Part I: Hollowborn
The lights above flickered—once, then again—before stabilizing into a dull, cold glow. Yuuji stood frozen in the hallway, breath held, pulse hammering. The air had shifted. Subtly, but enough to notice.
There were no signs of life. No nurses, no machines, not even the faint buzz of electronics. Just the hush of a vacuum-sealed world pretending to be real.
He took a step forward. The linoleum didn't creak. His footsteps made no sound.
Something was wrong with his shadow.
It lagged behind him, just a fraction slower than it should've been, like a puppet uncertain of its strings. He turned sharply. The shadow twitched to catch up.
His throat tightened. He wanted to speak—to call out, even if just to break the silence—but instinct screamed don't.
The walls pulsed. Subtle. Breathing.
Then, somewhere far ahead down the endless white corridor, a figure turned the corner.
Not walking. Gliding.
Tall. Humanoid. But too slender. Its movements smooth like oil on glass. And its head—wrong. There were no features, only a blurred smear, like memory failing to recall a face.
Yuuji stepped back.
The lights overhead buzzed louder.
The figure began to move toward him.
Slowly. Purposefully.
He turned to run—
And smashed straight into a wall of glass that hadn't been there a moment before.
Pain exploded across his face. He staggered back, dazed, blood on his lip. He looked up—
On the other side of the glass was himself.
No, not himself.
It wore his face, but the eyes were empty pits leaking black vapor. The same crooked smile from the dream twisted his reflection's lips.
It raised a hand.
And mouthed something he couldn't hear.
Yuuji's vision blurred. The world tilted sideways.
And then— The hallway, the figure, the glass— All of it shattered like smoke in the wind.
Darkness again.
The world shattered like smoke in the wind.
Then—darkness. But not silence. Not nothing. This was a darkness that moved, that breathed, that remembered.
Yuuji didn't fall. He simply stopped being. Or maybe he had become something else. Weightless. Thoughtless. Unmade.
But still aware. Still there. Somehow.
Shapes passed around him—not real shapes, not of geometry or logic. They were thoughts with edges, memories with teeth, feelings that glowed like dying stars. Each one brushed against him, testing, tasting.
One of them spoke. No sound—just the idea of a voice, pulsing like pressure behind his eyes.
"You are seen."
It was not comforting.
The presence behind the voice wasn't kind. It wasn't cruel either. It was vast. Old. Incomprehensible.
A thing that knew the difference between atoms and intentions.
Yuuji tried to think, to scream, to understand. But his thoughts unraveled like ribbon caught in a gale. His name—what was his name? Why did it matter? There was only the pull now.
A flicker of motion. Something—someone—approached. Not by walking. Not by flight. By… unraveling the space between them.
It was the woman. Or what had worn her shape.
She hovered, half-formed, bleeding light and smoke. Her face bent around itself, reshaping every moment Yuuji tried to focus on it.
"We saw you." she said—or maybe the void said it through her. "The thread snapped. You should not be. And yet… here you are."
He tried to speak. His mouth was gone. He tried to move. His limbs were memory.
"Do you mourn what was?"
Images flickered—Tokyo's skyline, vending machines at 3AM, soft rain on the window, his sister's quiet snore from the next room. A laugh. His own, awkward and small.
"You carried no anchor." the voice murmured. "No binding to that world. You were always… hollow."
That word. Hollow.
Yuuji felt it settle inside him like truth.
And suddenly—he was falling again. Not through space. Not through time. Through meaning.
Flashes struck him like lightning: —A city of obsidian towers —A cathedral where stars wept blood —A battlefield where soldiers fought with echoes —A girl with silver eyes whispering, "Don't forget who you were."
The void shook.
"A vessel." "An opening." "One who is not remembered cannot be unmade."
Symbols blazed into existence—no, not symbols. Echoglyphs. They etched themselves into Yuuji's mind: spirals, fractures, mirrored letters that spoke in concepts too large for language.
"The Hollow Enclave accepts."
He screamed. Or dreamed of screaming. The echo of it folded inside itself, infinite and terrible.
And then—
A light.
