The boy had no name worth remembering.
They called him Wretch when they needed someone small enough to crawl through collapsed cellars, someone whose ribs could still be counted from across the alley. Fourteen winters, maybe fifteen; no one kept tally in the undercity of Vaeloris. Hunger was the only calendar that mattered.
Today even hunger forgot its place.
The silence came first.
Not the ordinary hush of a city holding its breath, but a pressure that pressed on the eardrums like deep water, made hearts skip, made the world feel suddenly, violently wrong. Wind died mid-gust. Banners on broken poles hung limp as hanged men. The crows that usually wheeled above the Grand Plaza forgot how to scream.
Then the sun began to bleed.
A black crescent appeared at its edge, thin as a knife cut. By the time the cracked bell tower in the plaza coughed its final, dying noon bell, the crescent had become a mouth. Twilight swallowed the capital of Eryndor in a single, merciless hour, dragging everything into bruised violet dusk.
The boy crouched behind the shattered remains of a marble lion, knees grinding in powdered glass and bone-dust. Around him, the scavenger pack—twenty ragged shadows who had survived the last three famines together—froze mid-loot. Old Garrick, one-eyed and limping, had been prying a silver mourning mask from a noblewoman's petrified face when the first thread of living darkness fell from the sky.
It struck the central fountain.
Marble hissed like fat on a fire, bubbled, melted into slag that steamed with the stench of burning bone and old perfume. The thread thickened, became a ribbon, then a whip. It lashed across the plaza, tasting.
Garrick's voice cracked the silence like a whip of its own.
"Run! The Hollowing! The Hollowing's come!"
They ran.
Bare feet slapped stone that now rippled like water under the threads' touch. The black ribbons fell faster, hungry, precise. One caught Lira the knife-sharpener around the waist. She was twenty-three, quick with a blade, quicker with a joke. She had given the boy half a bruised apple two nights ago and called him "little ghost" while ruffling his hair.
Now her legs dissolved first, skin peeling away in perfect spirals of shadow. Her scream never left her throat; it simply unravelled with her, a ribbon of night whipped upward into the bleeding sun. Her eyes—wide, brown, terrified—found the boy's for one heartbeat.
Pleading. Apologising. Promising.
Then she was gone.
He tripped, face-first into filth. Blood bloomed hot across his tongue, metallic and bright.
Garrick's hand—calloused, missing two fingers—clamped the back of his neck and hauled him upright. "Move, Wretch! Alleys—shadows can't follow deep shade!"
They plunged into the warren of side streets that spider-webbed beneath the palace district. Twenty became twelve before they crossed the first corner. Twelve became eight when a thread speared straight through young Fen's chest and lifted him like a puppet, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly as his body folded into darkness.
Eight became five when the cobblestones themselves began to soften, sucking at their ankles like quicksand made of night.
Five became three when a palace guard stepped from a doorway, armor melted into his flesh, helm fused to skull, sword dripping black tar. His voice bubbled from a mouth split too wide.
"The sky is hungry. Feed it."
Garrick swung his rusted cleaver. The blade bit deep into the guard's neck, but no blood came—only a spray of inky mist that blistered the old man's skin wherever it touched. The guard laughed, a sound like drowning bells, and reached for Garrick with fingers that elongated into claws.
The boy did the only thing left.
He ran.
He ran until his lungs burned raw, until the screams behind him thinned to echoes, until the palace spires were swallowed by distance and smoke. He ran until his legs gave out and he collapsed in a forgotten cistern beneath the old city, knee-deep in stagnant water that stank of rust, rat shit, and centuries of despair.
He retched until his stomach surrendered nothing but bile and the taste of his own blood.
Alone.
Utterly, impossibly alone.
The cistern had once been part of the royal aqueducts—grand arches now collapsed into jagged teeth, moonlight replaced by the sickly violet glow of the eclipse filtering through cracks overhead. Water dripped somewhere in slow, deliberate beats. Each drop sounded like a countdown.
He curled against the slime-slick wall, knees to chest, and tried to make himself smaller than he already was. The threads hadn't followed him here. Not yet. Maybe the dark was too deep even for them.
His fingers, searching for something—anything—to hold onto, brushed cold metal in the muck.
A hilt.
Leather-wrapped, cracked like old skin, still solid. He pulled it free with a wet sucking sound. The blade that emerged was not steel.
It was night-forged glass—obsidian so pure it drank the violet light and gave nothing back. A sliver of captured starless void. Runes crawled along its length like living things, too faint to read, too ancient to ignore.
When his blood—still oozing from a split lip—touched the edge, the dagger drank.
It warmed in his hand, a heartbeat that was not his own.
Whispers blossomed inside his skull, tasting of ozone, old iron, and distant thunder.
"Eclipse Child.
The Hollowing hungers, but the Tempest births.
Thou art the fracture in the chain.
Wilt thou claim the first link…
…or shatter in silence?"
The words were not heard so much as remembered, as if they had always been waiting behind his eyes.
Above, the eclipse laughed—a low, rolling sound that shook dust from the cistern's vaulted ceiling. Its corona flared like an open wound, painting the water crimson for one heartbeat before the violet returned.
Seventy-two hours had only just begun.
He stared at the dagger. At the blood—his blood—sinking into the glass like ink into parchment. At the faint glow now pulsing along the runes, the same bruised violet as the sky outside.
He should drop it.
He should run again.
He should curl up and wait for the threads to find him, because at least then it would be over.
Instead he tightened his grip until the edges bit new crescents into his palms.
Because for the first time in his short, hungry life, something had spoken to him.
And it had used the word child like it was a title, not an insult.
He pressed the flat of the blade against his forehead. It was warm. Alive. Waiting.
"I don't know how," he whispered to the dark, voice cracked from screaming he hadn't realised he'd done. "I don't know what you want."
The dagger answered with silence, but the warmth spread—up his arms, across his chest, settling over his heart like a brand that refused to burn.
Outside, somewhere far above, stone cracked like breaking bones. A building died with a roar that rolled through the earth and rattled his teeth. Dust sifted down in slow, deliberate curtains.
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, the violet glow from the blade had painted the cistern walls with shadows that moved wrong—too tall, too thin, reaching for him with fingers made of stormlight.
One shadow detached itself from the rest.
It was shaped like a man, but wrong in every proportion—limbs too long, torso too broad, hair wild as a thunderhead. Chains of white fire hung from its wrists, trailing into nothingness. Where its eyes should have been, twin storms raged.
The figure crouched, bringing its face level with his. Up close the boy could see lightning crawling beneath its skin, could smell ozone and hot iron and summer rain on open water.
The voice that came was not sound. It was thunder inside his bones.
"Little Storm," it rumbled, amused and ancient and impossibly gentle. "You're late."
The boy's mouth opened. Closed. No words came. He had forgotten how to make them.
The storm-giant tilted its head, studying him the way a smith studies flawed steel.
"Scrawny. Half-starved. Bleeding from places you don't even know yet." A pause. "Perfect."
It extended one massive, lightning-wrapped hand.
The chains on its wrists clinked softly, like wind chimes made of bones.
"Stand up, Eclipse Child. The first trial begins whether you're ready or not. And I have waited ten thousand years for someone stupid enough to break my throne instead of sitting on it."
The boy stared at the hand.
Then, slowly—trembling so hard his teeth chattered—he reached out.
His blood-slick fingers closed around a wrist thick as his thigh.
The moment they touched, the cistern exploded with white fire.