The sky bled gray. Ash drifted in lazy spirals through the windless air like broken feathers from gods long slain.
Kael staggered down the embankment leading out of the ruins of the Raven Spire. His limbs trembled, blood mixing with the soot on his torn coat. One eye was swollen shut; the other stared, unfocused, at the shattered horizon where broken cities knelt beneath the weight of ruin.
His Hollowbrand still burned.
Not visibly—he had covered it under cloth and stitched metal, but the pain pulsed deep, a core resonance behind the heart. It hadn't just protected him at Raven Spire; it had awakened, and in doing so, threatened to rip him apart. The Echo Pulse was raw, chaotic.
"You used it... but you weren't ready."
The voice wasn't real, just memory, something from his youth or from someone he'd once fought beside. He couldn't tell anymore. Memories in Virelia bled, warped, and hollowed out.
Kael collapsed somewhere beyond the Decay Frontline.
A salvager drone from Outpost 9E, a beat-up model that looked stitched together from mining and medical protocols, found him twitching beside a rusting cargo hauler. The drone scanned his vitals—spiked readings, unstable synaptic patterns, regenerative surges inconsistent with known survivor classes.
"Mutagenic anomaly detected. Biological value: moderate. Risk: unknown. Directive: retrieve."
It dragged him into its hover-bay and glided over the ashen canyons toward Outpost 9E, a place where none arrived unscarred.
Captain Rehn Solvar leaned on the parapets of Outpost 9E, squinting into the silver dusk. A veteran of the Hollow Siege of Resa Delta, his half-mechanical jaw clicked when he chewed on stress. The Outpost had lost three scouts in two weeks, morale was thinning, and they were dangerously low on thermal charges.
So when the drone returned with a wounded man nearly humming with Hollow-energy, Rehn didn't shoot first.
"Put him in the slop quarter. Chain him. If he mutates, burn the room."
Kael woke in a concrete slab cell. A tattered cot. Fungal lighting above. Two guards stationed outside, steam-bayonets in hand.
His body still ached. More troubling was the muffled pulsing in his chest. The Hollowbrand. Dormant again. But not silent.
A woman stood in the corner. Not a soldier. A medic, maybe. Her eyes were precise, not unkind.
"Name?"
"Kael."
"Path?"
"…Echo Forger. Cast out."
"That so?" She glanced at a worn scanner. "Echo Forgers don't hum like that, Kael."
He didn't respond. She sighed, scribbled something into a notepad that looked older than she was, and left.
Rehn allowed him to stay. Barely. There were too few hands to guard the perimeter, and Kael knew how to handle himself.
But rumors spread fast.
The workers muttered.
"He smells like old ash."
"Saw his wound close on its own—no stim."
"Marked. Gotta be. Hollowborn filth."
They didn't say it to his face. But in Virelia, silence was rarely peace—it was pressure, coiled and hidden.
The Hollowborn were not viewed as saviors or mutants or mysteries. They were seen as echoes of the enemy—creatures born with the Mark of the Hollow, the very thing that had swallowed cities whole.
Even if one acted human, even if they had memories, voices, kindness—most of Virelia feared them like they feared open air on toxin nights.
Kael didn't defend himself. The less he said, the less they knew.
But he heard the whispers:
"He should be burned."
"He's a walking relapse."
"They say a Hollowborn cracked the sky during the Siege of Delta. Killed both sides."
Kael's Mark—the symbol across his chest—was not like others. It was shaped like a spiral etched into fractured stone, flanked by feathered cracks that looked almost… deliberate.
Old. Ancient.
Each time he used his Hollowbrand, it deepened. It glowed with a heatless fire when it resonated. It whispered to him sometimes—not in words, but in memories not his own.
It gave him power. And it demanded something in return.
One night, Rehn called him up to the lookout. The captain didn't mince words.
"You're dangerous, Kael. Don't think I don't see it."
"Then why keep me?"
"Because you haven't turned. Yet. And I've got a job that needs ghosts."
Kael turned to him. "Ghosts?"
"We found something out near the Glimmer Cradle. Old tech. Maybe pre-Fall. Maybe older. You'll go with the unit tomorrow."
Kael nodded. "And if I don't?"
Rehn stared at him coldly. "Then I put you down like the others. Simple."
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