The wind in the Hollow carried no scent, no warmth—just a subtle pressure that made Riku feel like he was being watched. The narrow path ahead led toward what the fungal remnants called the Trade Grave. His footfalls echoed dully across the slick vein-glass, and behind him, only Kael dared speak.
"This place's older than the Bone Drifts," Kael murmured. "Feels like walking across someone's ribcage."
Riku didn't reply. He could feel it too. Whatever this place had once been, it still remembered. And it remembered wrong—the way shadows drifted against torchlight, too slow or in reverse.
They passed a collapsed arch of bone and root, fused together like organic masonry. Moss clung to it, pulsing faintly with bioluminescence that flickered faster the closer they got. As they approached a shallow basin ahead, something stirred.
A pair of tall, elongated figures rose silently from the recesses in the ground. Not hostile. Not fully alive either. They were fungal constructs, barely aware, but imbued with a kind of duty. Their faces were masks of chitin—empty, oval, and strangely delicate. They held long rods etched with symbols—half language, half nerve.
Kael raised his blade halfway. "Do we fight?"
Riku held a hand out, stopping him. "No. We wait."
The constructs moved in unison, stamping their rods into the glass ground. A tremor rippled outward. The basin ahead cracked open like a blooming flower, revealing a spiral trench leading downward—lit by slow-turning crystals suspended in hanging net-vines.
One of the constructs stepped forward and extended its rod toward Riku, bowing low. Its arm trembled, not from weakness but strain—as if it wasn't meant to make such gestures anymore. The gesture was unmistakable.
"Invitation?" Kael asked, watching the spiraling descent warily.
Riku nodded once. "We trade. But not with currency."
He stepped into the basin, boots crunching against ancient grit. Kael followed, muttering something about cursed soil and bad omens.
Below, the spiral widened into a chamber—a skeletal hall formed by the intertwined bones of something colossally dead. Eight fungal entities sat or lay within, propped by root-vines that pulsed faintly in rhythm. Some of them had faces. Others had masks. One had no head at all.
And yet Riku felt the weight of a gaze.
One of them shifted. Not with muscle, but through the twitch of the net-vines holding it. Its face glowed briefly, eyes illuminating like a firefly caught in dusk.
"You bring a name," it rasped. The voice was neither male nor female, not aggressive—but deeply aware.
"I am Riku," he said. "Monarch of AshEdge."
No reaction. But then one of the seated figures twitched. It extended a limb, producing something from beneath its decayed robes—a thin bundle of knotted cords and bone disks.
"They are memories. Of trades. Of betrayal. Of things left behind."
Riku knelt and accepted the object. As he touched it, a rush of sensation overwhelmed him—not sight, not sound, but an imprint: a boy selling his name for protection. A woman trading her heartbeat for a child's breath. A monarch offering his people's sleep to never dream again.
Each memory was a trade. Not metaphorical. Real.
He opened his eyes slowly. The figures were still watching.
"What do you offer?" the glowing-eyed one asked.
Riku reached back, unhooked one of his prototype glaives—the one he forged before the second Blood Moon. He laid it gently before them.
"This was made for war, but it's never tasted blood. It remembers fire, not death. I offer it freely."
A pause.
One of the fungal constructs broke from the wall behind and shuffled forward. It lifted the glaive carefully, cradling it like a child. The net-vines along the wall pulsed. Then... quiet. A long breathless stillness.
Then the glowing one spoke.
"Accepted."
Riku didn't expect a reward. But something shifted. One of the figures at the back, missing its head, slumped forward. A gentle thump as something rolled from its chest cavity—a small egg-shaped stone covered in etched notches, like a lock without a key.
Kael stepped forward instinctively, but Riku held him back and reached for it himself.
When his fingers closed around it, the notches shifted. He felt heat, but not flame. Buried intent. It was a relic. A ghost seal. A key to something that no longer existed—or didn't yet.
"Take it," the glowing figure rasped. "You carry ghosts anyway."
As they ascended from the trench, Riku didn't speak. The object pulsed in his satchel with the quiet rhythm of a heartbeat out of place.
Kael finally broke the silence. "You gave away one of your best weapons."
"No," Riku said quietly. "I gave it to something that remembers more than we do."
The Hollow closed behind them without sound. Only the memory remained. And the trade.