Ash fell like snow over Miralune.
From a distance, the lower rings of the Skyhaven looked almost beautiful—tower after tower
rising from the suspended platforms, lights shimmering through the smog like trapped
stars. Up close, the beauty died fast. The air tasted of rust and burning dust, and
everything carried the faint, metallic glow of spilled Eidravore.
Aurek Valein wiped gray ash from his lashes with the back of his wrist and kept walking.
The freight line shook beneath his boots as another container of Remnant ore rumbled past,
chains clanking, engines whining. Above him, high overhead, the true Miralune gleamed—a
suspended city of glass and white stone hanging from colossal pylons, haloed in artificial
light.
Up there, people never breathed this air.
"Valein!" a foreman shouted from the platform rail. "Stop daydreaming and move your
useless spine. Eight more carts before shift change."
Aurek didn't bother answering. He just dipped his head once and pushed the empty trolley
forward, muscles burning with familiar dullness. It wasn't worth talking back. Down here,
words never outweighed work.
Dominance wasn't shouting at people who could crush you.
Dominance was choosing what you cared enough to answer.
The trolley wheels screeched as he reached the loading gate, where a narrow service tunnel
bored down toward the underbelly of Miralune's biggest wound—the **Reactor Pit**.
He paused for a heartbeat on the threshold.
From here, he could feel it—a low, constant vibration in the bones, a pressure behind the
eyes. The kind of hum that didn't come from machines.
The Hollow was awake tonight.
A hollow world, and we still pretend we're the ones looking down.
He pushed the trolley into the tunnel.
Cold light panels flickered overhead, casting long, jittery shadows on the metal walls.
Every few meters, warning sigils pulsed in red along the railings:
**REACTOR 3 – CROWN ABYSS BREACH ZONE**
**AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY****NO SHADOW-CAST DEVICES BEYOND THIS POINT**
Aurek's own shadow stretched ahead of him, thin and faint in the flickering light. It
clung to the ground in a narrow strip, obeying his movements.
For now.
He tried not to look at it more than he had to.
The tunnel opened onto a platform suspended above a vast, circular shaft. The Reactor Pit
was a gaping wound in the world—an engineered throat plunging straight down toward the
Crown Abyss far below. Rails lined the platform edges. Cranes swung silently overhead. A
single containment tower rose from the center of the shaft, its surface crawling with
veins of dim golden-black radiance.
Reactor 3.
It didn't actually touch the Hollow. That would be suicide. Instead, the engineers had
anchored it just above the breach, harvesting what leaked out.
They called it Eidravore when they bottled it.
Below, in Nadirth, it was just… blood.
"Valein, you're late." The shift captain, a thick-shouldered woman with tired eyes and
silver veinmarks at her throat, checked a slate. "Run these samples to the inner struts.
Techs need 'em for density checks before tonight's draw."
She pointed to three sealed canisters waiting on the railing. Even through the reinforced
glass, Aurek could see the contents moving—thick black dust threaded with faint, pulsing
gold.
Raw Remnant ore.
"Got it," he said.
The captain's gaze lingered on his face for a moment, searching for something there. Aurek
met her eyes briefly, then looked away. People always stared a little too long, like they
were trying to figure out why his features didn't quite match his station.
He was used to it.
"Don't stand near the core longer than you have to," she added. "Reactor's been whining
all night. If the alarms go, drop the samples and run."
"Sure."
I won't run, he thought. There's nowhere to run to.
He loaded the canisters onto the trolley and pushed it toward the maintenance bridge that
reached out toward the containment tower. The bridge vibrated faintly under his weight.Beneath the grating, the shaft opened into a dizzying fall of steel supports, cables, and
distant, shimmering dark.
Aurek didn't look down often.
Tonight, he did.
The Hollow stared back.
It was subtle. A faint suggestion of motion in the black, like something vast shifting
miles below. Every time he watched, he saw something different—jagged silhouettes, slow
waving limbs, a thousand dim eyes like dying embers.
You're imagining it, he told himself.
But the vibration in his bones said otherwise.
Halfway across the bridge, the world changed.
It started with a sound.
Not the usual low reactor hum, or the drip of condensation from the support struts.
