The surface light had long disappeared, swallowed by the fungal canopy above. Only the slow pulse of moss-vein trails and the occasional flicker of bioluminescent spores lit the Hollow's pathways. Somewhere between the weight of stone and the echoes of lost voices, Riku walked with purpose.
He held the ghost seal close to his side, wrapped in black linen. It radiated a warmth that had no source—like remembering something you hadn't lived through. It didn't hurt. But it didn't rest, either.
Kael walked slightly behind him, his glaive slung over one shoulder, eyes constantly scanning. "Still think it's a key?" he asked after a long silence.
"No," Riku murmured. "Not anymore. It's not for opening something. It's for showing something."
Ahead, the Hollow narrowed into a sharp spine of stone. Blackglass laced through the walls here—ribbons of glimmering mineral that bent the light in wrong angles. These weren't natural veins. They'd been shaped—melted, perhaps, then cooled in a lattice of intent.
When they rounded the ridge, the slope dropped off into a chasm lit entirely by fractured shards of obsidian glass embedded in petrified trees. A thin bridge of fungal rootweb stretched across the void. And on the far side, waiting at the center of a shallow arena, stood a figure unlike the others.
It wasn't a construct. Nor a sovereign. Nor beast.
It wore no mask. Its face was made of mirror-like glass—flawless, but blank. A dark robe hung from its shoulders, frayed and veined with silver. The body beneath the robe shimmered in and out of shape, like it was being projected from elsewhere.
Kael bristled, tightening his grip on the glaive. "What is that?"
"I don't know," Riku admitted. "But it's not here by accident."
They stepped onto the rootbridge. The air changed. Not colder. Not warmer. Just closer. Every breath echoed louder in his ears. By the time they reached the other side, the mirror-faced figure had begun to speak—not with voice, but through soundless vibration.
"You carry the weight of a traded memory," the voice came, inside their minds. "Do you wish to see what it cost?"
Riku didn't hesitate. "Show me."
The figure extended one hand. The blackglass at its center split like water under pressure—and a ripple of illusion, or memory, or both, unfolded across the air between them.
A battlefield. Not recent. Dust-covered, root-choked. Scores of monarchs once stood here—each different, but each with fire in their veins. They had fought. Not for land. Not for resources. But to bury something beneath the Hollow.
Riku saw flashes. A monarch in golden armor screaming as vines coiled around him. A crowned woman slicing her own hand open to seal a pact into stone. A circle formed, rituals enacted, and the Hollow sealed shut with names written in a tongue the current system no longer used.
The memory faded. Riku stepped back, dizzy.
"You watched them bury power," the glass-faced figure said. "But they never destroyed it. Because they couldn't. They traded memory for time."
"And now?" Riku asked.
"Now it leaks. The seal weakens. And those who walk the Hollow awaken fragments not meant to rise."
Kael muttered under his breath, "Great. So we're sitting on top of a melting tomb."
The figure turned to Riku. "You may leave. Or you may stay and enter the pact. A Nightglass bond. You will not control what sleeps. But it will see you."
Riku looked at the chasm's center. Blackglass crystals pulsed faintly there—in sync with the heartbeat he felt inside the ghost seal.
"I don't want control," he said softly. "I want understanding."
The figure nodded. "Then bleed."
Before Kael could protest, Riku unsheathed his dagger and made a shallow cut across his palm. The blood dripped onto the ghost seal. The etched notches absorbed the blood without trace.
The ground shook—barely. A soft sound like breath exhaled through caverns below.
The pact was made.
The glass-faced being stepped back into the blackglass. It rippled once, and then it was gone. Nothing remained but the cracked seal, now smooth and blank.
Kael exhaled. "Was that wise?"
"No," Riku replied. "But it was necessary."
The path ahead split into three tunnels, none marked. The Hollow no longer resisted their passage. In fact, the air itself seemed to guide them.
Riku didn't look back. "Come on. It saw us now. Let's find what it remembers."