The sound of roots cracking beneath weight that shouldn't be there echoed deep in the Hollow. The chamber was long—limestone-ribbed and striated with blackened, half-pulsing veins. From its ceiling hung limp, molted fungi-skins, and from the floor, slow-glowing stalks twisted lazily toward where Riku walked.
He moved without torchlight.
The others followed in a quiet line: Sira, blade sheathed but hand on hilt; Kael, carrying a pack of ember-forged core drills; and Tharn, last, who rarely spoke now, but whose steps were always perfectly placed. They'd learned how to walk in the Hollow. The tunnels punished sound.
Two days had passed since they'd entered this deeper route—since the root-throne corridor spat out into a new region, hidden behind a collapsed basalt wall. But time didn't behave normally here. There were no sun cycles. The stone sweated with condensation that tasted faintly of bloodroot. Their water had to be filtered. Their dreams, increasingly, didn't belong only to them.
But Riku never wavered. He kept walking. Because this new layer wasn't random.
It was shaped.
"I see structure again," Kael muttered, stopping. He tapped his foot against a near-perfect arc carved into the floor.
Riku crouched beside him. The stone was veined with silver dust, but what caught his eye was a symbol—half-buried, worn to almost nothing. Not glyph. Not language.
It was an impression. A design made not with hands, but with time.
"It's like the root-throne's basin," Sira whispered, kneeling beside it. "Same curve. Same sense of… weight."
"This wasn't built. It was grown," Kael said. "And then hollowed."
Riku ran his thumb across the carved edge. A faint warmth pulsed back, like a dying heartbeat responding to touch. He stood slowly.
"Something remembers," he said.
Sira looked at him. "Do you think they'll speak again? The Fungal Remnants?"
"They don't speak," Tharn murmured from the rear, surprising them. "They echo. Big difference."
Riku nodded. The memory of the first encounter still clawed behind his eyes: the withered remnant draped in biofilm and sorrow, its gestures hollow and graceful. It had gestured with its half-hand at Riku's weapon, not with fear, but recognition. Then it folded itself back into the wall and never emerged again.
And now they were nearing the place it had pointed to.
The tunnel opened.
It wasn't a room so much as an interior valley—like the lungs of the Hollow. Great fungal scaffolds curved upward into a high chamber with translucent ceilings. Light filtered through from unknown sources, casting violet shimmer across the floor, which was made not of rock, but a lattice of white calcified cords—vein-like and humming faintly.
And in the center of the room: shapes.
Dozens.
Riku stepped forward. He counted them as he went. Thirty-one—each upright, humanoid in size and shape, but made entirely of the same root-lattice, shaped as if clay had been pulled into limbs and left to harden.
Puppets.
But their faces—if they could be called that—were blank, save for one.
Kael breathed in sharply. "That one… has a name."
It did.
Carved into the torso of the foremost figure, in the same faint sigil-line as the root-throne itself: R.K.
The characters were crude, and yet undeniably shaped by a hand that had seen language.
Sira drew her blade. "This is a mockery."
"No," Riku said, too softly. "It's memory."
He stepped up to the figure. Not a mirror. Not a statue. But something older, that remembered something it had never seen.
Behind him, Kael reached out and touched the arm of one of the other root-puppets. It shivered.
The motion was not random.
The whole valley trembled faintly—then stopped.
"I don't like this," Sira said under her breath.
"They're... vessels," Riku murmured, turning slowly. "Not alive. But not inert."
A crack sounded from behind.
Tharn stepped back, face hard. "That one moved."
Indeed, a second puppet had shifted, subtly—a tilt of the head, a rearrangement of limbs that hadn't existed moments before.
The ambient light dimmed. Not by absence of source—but because something with intent had focused it.
Kael raised the scanner from his hip, an older tool he rarely used. "I'm reading… proximity spikes. Not heat. Not mana. It's behavioral."
"Like they're watching," Sira said.
"No. Like they're... waiting," Riku said.
He stepped back, slowly. He placed one hand on the sigil-marked puppet's shoulder. It was soft. Not rotted, not alive. But giving.
"They're not soldiers," Riku murmured. "They're keys."
Kael looked up. "To what?"
"To whatever built this. Or buried it."
A pulse sounded in the far wall—no louder than a heartbeat, but enough to make every root-thread in the chamber stand up straighter.
Then the floor shifted.
Not violently. Not with warning.
The entire valley's central ring slowly began to descend, spiraling downward like an ancient lift. The puppets did not move. They simply... followed, as if their presence extended beyond where they stood.
Sira cursed, backing toward Riku. "We go with it?"
He nodded once.
Whatever was below hadn't rejected them. Not yet. And the name etched into the root-body wasn't accidental. It was an invitation.
The platform sank lower.
And far above them, near where the ceiling faded into biolight, one last puppet stirred—barely visible in the shadows. Its fingers twitched, and on its chest, another set of letters glimmered faintly into shape.
This time, it didn't say R.K.
It said K.E.L.
Kael stared upward.
And something inside him quietly unraveled.