A scream.
The metal beneath Aurek's boots vibrated as if something huge had dragged its claws along
the world's ribs. The light panels overhead flickered, then flared bright white, washing
everything in harsh glare.
Warning klaxons snapped to life around the shaft, red lights spinning.
"REACTOR INSTABILITY," a voice boomed from the speakers, twice too loud. "CORE PRESSURE
CRITICAL. ALL PERSONNEL STAND BY FOR—"
The voice cut off in a burst of static.
The containment tower groaned.
Hair rose along Aurek's arms.
He looked up.
Rivers of golden-black light crawled faster along the reactor's surface, veins bulging,
contracting, like something inside was breathing hard. The core's usual restrained glow
had become a pulsing heartbeat, each throb sending waves of dizzying pressure through the
air.
"Not good," Aurek muttered.
He glanced back at the platform. The shift captain was shouting orders, workers scramblingfor the lifts, for the exits. Someone waved frantically, pointing at him.
Run.
He didn't.
He looked forward, toward the reactor's maintenance port. He still had the samples. The
techs were counting on them. If the density was wrong, tonight's draw could—
The bridge lurched.
Aurek's hand shot out, gripping the rail. Chains rattled. A spiderweb of hairline cracks
raced across the containment tower's outer shell, spilling bright filaments of Eidravore
into the air like leaking veins.
The world tasted suddenly of lightning and burnt metal.
Move.
He pushed the trolley forward, feet hammering the grating.
The pain started before the explosion.
It speared through his skull like a nail of light, sharp and sudden, dropping him to one
knee. His breath caught, chest spasming, vision smearing into streaks of white and black.
What—?
His heart hammered as if trying to escape, beating against his ribs with enough force to
bruise. The trolley handle slipped from his fingers. The canisters rolled, clanking, one
slamming against the bridge rail.
"REACTOR BREACH," the speaker voice returned, distorted. "ALL PERSONAL—"
The word shattered into static as the world did the same.
The containment tower ruptured.
For a moment, there was no sound—just a blinding column of golden-black light erupting
from the reactor, lancing upward through the shaft, through the platforms, toward the
distant sky.
Then the sound hit.
It was not an explosion.
It was a roar, deep and endless, like the planet itself had finally remembered how to
scream.
The bridge bucked. Aurek felt his body lift into the air, his stomach lurching. Theshockwave hit him like a wall, folding him in on himself, smashing the breath from his
lungs.
Then the light reached him.
It wasn't just light. It was substance and memory and heat and cold all at once, slamming
into his skin, into his eyes, into his ears. It poured through him instead of around him,
a flood of raw Eidravore bursting into every nerve.
His body caught fire from the inside.
Pain bloomed.
For a heartbeat, he tried to understand it, to map it—heat here, cold there, a burning
under his skin, a piercing behind his eyes.
Then understanding failed.
The pain was too big for words. It roared down his spine, along every nerve, into every
joint. His fingers curled uselessly, muscles locking, as if his own bones were trying to
escape his flesh. His teeth clamped so tight something cracked.
He would have screamed, but the light stole his voice.
Everything became sensation.
I'm burning.
That was the first thought that managed to surface.
Not my skin. Me.
It was like someone had poured molten metal into his veins, replacing blood with liquid
storms of gold and shadow. It surged through his heart, his lungs, his brain. Every beat
felt like a detonation.
His vision split.
He saw the bridge, the reactor, the blast—everything frozen in a shattered instant.
At the same time, he saw something else.
Darkness.
Not the simple dark of a room without light.
A hollow, endless void that curved the wrong way. An inverted sky that stretched beneath
him instead of above, studded not with stars but with slow-burning eyes. Rivers of
Eidravore flowed upward there, golden-black streams that defied gravity, pouring from
chasms in the air into towering structures that looked almost like cities.Nadirth.
He knew its name without knowing how.
He was falling toward it, down, down through the cracked world, the bridge and reactor and
Miralune shrinking above him. The wind screamed in his ears, except there was no wind,
just the pressure of something vast watching him drop.
That's not real.
The thought tore itself through the agony.
This is in my head.
