sound fading into the roots and veined walls of the Hollow. The light came not from torches—he carried none—but from thin glowing fractures along the stone, like veins of ancient memory pulsing just faintly enough to show the way. It reminded him of an old scar—a mark you forget until something brushes it.
He had been down this tunnel twice before. Once with Kael and Sira, and again with a full escort for the fungal encounter. But this time, every detail felt altered. Tighter. Quieter. There was no breeze, yet he felt the subtle tug of air moving behind him—as if the Hollow exhaled once every hundred heartbeats.
He passed the first root hall, where bark had split stone like ribs, and the patch of growth Kael once called "whisper moss." It had shriveled now. Turned gray. Silent.
Riku didn't stop.
His thoughts flickered back to Blackridge above—steady, waiting, full of trained fighters, restructured defenses, multiplied glaives and tripwires, half-embedded in obsidian teeth.
They were ready for a war.
But this was not a war. Not yet.
He crossed a collapsed shelf of slate, stepping between the gaps carefully. Below, darkness pooled without edge. Just ahead, the pulse began again—the one he had first felt on his last descent. That beat—not a throb, not a hum, but a memory of both—seemed to reach for his feet.
When he rounded the final bend, he saw it.
The chamber.
It wasn't built. It was grown.
Not a throne room—nothing so clean or imperial. But it held weight. Vast, rising, broken ribs of calcified root stood in an oval around the center, all arching toward the sky that no longer touched them. The ceiling had no roof, just more stone. But when Riku looked up, he still felt watched.
At the center, the pulse rose again.
The Memory Core.
A mineral formation wrapped in fused bark, bleeding light without shadow. It pulsed not from itself but from something far older, deeper. It wasn't alive. But it remembered.
Riku stepped forward.
He didn't kneel.
Didn't reach out.
He waited.
And for the first time, something answered.
A thread of sound—no louder than a whisper in a cavern—rippled through the chamber. Not language. Not song. But familiarity. A texture of echo that didn't repeat Riku's presence… it recognized it.
His breath caught.
The Core pulsed once, deeply, and three thin lines of stone on the floor illuminated around it. Not paths—connections. One to the basin lake beneath Blackridge. One to the old forge where Kael first bled iron into steam. One to the ruined passage that had long collapsed near the obsidian trench.
And in that moment, Riku understood.
The Hollow had been shaped before. Not ruled. But guided.
The previous hand? Long turned to dust.
And now, it waited again.
Not for control.
For resonance.
Riku reached beneath his cloak, unwrapping the Sovereign Spindle. The iron spiral shimmered faintly in the ambient pulse, its bands moving not in response to his grip, but in harmony with the chamber.
He didn't place it down.
He simply stood.
And let it see him.
The Core responded.
A second pulse echoed—a sharper one, more focused. Riku's shoulder burned. The old marking from his first claimed Fold. For a moment, it shimmered through the cloth of his sleeve—not with system notation, but with something older. A circle of breath-like sigils, floating a few inches off his skin before fading.
Then, quietly, one of the roots around the Core split.
Not violently. Gently. Willingly.
A pod.
Inside was no relic. No stone. No scroll.
A crown.
Forged not from metal, but from hardened mycelial strands woven with root-glass. Ancient. Alien. Familiar.
Riku approached. His chest beat once, then twice—each rhythm answering the pulse of the Core.
He didn't reach for it.
But the crown lifted.
Floated forward. Not touching, not forcing.
Waiting for acceptance.
Riku hesitated. Not out of fear—but reverence.
Whatever this was, it was not just another tool. It was a memory given form. A contract older than names.
He inhaled slowly. His hand rose.
And as his fingers brushed the underside of the crown, it folded inward—not breaking, not snapping, but adapting. Shrinking to fit. Like recognition sealing shape.
He didn't put it on.
But he didn't refuse it either.
The chamber's pulse deepened.
Then quieted.
The Memory Core dimmed.
And in the stillness that followed, one silent truth settled in the stone, the roots, and in Riku's bones:
He had been received.
Not as ruler.
Not as intruder.
But as continuation.
When he turned and climbed the path again, crown tucked against his side, the Hollow said nothing more.
But Blackridge would feel it when he returned.
And so would the next Blood Moon.