The town did not wake so much as stir uneasily in the gray hours that followed. It was a dawn without clarity, a reluctant smearing of light over the ridges and rooftops, as though even the sun questioned the wisdom of revealing too much. Smoke still lingered in thin ribbons above the chimneys, though not all belonged to hearths. Some carried the bitter tang of scorched wood and stone. Some clung to the air like remnants of unspoken grief.
Elara rose before the bells, before the bakery stoked its ovens or the blacksmith wheeled open his doors. She had not truly slept, though her body had lain long upon the mattress. Her dreams had been fractured glimpses of faces—some known, some not—pressing close to her as if through a pane of glass. One pair of eyes had followed her relentlessly, shadow-dark, unblinking. She had woken with the taste of ash in her mouth and the uneasy certainty that the breach was no longer content with silence.
The shop felt brittle beneath her hands. Every object she touched carried a faint tremor, as though the wood, the glass, the carefully arranged relics and coins and curled pages were aware of the strain in the air. She set a lamp on the counter, its wick reluctant to catch, and forced her hands to steady. Routine was a fragile shield, but it was all she had.
By the time Kieran arrived, the town had begun to stretch into its day. He pushed through the door with his usual sharp awareness, scanning the shop as though its corners might hold ambush. His hair was damp, his boots muddied, the collar of his coat turned high against the wind. Yet beneath the surface caution, his eyes found hers with a recognition too immediate, too raw to disguise.
"Morning," he said, though the word sounded unfit for the hour.
Elara nodded. "You came early."
"So did you." His gaze drifted briefly to the lamp, then back. "Couldn't sleep?"
She shook her head. The words between them required no embellishment. Sleep had become a luxury neither trusted.
For a while they busied themselves in silence, straightening shelves, sorting the drawer where their worlds brushed against each other in fragile communion. At intervals their hands nearly touched. At others, they lingered too long over the same object, as though reluctant to release the thread binding them.
It was Kieran who finally broke the stillness. He drew a folded sheet from his coat pocket and spread it on the counter. It was a photograph, its surface worn, the image distorted by a faint shimmer that did not belong to age.
Elara leaned closer. The picture showed a narrow street she did not recognize, lit by gas lamps that bent unnaturally, their light haloed in a way that suggested more than fog. In the distance stood a figure—indistinct, but human enough to unsettle. Its features were obscured, yet the angle of its stance suggested watchfulness.
"This was taken two nights ago," Kieran said quietly. "Not far from where the last breach flared. A child found it half-buried in the ash. No camera, no explanation—just the photograph itself, as if it had been carried through."
Elara's throat tightened. "Through the seam?"
He nodded. "Or from somewhere beyond it."
The flame of the lamp guttered suddenly, and both of them turned instinctively toward the glass case at the far wall. Nothing moved. The room held steady. Yet the sense of being observed thickened, pressing like a hand at their backs.
Elara forced herself to breathe evenly. "What do you think it means?"
Kieran hesitated, then shook his head. "I think it means we're not the only ones sending things across anymore."
The words settled like lead.
That evening the town gathered, as it had begun to do after each disturbance, though fewer voices rose in complaint and more in wary silence. The square was lit by torches rather than lanterns, as if flame alone might ward off intrusion. Mothers held children close. Farmers shifted uneasily. Even the mayor's voice lacked its usual force when he called for calm.
Elara stood at the edge of the crowd, Kieran beside her, neither speaking. The air smelled of fear, metallic and thin. People cast furtive glances toward the hills, toward the stretch of river that marked the seam's suspected edge.
It was then that the warning came.
The figure stepped from the shadows between torches, his coat long, his face gaunt, his eyes carrying the depthless pallor of someone who had seen too far. He was not a stranger in the strictest sense—Elara recognized him faintly as a man who had once passed through town seasons ago, selling trinkets, muttering of storms. But his presence now was changed, sharpened.
He raised one hand, and the crowd fell into reluctant stillness. His voice carried without effort, as though the night itself bent to bear it.
"You play with doors that were not meant to open," he said. "You barter with silence and call it harmless. But each gift you send, each scrap you welcome, binds you tighter to a place that does not forgive trespass. The breach does not widen because it is weak. It widens because it is hungry."
Murmurs rippled. Someone scoffed. But more shifted uneasily, clutching their coats.
The stranger's eyes swept the crowd before settling, unerringly, on Elara. For a moment she felt the air collapse, the torches leaning inward.