Pain answered, a fresh spike through his chest, like something disagreeing.
Somewhere, far away, his body slammed onto the bridge.
He felt the impact in fragments—ribs jarring, skull bouncing off metal, limbs twisting at
wrong angles before snapping back. The light did not let him go. It wrapped around him,
into him, a cocoon of burning static.
His shadow tore free.
He saw it out of the corner of his eye—the strip of darkness that had been faithfully
following his movements every day of his life beginning to writhe.
It peeled.
Not like a painting scraped from a wall.
Like skin.
It stretched along the bridge, ripping itself away from his feet, elongating, thickening.
For a heartbeat, two Aureks lay there—one of flesh, writhing, and one of darkness,
perfectly still.
The second one opened its eyes.
They were not eyes, not truly—just twin voids ringed with molten gold.
They looked at him.
The pain surged, a tide that swallowed everything else. His back arched off the metal, a
hoarse sound finally breaking from his throat. His muscles spasmed, veins standing out
along his neck and arms like glowing wires.
Stop.He tried to curl in on himself, to protect his head, his chest. His fingers wouldn't obey.
They flailed, clawing at the air, at his own arms, seeking purchase in anything real.
His skin pulsed.
He saw it, through the blur—thin lines of light crawling just beneath the surface of his
forearms, along the backs of his hands. Gold, shot through with black threads. They traced
the paths of veins, then veered off, following patterns that made no anatomical sense.
Veinmarks.
No, not possible.
Veinmarks belonged to the bloodlines above, to nobles born under the Skyhavens' inner
lights, not to ground rats like him. They burned golden, silver, crimson. They didn't
writhe. They didn't dig into the flesh like hooked wires trying to anchor something
inside.
His did.
They spread from his wrists up toward his elbows, up his neck, spiderwebbing across his
ribs, his chest, like some invisible hand was drawing symbols beneath his skin with molten
metal.
His heart skipped a beat.
Then another.
Too slow.
If it stops, I die.
The idea should have been simple, obvious. Instead it came with a strange, cold clarity,
standing out in the middle of the chaos. Everything hurt, but that thought did not. It was
a fixed point, a quiet center.
He grabbed it.
Breathe.
He forced air into his lungs. It scraped through raw throat, burning. His ribs protested,
but they moved.
Breathe. Keep breathing. Don't stop.
Dominance wasn't control over others.
Right now, dominance was control over this—his own failing body.
The bridge shuddered. Sections of the platform above rained down in smoking fragments,
clanging off supports, spinning into the shaft. Through the veil of light and ash, Aureksaw the distant shape of Miralune's undercity tearing, whole sections of habitation plates
collapsing.
For an instant, the sky—what little he could see of it through the industrial maze—split.
Not metaphorically.
High above, past the hanging pylons, past the lowest rings of the suspended city, the
artificial sky-shield that protected Miralune from the Hollow cracked like glass under a
hammer. A hairline fracture of pure darkness cut through the shimmering dome, widening,
bleeding blackness.
The light from the reactor column speared into that fracture.
The world connected.
Nadirth stared back, closer now. He saw cities inverted on the underside of the crack,
structures hanging down like roots, lit by rivers of upward-flowing fire. He saw shapes
moving there—colossal silhouettes crawling along those impossible streets, turning massive
heads toward the new wound between worlds.
The pain in his chest deepened, like those gazes had weight.
Something noticed him.
Something old.
His vision blurred.
The column of Eidravore contracted suddenly, collapsing inward. The light around him
tightened, compressing like a fist.
The pain sharpened from everywhere to one point—his spine.
It felt like a hook was being driven through it from the inside, threading each vertebra,
dragging something up along the cord. His back arched, tendons standing out. Fingers
clawed at the metal. His jaw locked. Sight went white.
Then he heard it.
A voice.
Not far away, not booming from the speakers, not echoing from the Hollow below.
Inside.
It wasn't words at first. Just a cadence, a rhythm that matched his heartbeat—ragged, but
relentless. As his pulse pounded against his ears, it grew clearer, sharper, like
something tuning itself using his pain as a guide."Too slow."
The word wasn't spoken aloud. It burst behind his eyes, cold and precise.
