The ruined chapel rose like a shattered ribcage against the bone-pale sky. Midnight pressed in from every direction, heavy with fog and unshed rain. No birds called. No crickets sang. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.

  Declan Harper stepped over the fractured threshold, his boots crunching over broken glass and prayer tiles worn smooth by time. The air inside was colder — not in temperature, but in essence, like the marrow of the world had gone still. At the center of the nave, beneath the remains of a collapsed spire, Willow had drawn a wide circle with salt, iron filings, and braided root ash. Sigils curved along its edge — glyphs of unbinding, old and raw.

  Willow stood at the edge of the circle, her palms stained with ink and a shallow cut wrapped in linen. Her eyes flicked up as Declan approached, carrying the satchel that held the items they’d gathered.

  “You’re sure about this?” she asked, her voice almost lost in the chapel’s stillness.

  Declan nodded. “Too late to turn back now.”

  One by one, the others emerged from the darkness. Kaelen arrived first, with the pages of the rite clutched in one hand and a censer of burning myrrh in the other. Nadine, dressed in black and gray, lit candles and placed them at the north, south, east, and west points of the circle. Tobias followed, slower, his limp pronounced in the damp air, and laid down the bone talisman carved from the jaw of a fox — the final anchor.

  The ritual had to begin before the moon reached its apex. That left them seventeen minutes.

  Willow stepped into the circle with Declan, her movements precise, careful. She handed him the final piece: a rusted button from the coat of the man who had led the original Kings Horn ritual — found in the ashes of Witch’s Hollow.

  Declan sat cross-legged in the center, the button clutched in one fist, the other palm open to the sky. He swallowed hard as Willow traced the severance sigil across his sternum in red ochre and whispered words that trembled against the veil of reality itself.

  The others took their places at each cardinal point. The air inside the chapel seemed to press inward, dense with unseen pressure.

  Kaelen began the chant.

  The sound was low at first — a harmonic drone that vibrated not just through the stone, but through the bones of every person present. Declan’s teeth ached. His vision swam. The rift was awakening — it knew what they were trying to do.

  Willow placed her hands on either side of Declan’s face. Her voice joined Kaelen’s, and the circle shimmered faintly with violet light.

  Then the rift answered.

  A crack tore through the chapel floor with a deafening snap. Darkness spilled out like ink underwater, tendrils coiling toward the circle. Screams echoed through the stone, not from anyone present — but from within the rift itself. Lives unlived. Futures lost. Time unspooling like thread from a broken reel.

  Declan screamed as pain seared through his chest. The button in his hand turned molten, burning into his palm, fusing into the ritual mark. His body arched, his back bowing in the salt ring, muscles locking tight.

  “I SEE YOU,” a voice boomed — not aloud, but in every head. The Hollow-born had turned its gaze upon him.

  Willow shouted over the storm of voices. “Declan! You must hold it! You’re the vessel!”

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  Blood ran from Declan’s nose, his eyes, his ears — but he didn’t let go. He held. Every moment longer, the sigils glowed brighter, the air shimmered more violently. The chapel’s shadow peeled away from the walls and hissed with teeth.

  Then — with a scream not from his throat but his soul — Declan tore.

  The binding inside him snapped like a chord yanked free from a violin. A flash of impossible light exploded from the circle. The darkness recoiled — shrieked — and imploded inward with a sound like a thousand windows shattering.

  Silence. The rift was gone.

  Declan collapsed forward, twitching. Smoke curled from the lines of the sigil burned into his chest. Willow caught him before he could fall from the circle, cradling his body in her arms.

  Kaelen stumbled, breathless. “It’s closed.”

  Nadine leaned against the wall, shaking. “But not gone.”

  Tobias knelt beside Declan. “That thing knows his name now. This wasn’t the end. It was only the first volley.”

  Willow looked down at Declan, who barely clung to consciousness, the echo of the Hollow-born still flickering behind his eyes.