Small. Distant. Pale as moonlight on old bones.
It pulsed in rhythm with something ancient. A heart? A promise? A door?
He reached for it—not with fingers, but with will. With the last scrap of Yuuji he had left.
The void blinked.
Everything collapsed. The light burned without heat, gentle and pale—but in its heart, something writhed.
It wasn't salvation. It wasn't escape. It was invitation.
Yuuji didn't hesitate. He didn't have the capacity to. His will was a flicker, a dying spark. But the light— It wanted him. Or needed him hollow enough to fit.
As his mind brushed its edges, the void cracked. Not like glass. Like a shell.
Out poured echoes. Not memories—reflections of memories, scavenged and stitched from countless lives. He saw:
—A child burying a toy beneath a tree. —A soldier carving tally marks into his arm. —A woman whispering to her reflection until the mirror answered. —A robed figure with no face, reading from a book made of skin.
The light pulsed again. Closer now. A hum threaded through it, low and resonant, vibrating across dimensions like a chord struck on the bones of forgotten gods.
Then—a hand.
It extended from the light. Not made of flesh. Not made of anything he could name. It was the idea of a hand, shaped from memory and promise and void.
Yuuji hesitated—not from fear, but from awe.
"What am I becoming?" The thought was not his own, but it wore his voice.
The hand answered by reaching deeper, into him, not to pull, but to carve. Lines etched themselves across his soul. Words without sound, language without breath:
"You are the wound." "You are the whisper." "You are the boundary between was and will be."
Pain bloomed, but it wasn't physical. It was the ache of identity rearranged. He remembered his own face—and then forgot it. He remembered his sister's name—and then felt it instead, deep in his chest like a heartbeat made of grief.
Then everything turned inside out.
Not the world—him.
Like a chrysalis collapsing backward, Yuuji was undone and rebuilt, not as a boy from Earth, but as something else.
A container.
A cipher.
A Voidbound.
The hand let go.
And in the final instant, just before the light consumed him—
He heard it. A voice so distant it might've been memory. Or destiny.
"Yuuji… remember the name Erisen."
And with that, the light surged—
—And the void was gone.
Part VI: The Hollowborn
Yuuji's awakening was not marked by the gentle stretching of limbs or the soft return of senses to a broken body. No. It was the violent reconstitution of self. Pieces of him—a fractured memory of a child's laughter, the fleeting weight of a mother's touch, the unbearable weight of being unmade—came crashing back into him, not as a whole but as shards. Each fragment was a story of something lost, a person that no longer existed in this space.
He was… changed. Not just in form but in essence.
The Hollow Enclave had given him the title of Voidbound, a being both bound and free. He was a container for things that should not exist, an archive of the universe's secrets, its griefs, and its promises. The Enclave had carved him into a vessel of unspoken power, and he was empty in a way that could never be filled.
But something else stirred within him, as if the echo of a voice—one he could not yet recall—was pulling at the corners of his mind. It was the faintest whisper, like a dream on the cusp of being forgotten, but it carried with it the weight of destiny.
The woman, the one who had worn the shape of a former life, hovered before him, her figure a blur of light and smoke. She was not the same as before; her form was solid now, her edges sharp as though reality itself struggled to maintain her existence.
"You are Hollowborn, Yuuji," she spoke, her voice threaded with an undertone of something ancient. "You are neither dead nor alive. You walk between worlds."
The words should have terrified him. Instead, a strange calm seeped into his bones. What did it mean to be neither dead nor alive? What did it mean to walk between worlds? These were not questions meant for mortals. Not for someone who had once been human.
"The Dominion watches," she continued, her voice becoming softer, almost mournful. "They seek the Echoforge—the place where all things converge, where the echoes of the dead are reborn as weapons. They do not know you yet, but they will."
The name Echoforge ignited something deep within him. He knew that name. It was part of him, part of the story he had yet to unfold.
"You must go to the Echoforge," she urged. "It is the place where your true nature will emerge. The Dominion will try to seize it, and you will be their downfall. But you are not ready yet."
