Level 12

  Race: Human/Hollow

  Strength: 153

  Dexterity: 149

  Vitality: 177

  Magic: 144

  —

  The boy’s eyes snapped open.

  For a heartbeat he expected the sky. He expected the river’s cold embrace. He expected pain. He expected the weight of arrows in his flesh.

  Instead, he stared up at a ceiling of clouds so dark they looked bruised.

  No sun shone through them. No stars pricked at their edges. The clouds churned in slow, heavy layers like smoke that had forgotten how to rise.

  He lay on his back in ash.

  Not dirt dusted with ash—ash all the way through. The ground was gray and dead, fine as flour, and when he breathed it in it scraped his throat and tasted old and bitter, like the back of a stove after a fire.

  He sat up fast.

  The ash puffed around him in a lazy halo.

  The air was cold. Dry. It had no smell of wet leaves, no rot, no sap. No black powder.The cold didn’t come from weather so much as absence—like the place had never learned what warmth was meant for.

  He looked down at himself.

  His coat was there, but it didn’t hang right. It looked like a memory of cloth draped over him. The tears in it didn’t flap. The mud stains from the riverbank were faint, like someone had tried to wash them with ash. His hands were pale in the dim light, the knuckles bruised—but when he turned his wrist, the arrow holes were gone.

  No blood.

  He touched his ribs where the Executioner’s axe had kissed him.

  No ache.

  He pressed two fingers to his throat.

  No pulse.

  His fingers didn’t feel cold against his skin. They felt… nothing. Like touching a fence post in winter with gloves on.

  A thin panic rose and tried to bite.

  He swallowed it down out of habit. Panic didn’t help.

  The last thing he remembered was Imrahil’s face splitting open like a cracked egg. Gold and bone spraying. Then arrows hitting him. The Colt slipping. Cold water. The river swallowing him.

  He turned his head slowly.

  The wasteland stretched in every direction.

  Dead trees rose like monuments. Not mesquite, or oak. Not even the strange wet giants from the elf forest. These were things the size of mountains, blackened trunks twisting up and up until they vanished into the bruise-cloud ceiling. Their branches were broken spears and hooked claws, reaching for light that wasn’t there.

  Between the trunks, jagged crags stabbed out of the ash like broken teeth. Their edges were sharp enough to look new, but everything else looked old.

  And everywhere—everywhere—hands.

  Blackened hands extended from the ground. Human hands, burned to charcoal, fingers splayed wide as if clawing for breath. Some were half-buried up to the wrist. Some up to the elbow. Some were only fingertips, knuckles just breaking the ash like drowned men trying to touch air.

  They didn’t move.

  But the boy couldn’t stop his skin from prickling anyway.

  He got to his feet. He took one step, then another, boots leaving shallow prints that filled in slowly behind him as if the ground didn’t like being marked.

  He reached inward without thinking.

  [Inventory.]

  Nothing answered.

  Not even the familiar pressure behind his eyes. No cellar door creaking open. No sense of space.

  He tried again, harder, like he could force it.

  Nothing. His jaw tightened. It was like the System had never existed.

  The silence was worse than the ash.

  He stood there for a moment, breathing out of habit, watching his breath—except there was no fog. Cold air and no fog. That wrongness sat in his chest like a stone.

  He looked down at the black hands again.

  He thought of Lily’s stories. Hell. Devils. Saints with shining hands.

  This place felt like what preachers threatened when they wanted children to behave.

  Only it wasn’t hot.

  It was cold.

  He had no idea where he was.

  And still—under all that—he felt it.

  The urge to move. Like a rope tied to his ribs, tugging him forward.

  He didn’t argue with it.

  He started walking.

  The trees didn’t change as he moved. They stayed huge and dead, the same black shapes against the bruised sky. The crags stayed sharp. The ash stayed ash. The hands kept reaching. Some were close enough that his boot brushed a knuckle. The ash around them puffed up, and he found himself stepping wider, avoiding them without meaning to.

  He walked and walked.