  “No,” she said. “But now we know how to fight it.”

  The storm had broken, but something deeper churned beneath the skin of the world.

  They had dragged Declan from the ruined chapel and into the thinning woods beyond Marrow Hollow, where the ground was still solid and the trees, though gnarled, did not whisper. A crude shelter of tarps and felled branches shielded them from the coming dawn, but nothing could keep out the unease that coiled between them.

  Declan lay curled on a makeshift bedroll, sweat slicking his brow, breath coming in short, ragged bursts. Willow knelt at his side, pressing a damp cloth to his forehead, whispering words that no longer seemed enough.

  He had stopped bleeding, but his veins—his veins—were wrong.

  They glowed.

  A lattice of faint, luminous lines pulsed beneath his skin, tracing sigils and runes that moved when you didn’t look directly at them. The markings shimmered faintly through his chest, arms, and even the curve of his jaw. Like something ancient had carved a language into him and now stirred beneath it.

  “His body’s rejecting the aftermath,” Kaelen muttered from across the campfire. He was pacing, hands buried in the pockets of his coat, eyes wild with thought. “Or… adapting to it.”

  “No,” Willow whispered, watching Declan’s eyelids flutter as he drifted in and out of consciousness. “This isn’t rejection. This is… integration.”

  Nadine crouched nearby, wrapping the last of their bandages. “You think he’s becoming one of them?”

  Willow looked at the way Declan’s skin pulsed with arcane geometry and thought of the voice in the chapel—the one that had seen him. That had named him.

  “No,” she said, though her voice lacked certainty. “Not one of them. But tied to them, yes. Bound, now. The ritual didn’t sever the connection. It… rewired it. It made him a conduit.”

  Kaelen stopped pacing. “You mean he can open rifts?”

  Willow nodded slowly. “And close them. And possibly much more.”

  They all turned to Declan then.

  His back arched suddenly, a choked gasp tearing from his lips. Light flared beneath his skin—sharp, brilliant, runic. Willow grabbed his shoulders to steady him, but her breath caught.

  The symbols were changing.

  They weren’t just glowing now. They were rearranging, shifting like molten script, speaking a language none of them could understand—but all of them felt. A gravity to the air. A resonance to the light. It was like being inside the eye of some ancient storm.

  Declan's mouth moved without sound, as if chanting to something deep within. The earth beneath him trembled. Wind rose from nowhere, stirring ash and dirt in a circular draft.

  Then, with a thundercrack that split the space above them, a jagged rift tore open six feet away—just for an instant. A vertical slash of hollow darkness, rippling with void-light.

  Everyone backed away.

  Willow stood her ground, eyes wide. “Declan…?”

  He opened his eyes.

  They were not his.

  Not completely.

  One was still the warm brown she knew, but the other was black—no, not black. Empty. An absence wrapped in a pupil. It flickered with the same light that had escaped the rift.

  He looked around, breathing hard. His skin was still marked with runes, but they began to dim, fading like coals after a fire.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said, voice hoarse. “It just… happened. I felt it. Like something called me to tear it open.”

  No one spoke for a moment.

  Finally, Tobias, who’d been silent since the ritual, stepped forward. “Can you close it again?”

  Declan’s throat worked as he swallowed. “I think so. I think I already did.”

  “You didn’t speak a word,” Kaelen said, arms folded.

  “I didn’t have to,” Declan answered. “It was instinct.”

  Willow knelt beside him again, this time with a different expression—one of reverence and unease in equal measure. “The Hollow-born left a scar. But it also left a gift. You’re not just the one who stopped the summoning, Declan. You are the counterbalance now.”

  Declan closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the pack beneath him. “Then we use it. We find the next rift—before the Kings Horn can—and we shut them down for good.”

  “And if they come looking for you?” Nadine asked.

  “They already are,” Declan murmured.

  Because somewhere, just beyond what they could hear, the hollow still whispered.