Aurek sucked in air—half sob, half gasp.
Who—?
"Your heart," the voice said calmly. "If it slows any further, you die. You know that,
don't you?"
The pain fought to drown it out. But the voice was a blade in the storm, cutting clean
lines through the chaos.
His lungs burned. The light cocoon around him flickered.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
I'm hallucinating. Reactor exposure. Brain damage.
"Wrong," the voice replied.
The word vibrated along his bones.
"You're adapting."
The hooks of pain in his spine twisted, sharper. He groaned, fingers digging into the
grated floor hard enough to leave blood in the grooves.
"Stop fighting it."
The voice sounded almost… amused.
"Fight the panic. Not the change."
What are you?
He didn't form the sentence with his mouth. There was no air left for that. It rose from
somewhere deep and hollow inside his chest, a raw thought flung at the thing coiled around
his nerves.
The answer came with the sensation of something opening its eyes in the dark.
"You already know," the voice murmured. "You've been carrying me since the first time you
stared too long into the Hollow."
Heat flushed through his limbs. The veinmarks along his arms flared, gold brightening,
black deepening.
His back slammed down onto the bridge. Muscles seized once, twice, then locked.The light around him changed.
It stopped feeling like a storm and more like… breath. Each pulse matched his, syncing,
aligning. The burning in his veins cooled from white-hot agony to smoldering embers.
The pain didn't vanish. It sharpened, then narrowed, like a rope being pulled taut.
He could think.
Not well. Not clearly. But enough.
The cocoon of Eidravore began to recede, drawing back into his skin, into his bones. The
taste of metal in his mouth dulled. He felt the bridge vibrations again, the distant
alarms, the crackling of fires.
His shadow moved.
He saw it in the corner of his eye again—the second Aurek, the one made of darkness and
leaking gold, slowly straightening up from the ground.
It wasn't a flat patch anymore.
It had depth.
Height.
Shape.
It stood where his shadow should be, anchored to his boots by a thin column of darkness,
but its torso, arms, and head rose out of the two-dimensional plane like smoke thickening
into flesh.
Its features were almost his. Same jawline, same nose, same mouth.
The eyes were wrong.
Too still. Too focused. No human ever held their gaze that steady.
Aurek stared.
So did it.
The voice in his bones spoke again.
"Open your eyes properly," it said. "Don't just look. See."
He realized, with a cold lurch, that his eyes were already open.
The first-person thought slid into the third-person moment like a blade.He was used to being unseen. Background. A moving shape pushing carts, hauling ore,
overlooked by nobles and foremen alike.
Now something was watching him the way predators watched prey.
No, not prey.
Potential.
The dark figure tilted its head, studying him. The faint golden veins tracing its form
pulsed in time with his own.
"Better," the voice said. "You're not dying anymore. Disappointing. I was curious what
would happen if you failed."
The words didn't match the lips of the thing in front of him. They vibrated from
everywhere—from the metal, from his own skull.
Aurek swallowed, throat raw.
"You're not real," he rasped.
That was a mistake.
Speaking hurt. The syllables scraped across raw vocal cords like glass. His chest
clenched. Coughs tore out of him, each one spiking pain down his ribs. Spots freckled his
vision.
The dark figure watched calmly.
"Reality is a matter of agreement," it said lightly. "Right now, you don't have much
authority to argue."
It smiled.
It was a small thing. No baring of teeth, no villainous curve. Just a subtle shift, a
slight softening at the corners of the mouth.
It looked more dominant than any snarl.
Because it was restrained.
Aurek forced his elbows under him, pushing himself up despite the fire in his muscles. The
world tilted. The bridge around him was half-destroyed, sections hanging at twisted angles
over the open shaft. The containment tower had split in two, its upper half sagging,
spilling streams of glowing shards into the abyss.
Above, the crack in the sky had begun to close, the fracture knitting around the spent
column of light like a wound scabbing over.Lower platforms burned. He heard distant screams, the grind of emergency bulkheads, the
thunk of automatic shutters slamming down.
The figure waited patiently.
"Who are you?" Aurek managed.
The answer came with eerie, lazy certainty.
"I am Serrin."