  Time didn’t behave here. There was no sun to mark it. No wind to shift. No bird call. No insects. Not even the far-off yip of a coyote.

  Just his steps and the ash sighing under him.

  Once, in the distance, he thought he saw something move between two trunks.

  A shape. Low. Fast.

  He stopped.

  The shape stopped too—or vanished. It might’ve been his eyes playing tricks in the dim. It might’ve been something else.

  He kept walking anyway. Because the rope in his ribs kept tugging.

  After a while—how long, he couldn’t have said—the wasteland changed. The ash underfoot grew smoother, packed down like a road that had seen too many feet. The black hands thinned out, fewer and farther between. The trees leaned in closer on either side, forming a kind of corridor through their dead trunks.

  Ahead, something stood in the road.

  A man.

  At first the boy thought it was just another tree stump—another chunk of black against black. Then two points of light opened in the shape.

  Eyes. Pale white-blue, like moonlight.

  The boy stopped.

  The man didn’t.

  He stood with his arms at his sides, still as a grave marker, the dead trees towering behind him like witnesses. His body was mostly shadow. Not because the light was poor. Because the shadow clung to him, thick and wrong, as if he wore darkness the way other men wore coats. When he spoke, his voice carried easy in the dead air.

  “Welcome back,” he said.

  The boy didn’t answer at first.

  His tongue felt thick. His mouth tasted like ash.

  He forced words out anyway. “Where am I?”

  The man’s glowing eyes watched him, unblinking.

  “This is where Hollows go,” the man said. “When they die.”

  The boy’s throat tightened.

  He looked down at his hands again. Pale. Too still. No pulse.

  He looked back up. “Am I dead?”

  “Yes,” the man said.

  The boy’s jaw worked once.

  He had thought death would be bigger. Louder. He had thought it would be pain, then nothing.

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  This was… waiting.

  He swallowed ash that wasn’t there. “How long?”

  The man tilted his head a fraction. “Not long.”

  The boy frowned. “You said—I’m dead?”

  “Yes.”

  The boy huffed and stared into the darkness above him. “I hope Lily’s okay.”

  The man’s eyes brightened a hair, “Do not worry.”

  The boy raised a brow. “Why’s that?”

  “Hollows can’t truly die,” the man said. “Not from steel. Not from claw. Not from magic. You can be broken. You can be burned. You can drown with your lungs full of river water and your bones full of arrows.”

  The boy saw the river again—dark bands with pale gold smeared through it. He saw the arrows quivering in mud. He heard Tavo coughing blood.

  He clenched his fists until his nails bit his palms. He didn’t feel it, but the motion helped.

  The man went on, calm as stone.

  “But you return,” he said. “Always.”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  The man lifted one hand.

  “Because your soul is unmoored,” he said softly. “Because there is no place for us anywhere.”

  The boy’s stomach rolled even though his stomach didn’t exist here.

  Your soul carries no name. The world does not know where to place you.

  The man watched him register it, watched the flicker of recognition.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” the man asked. “That emptiness.”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  He didn’t need to. The cold in his chest had been with him before the System ever spoke. It had been there when he was hungry. When he was scared. When he watched people die and felt nothing but the need to keep moving.

  The man’s hand lowered.

  “You will go back,” he said. “But every time you return, you pay.”

  The boy’s eyes sharpened. “Pay what?”

  The man’s gaze slid past the boy for a moment, toward the black hands in the ash. Toward the places where shadows moved between trunks.

  “Pieces,” the man said. “Small parts at first. A face. A smell. A name you should have remembered. The way a song went. A day you promised yourself you’d never forget.”

  The boy’s throat tightened hard.

  Lily’s face flashed in his mind—soot-smudged cheeks, eyes bright with stubborn fear. Ember tucked against her chest. Her voice whispering brother in the dark.

  He felt a sudden, sharp terror that had nothing to do with spears or arrows.

  He couldn’t lose her.

  Not that.

  He forced himself to speak. “I don’t… I don’t feel like I lost anything.”

  The man’s mouth moved in the shadow, a half-smile.

