The fire does not leave his skin.
Even after the ash is wiped clean, the sigils remain — faintly glowing, whispering when no one else speaks.
Aren tries to forget what he saw during the Rite.
But forgetting doesn’t come so easily anymore.
The Ashen Flame cheers him now.
They call him “Brother Burned.”
Some bow. Others avoid his eyes.
But in the still moments — when he closes his fists, or breathes too deeply — he hears the scream again.
And sometimes… a child’s laughter, far away.
Three nights pass.
Then, one night, he wakes in his tent.
But the tent is gone.
So is the sky.
So is the world.
He’s in The Hollow.
Again.
The trees are shadows of trees.
The ground is neither ash nor frost — but something soft, familiar, wrong.
It smells like his childhood.
And in the center of it all sits the Hollow Child — mask cracked wider now, hair damp from rain that doesn’t fall.
He hums a lullaby Aren knows.
One his mother sang.
One he’d buried years ago.
“You’re back,” the child says.
“I missed you.”
“You’re not real,” Aren replies.
The child shrugs.
“Neither are they.”
The Hollow warps.
The trees become torches.
The ground becomes blood.
And the child becomes… Aren.
Younger.
Frightened.
Clutching the same toy from the shrine, burned and broken.
“I waited in the fire,” the child says.
“I screamed until my throat broke.”
“I tried to save you—”
“You saved yourself.”
Aren drops to his knees.
“I was a boy.”
“And I was your price.”
The Hollow cracks open beneath them.
And suddenly, Aren is falling.
He wakes gasping.
Covered in sweat.
The sigils on his body are no longer glowing.
They are burning.
He stumbles outside into the Ashen night.
“Let it burn,” someone whispers.
But no one is there.
Only the flame, waiting.
And the child’s voice, echoing.
“You can’t run forever.
Not from me.”
[End of Chapter Four]
Read Chapter 3 here
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