"You," he said softly, almost reverently. "You carry its mark more deeply than you know."
Her pulse stuttered. She wanted to look away, but could not.
Kieran moved subtly closer, his stance protective. "Enough," he said sharply. "If you mean to scare them, you've succeeded. Now leave."
The man did not move. His gaze remained locked on Elara. "You will learn," he said. "When the hollow light comes, when it strips shadow from flesh, you will remember this warning."
Then he was gone, swallowed by the dark beyond the square, as though the night itself had reclaimed him.
The crowd dissolved in uneasy whispers. Some dismissed him as a madman. Others clutched the words to their chests like curses. Elara stood frozen, the phrase echoing through her like a bell. The hollow light.
That night, long after the town had shuttered its windows, Elara lit a candle and sat before the drawer. The flame bent oddly, its glow stretching toward the seam as though yearning. She pressed her palm against the wood, half-expecting it to pulse beneath her skin.
Kieran's message came at the stroke of midnight. A slip of paper slid into her hand, its edges cold.
Do not let his words root too deep, it read. Fear feeds it more than we do.
She closed her eyes, clutching the note, and whispered into the silence though she knew no voice would carry across.
"But what if fear is all we have left?"
The days that followed wore thin, their hours stretched taut as wire. Elara found herself glancing toward the corners of her shop more often, toward the shadows beneath shelves, as if expecting the stranger's pale eyes to appear. She told herself it was foolishness. She told herself the town was safe by daylight, that walls still held and ground still steadied. Yet beneath it all, a restlessness grew.
Objects passed across at midnight—trinkets, pressed flowers, fragments of words. But sometimes they returned altered, their edges blurred, their meanings askew. A ribbon that had been blue arrived in her hand faded to gray. A coin from Kieran's city bore a face that did not exist. Once, a note came back half-erased, its letters smudged into something unrecognizable.
The seam was changing.
And with it, so were they.
Elara began to notice the silence first. It was not the natural hush of a village settling after work, nor the drowsy quiet that hung in the fields when the last birds nested. This was a silence with intent, one that pressed too firmly into her ears and made her heartbeat sound unnaturally loud.
It followed her through the shop, lingered even in the scrape of her chair or the creak of the floorboards. When she swept dust from the counter, the bristles of the broom made a faint rasp—but behind it, the air seemed to swallow everything, a silence swollen, expectant.
Sometimes she thought she heard the echo of the stranger's words folded into it: When the hollow light comes…
She caught herself lighting extra candles, scattering them across shelves until the room glowed unevenly with trembling flame. Even then, the corners felt too deep, too capable of swallowing what light touched them.
Kieran noticed the change too. He came more often, not always with words, sometimes only with his presence—sorting through maps, rearranging objects with unnecessary precision, lingering in the quiet as though his nearness might dilute it. When their eyes met, there was always the shared admission of unease, though neither wanted to be the one to name it.
On the third night after the warning, Elara dreamed again.
She stood in the square, but the torches had guttered out, leaving only the strange pale sheen of a light without source. It was neither moon nor sun but a diffuse glow that seemed to rise from the ground itself, flattening shadows until faces looked carved from wax.
Around her, the townsfolk stood in silence, their eyes blank, their bodies unmoving. Kieran was there too, but his outline blurred, his features shifting as though someone were erasing him stroke by stroke. She reached for him, but her hand passed through his arm like smoke.
In his place remained only the hollow light, pressing against her until it entered her chest and filled her lungs, until breathing felt like swallowing ice. She woke with a gasp, the candle beside her burned to a stub, the room heavy with the scent of spent wax.
The memory lingered all morning, more vivid than any dream had right to be. When Kieran arrived, she found herself blurting it out without ceremony, needing him to carry part of it.
He listened, his brow furrowed, fingers drumming a steady rhythm on the counter as if to ground them both.
"It's not just fear," he said finally. "The breach sends echoes—dreams, visions. It pushes into what's closest to breaking." His eyes searched hers. "But it doesn't decide everything. We still choose what to believe."
Elara wanted to believe him. She wanted to lean on that certainty. Yet when she closed her eyes, she still saw his face dissolving, replaced by light that did not warm.
The town itself began to shift. People lingered less in the square, hurried through streets without pausing for gossip. Merchants packed earlier. The smith's hammer rang less frequently. The tavern's laughter dulled, replaced by murmurs that frayed whenever someone approached.