  “This time,” he said. “Not much. If anything at all.”

  The boy exhaled. The breath didn’t fog. It didn’t matter. The exhale still steadied him.

  “What happens if you keep dying?” he asked, because he already knew the answer was bad.

  The man’s glowing eyes held his.

  “You become less human,” the man said. “Not all at once. A little at a time. You stop caring about names. You stop caring about faces. You stop caring about anything but the cold hunger.”

  The boy’s fists clenched again.

  He had felt that hunger in the middle of the fight. The way the mist snapped toward him. The way he hated it and wanted it in the same breath.

  The man gestured again toward the black hands.

  “And when there’s not enough left of you to hold the shape,” the man said, voice flat now, “you devolve.”

  The word landed heavy.

  “Into what?” the boy asked.

  The man’s eyes flicked toward something far off. For a heartbeat, the boy thought he saw a shape moving between trees—tall, wrong, all limbs and hunger.

  The man said, “Devourers.”

  The boy’s jaw tightened. “Mindless.”

  “Yes.” The man’s half-smile returned, faint and sharp. “You’ve heard the name, then.”

  The boy thought of elf voices hissing he fed. He thought of their disgust. Their fear. The way they wouldn’t cut him. The way they wouldn’t spill his blood. He remembered. He wished he didn’t.

  The man studied him for another beat.

  Then he lifted his hand and pointed—not at the ash road, not at the hands, but at the boy’s chest.

  “You and I have spoken before,” the man said.

  The boy blinked. “No. I don’t remember you.”

  The man’s eyes didn’t change.

  “This is the second time,” the man said. “The first time, you were far younger.”

  The boy’s mind jumped.

  He saw scraps of his own life like torn paper: the sheriff’s boots. Firelight. A woman’s crying. Lily clutching him under floorboards. Mrs. Hanley’s face leaning close, saying a name that never stuck.

  Far younger.

  He frowned so hard it hurt somewhere deep, even if he had no body to hurt.

  “I’d remember,” he said.

  The man’s voice went softer, almost kind. Almost.

  “That’s the point,” he said. “What you should have remembered, you lost. And it will remain lost.”

  The boy’s throat went dry. Now that he thought of it, he hardly remembered his parents. He didn’t remember their names. Or their faces. He should’ve remembered. Lily did. Why didn’t he? He tried to reach for that lost memory. There was only a blank wall.

  A hollow space.

  His chest tightened.

  The man watched him strain, watched the frustration sharpen.

  Then the man said, “You were already walking the Path of Hollows before the System ever came to your world.”

  The boy’s confusion flared hot.

  “That’s not—” He stopped. He didn’t know what it was or wasn’t. He only knew the System had been the first time he’d heard numbers in his head.

  “The Path,” he repeated slowly, tasting the phrase. “What does that mean?”

  The man didn’t answer the question.

  He stepped closer—two quiet steps on ash that didn’t move. The boy didn’t hear his footfalls. He just saw him nearer.

  The shadow-man’s eyes burned brighter.

  “You think the System made you,” the man said. “Put a mark on you. Named you Hollow.”

  The boy’s jaw tightened. “It did.”

  The man shook his head once. A slow motion, like a judge delivering a sentence.

  “No,” he said. “It noticed… it only saw what was already there.”

  The boy stared.

  The man’s voice sharpened slightly, as if he was impatient with explanations.

  “Your soul-pattern was incomplete before it ever spoke,” the man said. “It wrote what it saw. It did not carve you. Within you was a bottomless abyss long before the System ever came to your world.”

  The boy’s hands flexed. He wanted to ask why. He wanted to ask why his soul carried no name in the first place.

  The man lifted his hand.

  A stop.

  The boy’s mouth went tight.

  He had lived so far by killing.

  He wasn’t sure what it meant to live without paying in blood.

  The man’s eyes held him, steady and cold.

  “For now,” he said, “you’ll barely lose anything. If at all.”

  The boy swallowed. “Why?”

  The man’s gaze slid over him, down and up, as if reading a ledger only he could see.

