The Hollow deepened around him.
Kael moved like a ghost through its narrowing path, boots brushing aside fallen ashroot blooms—frail petals that still glowed faintly in the dim. Their bioluminescent stems pulsed with a warmth that reminded him of memory shards—alive, but fragile. Meant to fade.
The wind had stilled entirely. Not silence, but anticipation.
Even the System was quiet.
Not dormant. Waiting.
The further Kael walked, the more the world around him began to feel... intentional. The way certain trees arched inward like ribs. The cracked obsidian rocks that lined the path in uneven intervals. The mist that pooled in certain hollows, then pulled back when he drew near.
[Observation: Geo-spiritual formation detected.][Residual emotional charge present. Caution advised.]
The message didn't unsettle him.
It affirmed what he already felt in his bones:He wasn't wandering.
He was being led.
A broken altar lay ahead, sunken into the earth and nearly overtaken by roots. No inscription remained on its face—only the faint imprint of a hand, burned into the stone. Not carved. Branded.
Kael stepped closer. The imprint matched his own.
He didn't place his hand there—not yet.
Instead, he sat.
The mist curled around his ankles. The ground beneath him radiated heat, as if a fire once raged below and hadn't quite forgotten how to smolder.
He exhaled slowly, eyes drifting shut.
And he listened.
Not for danger.
But for memory.
They came like sparks.
Not visions, not yet—just impressions. Sounds without source. Feelings that didn't belong to this body, but lived somewhere inside it:
The echo of a sword dropping in the rain.
A lullaby, unfinished.
Fingers curled in blood-soaked fabric. His? Someone else's?
A boy's voice, distant and soft: "Are you still you?"
Kael's breath hitched.
He pressed a hand to his chest, where the tether pulse had once flickered.It was still quiet. But not gone.
Waiting, like everything else.
Suddenly, the roots shifted.
Not violently. Not unnaturally.They simply moved—untangling with the fluid grace of something that had always been alive.
And in their wake, a small pedestal rose.
Upon it: a charred, obsidian ring, still glowing faintly at its edge.
[Relic Discovered: Ring of the Emberbound][Memory Resonance: Partial. Linked Entity: Unknown.]
Kael didn't touch it.
He stared, the name sparking recognition he couldn't place. Emberbound.
His gaze flicked sideways to the shattered altar, then to the handprint.
Slowly, cautiously, Kael reached forward—not to claim the ring, but to rest his fingers in the print.
The world didn't shatter.
But it did shift.
For a single heartbeat, he wasn't in the Hollow.
He was standing in the middle of a field—sunlit, golden, warm.
Children laughed nearby. He turned—
And saw them.
A girl with a braid of fire-colored hair, chasing a younger boy who wore a scarf too long for his frame. They raced around a man with silver eyes, who knelt by a tree and carved something into its bark.
The man looked up.
Not at Kael.
Through him.
"Still chasing ghosts, flamewalker?"
The field vanished.
Kael jerked back, the altar vanishing beneath him.
The pedestal was empty.
The ring, gone.
And on the edge of the path behind him, faintly etched into the blackened bark of a tree he hadn't noticed before:
"To burn is not to destroy, but to reveal."
His hand trembled.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
He stood, the Hollow spinning slowly around him like the center of some great turning wheel.
The fog had thickened again—but this time, Kael did not feel alone.
He felt seen.
Not by the System. Not by some threat.
By something older.
Older than flame.
Older than memory.
And somewhere beyond the ridgeline—a boy with silver eyes stirred from his hiding place, finally stepping into the light.
But Kael did not see him.
Not yet.