Yuuji opened his mouth, though his lips felt foreign to him. The desire to speak was there, but no words came. Instead, his mind stretched, unraveling itself, testing the limits of the Hollowborn form. He was not just a vessel. He was a memory made manifest. A promise of something that should not be.
"You are the weapon they fear," the woman said. "And you will walk the path of the Scourborn."
At the mention of the Scourborn, Yuuji's pulse quickened. He had seen them before—their silhouettes in the shadows of his fractured memories. A legion of beings forged from desperation, born from the echoes of the dead, corrupted by power and rage. The Dominion had weaponized them, turned them into living nightmares. But they were nothing like him.
The woman's eyes gleamed, bright as stars. "You are not one of them. You are something else."
Yuuji's vision blurred, and the world around him folded inward once again. He felt himself fall, not through space, but through meaning. He saw flashes: a city torn apart by war, a battlefield where soldiers bled echoes instead of blood, a field of glass where memories shattered like light.
The light from earlier pulsed again, brighter now, more insistent. He reached toward it instinctively. This was not a world of flesh and bone; it was a world of intent, of will. It was a place where the essence of being could be rewritten. This was the Hollow Realm, where the boundaries between life and death were thin, where the stories of gods and mortals twisted together like threads in a tapestry.
In this space, Yuuji was something more than mortal. He was a Hollowborn. And he felt it—this was his true nature.
The Hollow Enclave had given him purpose, but it was not enough. He could feel the weight of something greater ahead of him. His journey had just begun.
---
Part VII: The Echoforge
When Yuuji opened his eyes again, he was standing on the edge of an immense chasm. The sky above was a dark, swirling vortex of forgotten stars, casting a pale, sickly light over everything. The ground beneath him was smooth, like polished obsidian, and in the distance, he could make out the silhouette of a massive tower—the Echoforge. It loomed like a mountain, its jagged spires stretching upward into the sky, as though reaching for the heart of the void itself.
The Echoforge was the source of all things. It was the place where the dead became echoes, where memories were forged into weapons, and where the future of this fractured world would be decided.
He stepped forward, his feet making no sound on the smooth surface. The landscape around him seemed to bend and warp as he moved, like reality itself was struggling to contain the weight of his presence.
"You've come," a voice echoed, deep and resonant, like the hum of an ancient bell. It was not the woman's voice, nor any voice he had heard before. It was something else—something far older.
A figure appeared before him, rising from the chasm itself. It was a man, tall and regal, draped in robes that shimmered like the night sky. His eyes were hollow, black voids that seemed to consume the very light around him. The man's presence was overwhelming, like the pressure of an ocean pressing against Yuuji's chest.
"Welcome to the Echoforge," the man said, his voice carrying a weight that felt like the end of time itself. "You are the Hollowborn. The one who has come to rewrite the fate of this world."
Yuuji stood silent, feeling the enormity of the moment wash over him. The air was thick with power, and the Echoforge pulsed with the rhythm of the universe itself.
"I am Erisen," the figure continued, his voice like a distant thunderclap. "And I have waited for you."
---
Part VIII: The Echo's Song
In the center of the Echoforge, Yuuji found a vast, circular chamber made of obsidian stone. In the center of the room, a pedestal rose from the ground, and on it, a single, glowing shard of crystal pulsed with an inner light. The shard was a source of immense power, radiating an energy that made the air hum with anticipation.
"This is the Heart of the Echo," Erisen said, gesturing toward the crystal. "It is the core of all things—of time, of memory, of being itself. It is the thing that binds this world together."
Yuuji felt the pull of it. He was drawn to the shard, the pulse resonating in his chest like the beat of a heart.
"Only one who is Hollowborn can touch it," Erisen continued. "You must be the one to reshape the world, to rewrite its future. The Dominion will seek to control it, to make it their weapon. But you…" He paused, his hollow eyes fixed on Yuuji. "You are the one who can unmake them."
Yuuji reached out, his fingers brushing against the shard. The moment he made contact, a flood of visions overwhelmed him. The history of the Dominion, the rise and fall of empires, the battles fought in the name of power. He saw the Scourborn, twisted echoes of life, their bodies shaped by the Dominion's will. He saw the Hollow Enclave, its fractured leaders hiding in the shadows, pulling strings. And he saw… himself. His own face, twisted and broken, a reflection of the world's pain.
