Chapter 3: The Trial of Hollow Light: Descent
The first thing Elias noticed was the silence.
It was not the silence of peace, but of something vast that had swallowed sound whole.
The world around him—the cracked walls, the wet stones, even the smell of soot—folded inward like paper being burned at the edges.
Then came the pull.
It felt like invisible strings were threading through his veins, dragging him into something deeper, colder. He reached for the table to steady himself—only to find his hand sinking into the wood as though it were water.
"Not again," he whispered. "Not now…"
Lira was still asleep in the other room, curled beside the dim lamp. For a fleeting second, he thought about her—her faint breathing, her half-dreaming smile—and then the world tore apart.
Light flooded everything.
But it wasn't light. It was reflection—a thousand mirrored fragments of himself twisting, breaking, and reforming. When his eyes opened again, he stood in a corridor that had no end, its floor made of black glass, its ceiling a dim sky of floating lanterns.
The Trial had begun.
He remembered the stories.
How the energy known as Aetherion seeped into their world centuries ago — invisible, untamed, alien. How a few rare people could resonate with it, shaping reality's rhythm around their will.
Resonance wasn't magic. It wasn't strength. It was alignment — syncing one's heartbeat to the pulse of existence itself. The stronger the synchronization, the deeper the Resonance rank.
---
Elias took one breath and instantly knew it wasn't air he was breathing—it was Aetherion, thin and cold, seeping into his lungs. It hummed faintly, like a song without words. Every step echoed, but the echo came before the step.
He had read of the Trials before. Every Resoner faced one. Those who failed… left nothing behind but faint echoes.
He muttered, "So this is what you call opportunity?"
Something shifted in the mirror.
A shadow rippled across it—a blurred human outline, walking beside him yet not touching the ground. He slowed. The reflection didn't.
Then it smiled.
A hollow grin, stretched too wide, like glass trying to imitate flesh. The reflection bent backward, cracked, and crawled out of the mirror.
The first Wraithform.
It moved wrong, its limbs bending at unnatural angles. Its body shimmered like it was made of smoke and broken light. And when it opened its mouth, the sound that came out wasn't a scream—it was a reversed heartbeat.
Elias backed away slowly. "You're not real," he lied.
The creature tilted its head. Its body pulsed with faint threads of Aetherion, threads Elias could almost feel. Resonance. His instincts told him he could touch them—not physically, but through thought.
He hesitated. Then he remembered the useless shard he had been rewarded before—the faint, dull crystal he had cursed for being worthless. He pulled it out.
The shard glowed faintly. The Wraithform twitched.
"Not so useless after all…" he muttered.
When the creature lunged, Elias threw the shard—not at it, but at the mirrored floor beneath them. The crystal shattered with a resonant hum, sending a wave of warped light that fractured both reflections.
The Wraithform screamed—its sound reversed again—and broke apart into dust.
The shard, however, was gone.
The floor rippled, and the corridor stretched further, new paths splitting in every direction like the veins of a shattered mirror.
A whisper followed him from nowhere and everywhere:
> "Cleverness echoes longer than strength."
He froze.
That voice wasn't his.
Nor was it human.
He clenched his fists and began walking, every step careful, quiet. The mirrors around him sometimes reflected himself, sometimes his sister, and sometimes… something else.
At one point, he saw a reflection of himself smiling—but the real Elias wasn't. The reflection's lips moved, mouthing words he couldn't hear. Then it disappeared.
His pulse quickened.
This was not a battle of power—it was a trial of perception, of sanity. Every reflection, every echo tested the strength of his will to exist.
He whispered to the air, "Resonance, huh? Let's see how far I can resonate before I break."
At the far end of the corridor, a light pulsed—like a distant star flickering through fog.
He moved toward it, but each step made the ground shift, reflecting hundreds of versions of himself. Some were older, scarred, broken. One lay dead.
He stopped walking.
The echoes stopped too.
Only one didn't.
It smiled at him with his sister's eyes and said,
> "You will fail, Elias."
Then it turned and ran.
And even though he knew he shouldn't, he followed.
---
The world bent, twisted, and folded inward once more. The mirrors began to hum. The faint whisper of Aetherion grew louder, forming chords, forming rhythm. He felt something syncing inside his body—a vibration aligning with the hum of the world.
For a moment, he understood.
That was Resonance.
It wasn't just energy. It was the tuning of one's existence with the rhythm of all things.
When one truly resonated, they could bend the very echoes of reality, turning thought into form, emotion into force.
But he wasn't there yet.
As the hum deepened, he realized:
This was only the first descent.
The Trial had many layers.
And he had just entered the second.