The bell faded, but its resonance remained, vibrating in their bones and in their shadows. Across timelines, heirs staggered, their echoes straining against a weight far greater than any trial they had imagined.
Saphine's Timeline — The Verge of Destruction
Saphine steadied the Saintess's daughter, who still clutched her chains as if phantom bindings lingered. Eris stood behind her, eyes narrowed as if peering beyond the flames themselves.
Seloria broke the silence. "If the daughter was framed… who could do such a thing?"
Her knight-shadow, Cyrinth, lifted its mirrored blade and drove it into the stones. Its reflection did not show their ruined square — instead, it showed the Saintess alive, kneeling in prayer before her cathedral. Yet her lips moved silently, as if her prayers were stolen.
Lyssandra folded her arms. Her smoke-shadow hissed, knives flickering in and out. "We're assuming she died here. But what if she didn't? What if this body we see is a husk, and her true self was devoured elsewhere?"
Eris finally spoke, his voice calm, too calm. "You're closer than you realize. The Grand Gaze does not show me answers, only the pieces. What I see is absence — a hole in time where the Saintess should be. She was not only killed. She was… erased."
Saphine's breath caught. She remembered his words before, about what his eyes showed him. What he sees is only his to see. And if he saw absence, then the truth was darker than framing.
Aerin's Timeline — Before the Fall
The sun still shone over Veltharion's golden towers, but shadows stretched longer with every step. Aerin leaned on his spear, frustration in his jaw. "If she was missing even now, then this entire kingdom's worship was hollow."
Meline's chained shadow tugged at its shackles, eyes burning. It knelt, but its voice cracked: "Servitude cannot bind what does not exist."
Verradine's scholar-shadow stopped its endless writing, letting the starry constellations dissolve. "The Saintess's absence was intentional. Someone wanted Veltharion to thrive without her, to forget her necessity."
Solmar's storm-shadow thrashed. Bolts of lightning split the air, striking marble spires. "Or she was hidden to buy time for something greater. Her absence may not have been weakness… but a choice."
Aerin's spear rang as he struck it against the ground. "Then the framing of her daughter is only one link in a chain. Someone was rewriting the kingdom long before its fall."
Korrin's Timeline — After the Ashes
Dust rose with every step through the ruins. The wolf-shadow padded ahead, ears twitching as if hearing whispers in the stone.
Korrin bent to pick up a charred banner of Veltharion, running his hand along the crest of the Saintess. "No survivors… unless survival was never the goal."
Thalvek's colossus lifted a broken tower beam and tossed it aside, faceless helm staring down at him. Calvess's hooded shadow weighed her scales, the balance never settling.
Finally, her whisper cut through the silence: "The world demanded a death so absolute it left no witnesses. Who has such power? Who demands such silence?"
Korrin clenched his fist. His wolf-shadow growled, fur bristling. "Whoever it was, they killed a kingdom, not a person. That is not framing. That is execution."
Convergence
For a heartbeat, the timelines folded into one another.
Saphine's trembling question: "How did she die without notice?"Aerin's furious demand: "Why was she missing long before?"Korrin's growled suspicion: "Why no survivors at all?"
The heirs and their shadows felt each other's voices vibrate across the Hollow. Chains rattled, wolves howled, storms cracked, reflections shattered.
And then the Saintess's corpse stirred.
Not in one time, but in all three. The ruined body in Saphine's arms twitched. The saintly figure reflected in Seloria's shadow's blade blinked. The ashes clinging to Korrin's boots shifted like breath.
Her voice echoed from nowhere and everywhere.
"You ask why I died unseen. You ask why I was gone before my end. You ask why no one lived to speak of me. Then let me answer."
Her shadows, her memory, her very death — all were bound into the Hollow itself.
The heirs realized together: the Resonant Hollow was not just a trial.
It was the Saintess's grave.