Chapter Four: The Hollow Wake
The Thornpath bled light beneath Kael's feet—red and gold, pulsing like a heartbeat. Every step echoed deeper than the last, not in the forest, but in him. Old bones remembered this walk. Old blood called it home.
And still, he felt watched.
Not by beasts or men, but by the land itself. The trees didn't sway unless he passed. Stones shifted after he stepped off them. Even the air had weight now, thick with memory.
After what felt like hours—or perhaps days, time had gone strange—he came upon the ruins.
Hollowthorn.
Or what was left of it.
The city was sunken into the earth, half-buried like a corpse in shallow grave. Pale towers jutted out of the ground at crooked angles, cracked and choked with vines that pulsed faintly with violet light. Bridges hung broken between structures like snapped webs. Shadows moved where sunlight should have touched.
Kael didn't speak.
Something in him knew: this wasn't just ruin. This was punishment.
He crossed a fractured causeway toward what had once been a great hall—its doors rotted and twisted, but the frame still carved with a crest he'd never seen, yet recognized instantly.
A thorned crown above a falling star.
He reached out, fingers brushing the ancient wood—
FLASH.
A memory struck like lightning.
He stood in this very hall, but the world was whole. Banners of black and silver hung from the rafters. Musicians played soft songs on bone-flutes. He wore a cloak lined in wolf fur. People knelt. Someone called him Prince.
"Ashren, take the oath," said a woman beside him, her voice rich with power. Her eyes burned like flame—but not fire. Something older. Elemental.
His mother?
The vision shattered.
Kael stumbled backward, heart hammering. His palms bled where thorn-shaped cracks had opened in his skin.
Behind him, a voice rasped from the rubble:
"You've come too soon.
Kael turned—and froze.
From beneath the stone arch crawled a creature of bone and bark, its body stitched from roots and scraps of armor, its eyes twin lanterns of green fire. It bore a crown of rusted iron, fused into its skull.
"The throne remembers you," it hissed. "But so do we."
Around him, the ground split.
Dozens more clawed their way out from beneath the earth—former kings, former knights, twisted by time and betrayal. The Thornwrought Dead.
And they had not forgiven him.