"You are more than what you were," Erisen's voice rumbled. "You are the key. You are the end."
And in that instant, Yuuji understood. His destiny was not just to fight. It was to break the cycle, to reshape the very fabric of reality.
He was the Hollowborn—the one who would unmake everything.
The Echoforge was his crucible.
---
Part IX: The Fall of the Dominion
The Echoforge was only the beginning. The world beyond it—Vesvara—lay fractured, broken into a thousand pieces, each one ruled by the Dominion's grasp. The Scourborn hunted, the echoes of the dead fought, and the Enclave whispered in the dark.
But Yuuji had seen the path. The voices of Erisen, the presence of the Echoforge, had him what he must do.
He would become the storm that swept across the Dominion. He would bring down their false gods and shatter their empire. The Hollowborn would rise, and from their ashes, a new world would be born.
The air around him vibrated—electric, unnatural. Yuuji's heartbeat pulsed through his veins like a drum, matching the rhythm of the dark hum that had begun to fill the space around him. His senses were stretched thin, like taut threads, holding him together and threatening to snap all at once. He barely understood what had just happened. Was it even real? Or had he crossed over into something far worse than a waking nightmare?
The void was still there. Beneath the weight of the empty silence, there was something else—something that wasn't just absence. A presence. He felt it, deep in his bones, coiling around his mind. Something was waiting.
"Yuuji..." The voice spoke again, this time not through his thoughts, but from the very air itself. The words didn't just come to him—they suffocated him, pressed him back. It was familiar and alien, both at once. "You are... not whole."
He staggered, gasping. The light that had once been so close—his salvation, his escape—was now distant, fading in and out of existence like an illusion he couldn't quite hold onto. The figure of the woman—the one who had once held his thread—was fading too. Or was she? He couldn't tell. The edges of her form splintered, disassembling and reforming like liquid reality.
"Why did you wake?" Her voice echoed in the void, but it wasn't just a question. It was a command. "You shouldn't have. You were never meant to find this place."
His fingers twitched, a desperate attempt to grasp something—anything—that could anchor him back to reality. His mind reeled, but he couldn't stop the relentless pull of the dark, the endless expanse of space around him threatening to swallow him whole.
This was not the end.
"You cannot return," she whispered, her voice like a soft exhale in his ear. "Not now. Not after the gate has been opened."
"Gate?" Yuuji tried to speak, but his mouth felt wrong. His voice was muffled, drowned by the void. He tried to think, to remember what had happened—what he had become—but every memory felt fractured—shattered like glass. He reached for the threads of his own past, but they slipped through his fingers like smoke.
"You opened the door," the woman's voice coiled around him. "And something stepped through."
A crack in the dark. The smallest glimmer of light—blue and pulsating—appeared at the edge of his vision. It was the shape of a symbol. No, a glyph. His glyph.
But something was wrong with it. It was shifting, alive, twisting itself into new forms—into new meanings. Each cycle of its change spoke a different truth. A truth that felt like it was unmaking him.
"No…" he whispered, his voice barely a sound in the ever-thickening dark.
The light flickered again. The symbol began to grow larger. Brighter. Until it was no longer just a symbol—it was a presence. Something ancient, something that remembered. He didn't recognize it. Yet, he did. And that was worse.
The glyph stared at him.
Then everything fell silent. Too silent.
A scream erupted. A scream that was not his own.
The glyph split. And within its fracturing light, there was—nothing.
His eyes snapped open.
The world had shifted.
He wasn't standing anymore. He wasn't even in his own body.
A voice, smooth and impossibly distant, rumbled from the endless black.
"Welcome to the Hollow Enclave."
Yuuji's vision blurred. He reached out, but his hands were not his hands. And the voice echoed again—clearer now, colder.
"You do not know your enemy yet."
Then, a flash of a face. A face that should not have been.
There was something else behind those eyes. Something older.
A final whisper before the world went black.
"Your journey has just begun."