The name slid into his mind like a key into a lock. It fit too well, like it had always
been there, waiting.
"And what are you?" he asked.
It considered that, head tilting just enough to suggest it could afford the pause.
"Your shadow," it said. "Your reflection. Your other. The piece the Hollow kept when the
world flipped itself inside out."
"Shadows don't talk," Aurek said.
"Bodies don't survive raw Eidravore." Serrin gestured vaguely at him. "Yet here we are.
Reality is having a strange day."
Aurek's fingers tightened on the grated floor. Pain flared, but he didn't let his hands
shake.
Dominance wasn't pretending he wasn't afraid.
It was not letting fear decide what he said.
"You did this," he said.
The accusation came out flat, measured. Not a shout. Not a plea.
Serrin's not-eyes glowed a little brighter.
"No," it said. "The reactor did this. The Hollow did this. Your engineers did this. I just
decided to introduce myself while you were… receptive."
"You're in my head," Aurek said.
"Incorrect. I am in your shadow." Serrin stepped closer, the lower half of its body
darting in a sleek, liquid motion along the bridge's surface. The connection between the
two-dimensional dark and the rising torso never broke. "You're the one trespassing, Aurek.
For the first time in your life, you're standing with one foot in the Lumen Veil and one
in Nadirth. You should feel honored."Aurek's mouth tasted of copper. He swallowed the metallic tang.
"How do you know my name?"
Serrin's smile shifted again, this time edged with something like amusement.
"I watched you," it said simply. "Every time you stopped to stare into the Pit. Every time
you ignored the foreman yelling. Every time you chose to listen to the hum below instead
of the noise above."
It leaned in closer.
"When you live in someone's shadow long enough," it murmured, "you learn what matters to
them."
Aurek's instinct screamed at him to lean away. He held his ground.
Up close, Serrin's features were almost perfectly carved, as if someone had taken Aurek's
face and refined it, trimming away uncertainty, fear, doubt. It wasn't arrogance he saw
there.
It was certainty.
"Why now?" Aurek asked. "Why talk to me now?"
"Because now you can hear me," Serrin said. "The reactor bathed you in Eidravore. It
threaded your nerves, rewrote your veins. Your body would have died. Your mind would have
cracked."
"Didn't," Aurek said.
"Because I held on," Serrin replied. "I wrapped myself around what you were losing and
pulled. I am, at an inconvenient level of accuracy, the reason you're still breathing."
Aurek exhaled slowly.
"So you saved me," he said. "And I'm supposed to… what? Thank you?"
Serrin's smile widened, just barely.
"No," it said. "You're supposed to live. Long enough for me to see what you become when
you stop pretending to be small."
The words landed like weights in his chest.
Above them, emergency drones buzzed, casting searchlights across the devastated platforms.
One beam swept past, passing over Aurek and Serrin.
Serrin flickered.For a heartbeat, its form blurred, stretched, pulled back toward the flat strip of shadow
at Aurek's feet. Then the beam moved on, and Serrin solidified again.
"Light is still inconvenient," it said mildly. "We'll have to fix that."
Aurek filed that away.
You're bound to my shadow. Stronger in the dark.
The realization brought a strange, cold calm with it. Pain still pulsed in his limbs, but
it had a rhythm now, an order.
He pushed himself fully to his knees, then to one foot, then upright. Every movement hurt.
Every joint protested. But he stood.
Smoke curled around them. The bridge groaned.
Serrin watched him rise, something like approval passing across its face.
"There," it said. "That's better."
Aurek looked down.
Beneath the grated metal, the Pit yawned—deeper now. Sections of the shaft wall had
collapsed, revealing glimpses of something else beyond steel and stone. Smooth surfaces,
too clean to be natural, glimmered faintly with upward-flowing gold.
Nadirth was closer.
He could feel it—a pull at the soles of his feet, as if gravity had remembered its other
direction.
The thought came, quiet and clear.
The world is hollow. We live on a shell.
He'd heard the rumors. Everyone down here had. Stories of the Inner Hollow, of inverted
landscapes and Hollowborn gods. But rumors were safe. Stories were distant.
This was not.
He tore his gaze away from the abyss and looked back at Serrin.