  “Because you haven’t died enough,” the man said. “Because there’s still enough of you to come back clean.”

  Clean.

  The boy almost laughed. There was nothing clean about him.

  He hadn’t gotten the sound out before the man spoke again.

  “Goodbye,” the man said.

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Wait—”

  The man’s glowing eyes flared brighter, and in that light his smile finally showed.

  It wasn’t warm.

  “And I hope we never meet again,” the man said, voice low, “for your sake.”

  The boy opened his mouth to demand answers.

  To curse.

  To beg.

  He didn’t get the chance.

  The world flashed.

  White.

  Not the pale of snow. Not the glare of sun on water. Something cleaner and harsher than that, like the inside of a lightning strike.

  The ash vanished.

  The dead trees vanished.

  The black hands vanished.

  The boy sucked in a breath—and this time it hurt.

  His eyes snapped open again.

  Sky.

  Real sky.

  Blue washed thin with clouds. Light sharp enough to make him squint. Wind that smelled like dust and grass and old sweat.

  He lay on his back on hard ground.

  His body screamed all at once—shoulder, ribs, thigh—like the pain had been waiting politely and now had permission to return.

  He tried to sit up and got an arm under him.

  Hands pressed down on his shoulders.

  Voices spoke above him. Not English. A quick rhythm of syllables he didn’t understand. Another voice answered, lower, steadier. His vision was blurry. The world swam in and out, edges smearing.

  He blinked hard.

  Faces leaned over him.

  Braids. Beads. Dark eyes narrowed with focus. Cheekbones sharp as hatchets. Skin sun-browned and wind-browned.

  Cheyenne. More than one. Some faces were darker, some lighter. Some had streaks of paint dried on. One had a thin scar down the bridge of his nose.

  The boy’s throat worked.

  He tried to speak and got only a rasp.

  A canteen pressed to his mouth.

  He drank.

  Water. Warm. It tasted like leather and river mud and salvation.

  He coughed and spat and then drank again.

  Someone said something sharply, and the canteen pulled away before he drowned himself.

  The boy’s hand fumbled at his chest.

  Feathers brushed his fingers.

  The eagle-feather necklace.

  It was still there.

  His chest tightened with something that wasn’t pain.

  He pushed up again, harder.

  Hands tried to hold him down.

  He shoved them off with more strength than he should’ve had in a body that had just crawled out of death.

  “Up,” he rasped.

  A face close to him—an older man, skin weathered like old leather—stared into his eyes, then leaned back and said something in a language the boy didn’t know. The others shifted, wary but not hostile.

  The boy got his knees under him.

  The world tilted.

  He breathed through it until it steadied.

  Then he stood. His legs shook, but they held. He turned in a slow circle. The land was wrong for the elf forest. No towering wet green. No ferns waist-high. No sweet rot. This was open. Dry. Wide. Low grass bent in the wind. Mesquite and scrub dotted the land. A line of low hills sat in the distance, sun-bleached and hard. The air had that familiar Texas bite—dust and sun and old limestone.

  Comancheria.

  He swallowed and looked down at himself.

  There were bandages wrapped around his shoulder and ribs, stained dark.

  He touched them and hissed.

  Pain, yes.

  But he was here.

  He reached inward on instinct.

  [Inventory.]

  The familiar pressure answered—like a cellar door swinging open inside his skull.

  Relief hit so hard it made his knees want to fold.

  He could feel the Colt’s weight in there. The rifles. Powder. Caps. All of it. He didn’t pull anything out. He just stood there and breathed, trying to make sense of the fact that he was breathing.

  A shadow fell across him.

  He turned.

  A man pushed through the little circle of Indians surrounding him.

  Rojas.

  His face looked leaner. His eyes were bloodshot. There was a smear of soot on his cheek that might’ve been two days old or two years.

  He stared at the boy like he was seeing a ghost walk out of the prairie.

  Then Rojas let out a breath—half laugh, half curse.

  “Kid,” he said, voice rough. “You been out cold for the last two days. And I was pretty sure you were dead.”

  "Welcome back."