The stranger had left no mark beyond his words, but they spread like cracks in glass, invisible until the whole pane shivered. Farmers whispered about livestock staring too long at nothing, about tools left overnight in fields turning up bent, warped. A fisherman swore his nets came back with fish that had eyes like coins—flat, unblinking.
Mayor Halvors tried to dismiss it, but even he tightened his coat, his voice too quick when insisting all was well. Elara could see the doubt in him, as visible as frost.
Midnight exchanges became strained.
The drawer resisted, sticking even when the clock struck twelve. Once, Elara pressed so hard that her palm ached, the wood refusing to yield until suddenly it sprang open with enough force to scatter its contents.
That night the object within was wrong.
It looked like one of Kieran's notes, folded neatly, his script beginning to curl across the first line. But the ink bled as she watched, the words blurring until they rearranged into something unreadable, shapes that seemed almost to move. The letters pressed outward, swelling like they wanted to lift themselves from the page.
She dropped it instinctively. The paper fell but made no sound when it struck the floor.
When she dared pick it up again, it was blank.
Elara held it with trembling hands, unsure whether to show Kieran. She folded it back into the drawer, almost afraid of what it might return as if she sent it across again.
That night, sleep did not come.
Kieran, for his part, tried to keep steadiness between them. He spoke more often now—not of the breach, but of his city, of ordinary details that tethered them to something resembling normality. He described the rattle of trams at dawn, the river markets, the smell of roasted chestnuts curling through streets in winter.
Elara listened hungrily, her mind sketching the scenes as if they were lifelines. Yet even those stories grew touched by strangeness. Once, when he described a square filled with booksellers, she swore she saw the faint shimmer of light ripple across his face, distorting the words. Another time, the smell of smoke—not chestnut, but burning—seemed to creep from the drawer as he wrote.
The breach was no longer contained at the edges. It was reaching through the very fabric of their communion, altering even their memories.
A week after the warning, the hollow light arrived—not in full, but in glimpses.
Elara noticed it first in the reflection of a window. The lamplight behind her appeared drained, its flame pale, elongated, as though some other illumination had laid itself over it. When she turned, the lamp burned normally.
Then it came in patches: a corner of the room suffused with faint pallor, a shelf of books looking bleached at their edges, a shadow cast where no object stood.
Kieran saw it too. "It's testing," he murmured one night, voice taut. "Like an animal nosing at a gate before it forces its way through."
The thought chilled her.
The stranger's words echoed louder with each glimpse. She caught herself whispering them at odd moments: The hollow light comes… as though rehearsing.
Kieran noticed. He gripped her wrist one evening, firm enough to anchor her. "Don't give it your voice," he said. "Don't let it root in you. You're stronger than this, Elara. You have to be."
His intensity frightened her more than the words themselves. Because in his eyes she saw not only determination but also fear—fear that she might not resist, that the seam might claim her before either of them could stop it.
The culmination came on the ninth night.
Elara was alone in the shop, the clock crawling toward midnight, when the light began to seep in—not from the lamp or candle, but from the very grain of the floorboards. It spread upward, pale and flat, erasing depth until the room looked two-dimensional, every object reduced to outline.
She stumbled back, knocking over a stack of books. The sound was swallowed instantly, as if the light consumed noise as well. Her breath came fast, yet even that felt muted, muffled.
The drawer shuddered.
Slowly, inexorably, it slid open on its own.
Inside lay no note, no trinket. Only a brightness so pure it seemed hollow, a window of light without weight. It pulsed once, as if aware of her.
Her hand moved before thought could stop it. Some force within the glow tugged at her, pulling her closer. She leaned in, the world around her dissolving into flatness. For a moment she felt the chill of something vast and empty pressing against her skin—then a sharp tug yanked her back.
Kieran's hand, gripping hers through the seam, though she had not seen him enter. His face appeared within the glow, strained, eyes burning with effort.
"Don't," he hissed. The word vibrated more in her chest than her ears.
With one last wrench, the drawer slammed shut.
The light vanished.
Elara collapsed against the counter, chest heaving. Kieran's face was gone, but the imprint of his hand lingered, warm against her palm.
The silence that followed was absolute.
When dawn broke, the town woke to find a pale ring scorched into the earth at the square's center, as though something had leaned down to press its mark. No fire had burned there, yet the ground was bleached, brittle as chalk.
No one spoke of it directly, but eyes turned toward Elara more often than before. Whispers carried on the wind. And always, beneath it, the same unspoken fear: the breach was no longer merely at the edges. It was here.
And the hollow light had begun to choose.