"What do you want?" he asked.
Serrin's answer was immediate.
"To see what happens when you stop letting other people decide what you are."It gestured upward, toward the cracked sky, the burning platforms, the distant gleam of
Miralune's upper city.
"You have two choices now, Aurek Valein. Pretend nothing changed and hope your veins don't
burn you from the inside out… or learn how to use what the Hollow just gave you."
"How?" Aurek asked.
Serrin's smile turned sharp.
"First," it said, "we leave this bridge alive."
As if on cue, a section of the containment tower above them loosened with a grinding
shriek. A massive fragment of armored plating tore free, tilting, then plummeting toward
the bridge.
Aurek felt its shadow before he saw the falling mass.
Instinct screamed at him to run.
He didn't.
He stepped forward instead, just enough to clear the worst of the impact zone, grabbed the
trolley handle with both hands, and yanked.
Pain flared along his arms, but he moved anyway. The canisters rolled, clanking, just as
the plating slammed into the bridge where he'd been lying seconds ago, tearing a jagged
hole in the grating.
The shockwave shoved him sideways. He caught himself on the railing, chest colliding with
it. The Pit opened hungrily below.
Serrin moved with him, shadow-body flowing along the bridge, always anchored to his feet.
"Good," it said softly. "You're not wasting time."
Aurek's breath came rough but steady.
"I'm not dying here," he said.
It wasn't bravado.
It was a decision.
Serrin's laugh was low and pleased.
"Now you're speaking my language."
Sirens wailed in the distance, growing nearer. The bridge stabilizers engaged with a heavy
thunk, locking some of the shaking. Emergency lights flooded the shaft in sickly yellow.Voices drifted from the platform, faint over the ringing in his ears.
"—there! Someone's still on the bridge!"
"Is the core sealed?"
"Doesn't matter, get them out before the lower struts give—"
Aurek straightened fully, forcing his shoulders back despite the pain. His veins still
glowed faintly beneath his skin, but the brightness had settled. For now.
Serrin began to sink slowly back into the flat shadow at his feet, its upper body
dissolving into smoke.
"We'll talk later," it said. "Try not to say anything stupid when they ask what happened."
"What do I tell them?" Aurek asked quietly.
The last of Serrin's face lingered a heartbeat longer, eyes like eclipsed suns.
"Tell them the truth," it said. "They won't believe you anyway."
Then it was gone, nothing left but a thin, elongated shadow pinned to his boots.
The foreman reached him first, scrambling across the bridge with two other workers in tow.
"Valein!" she shouted. "You still breathing?"
"Yeah," he said.
His voice sounded strange to his own ears.
"Good. Move!"
They hauled him away from the worst of the wreckage, toward the relative safety of the
platform. While they spoke, while hands checked for injuries they couldn't see, while
someone babbled about miracles and another about radiation burns, Aurek let his gaze drift
once more to the Pit.
Far below, buried in the smoke and shifting dark, something moved.
Not a shape.
A feeling.
Like a hand pressing against glass from the other side.
For the first time in his life, Aurek didn't feel like he was staring down into the
Hollow.
He felt like the Hollow was staring back directly at him.*You climbed out of it,* a memory of Serrin's voice whispered in the back of his skull.
Not a curse.
Not a reassurance.
A simple fact.
And facts, Aurek decided, were something he could work with.
He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, steadying his breath as the world screamed around him,
as alarms blared, as the sky tried to knit itself back together.
When he opened them again, his shadow lay at his feet, exactly where it should be.
Smaller.
Quieter.
Familiar.
If he hadn't seen it rise, if he hadn't heard the voice, he might have convinced himself
it had all been a hallucination.
He didn't.
The pain still lingering in his bones wouldn't let him.
Aurek Valein stood on the shaking bridge above a wounded world, ash drifting around him
like dead snow, and made a quiet promise.
I won't pretend nothing changed.
He didn't say it aloud.
He didn't need to.
Somewhere deep beneath his skin, the veinmarks pulsed once in agreement.
Above, Miralune's upper lights flickered.
Below, in Nadirth's endless dark, something turned its head.
And for the first time, the Hollow knew his name.