A Novel of Ash and Void
The dream always began the same way.
Mama's smile. The smell of rosemary from her garden. Sunlight through the window of their cottage in Velmoor.
Then the colors bled away. Mama's smile stretched too wide. Her eyes emptied—not closing, just emptying—until they were holes that opened into forever. And from those holes poured darkness that ate the sunlight, ate the rosemary smell, ate everything.
Ate everyone.
The screaming of forty-seven people sounded exactly like wind through dead trees.
Kael woke with his hand already reaching for the knife under his pillow.
For three heartbeats, he didn't move. Just breathed. Counted the water stains on the ceiling of his rented room above the Silver Mule tavern. One. Two. Seven. Thirteen. The familiar ritual grounded him, pulled him back from the edge of that black place in his chest where something else lived.
Something that had been sleeping for nine years.
He released the knife. Sat up. The pale light of pre-dawn Thornwick filtered through the grimy window, illuminating a room that contained everything Kael Ashford owned: a threadbare coat, a courier's satchel, three books he'd read forty times each, and a wooden box he never opened.
The box sat on the windowsill. It was simple oak, unremarkable, small enough to fit in one palm. Burned into its lid was a symbol—a circle broken by seven lines radiating outward like a fractured sun.
The Mark of the Hollowed.
Every morning, Kael thought about throwing it into the Veiled Reaches, the forbidden zone that bordered Thornwick's eastern edge. Every morning, he didn't.
You can't throw away what's already inside you.
He dressed quickly: wool trousers patched at the knees, a faded gray shirt, boots that had been resoled twice. At seventeen, Kael was lean in the way that spoke more of skipped meals than athleticism, with dark hair that fell past his ears and eyes the color of smoke after a fire. People in Thornwick called him "the ghost boy"—partly because he moved quietly, partly because everyone knew he'd survived Velmoor.
The town that had disappeared in a single night.
No one asked him about it. That was one of the unspoken rules of the frontier: you didn't ask about the dead, and you didn't ask about the Hollowed. Both topics ended conversations—and occasionally, lives.
Kael grabbed his satchel and headed downstairs.
The Silver Mule's common room was already alive with the clatter of the morning crowd. Miners heading for the iron deposits north of town. Merchants preparing caravans for the long road to the capital. Soldiers from the garrison, their crimson cloaks marking them as Wardens—the empire's answer to the Hollowed threat.
Kael slipped through the crowd with practiced invisibility. He'd learned young that being unremarkable was a form of armor. The extraordinary drew attention, and attention drew questions, and questions eventually led to the truth.
The truth.
That he was the son of Vara Ashford, the Hollowed who had reached Voided-tier before her mind shattered completely. That the thing growing in his chest was her final gift—a seed of the Abyss itself, planted in his soul the moment before she tried to kill him.
Tried.
The scar on his left shoulder ached with the memory. Even now, he could feel the wrongness of her claws sliding between his ribs, reaching for his heart, only to stop at the last inch. Only for her empty eyes to flicker, just once, with something that might have been recognition.
Run, she had whispered in a voice like breaking glass.
He had. And behind him, Velmoor had died.
"You look like death warmed over."
The voice cut through his spiral. Kael looked up to find Sera already waiting at the courier's post near the tavern entrance, her arms crossed and one eyebrow raised. She was two years older than him, with close-cropped red hair and a scatter of freckles across her brown skin that made her look perpetually amused by the world.
"Didn't sleep well," he said.
"You never sleep well." She pushed off the wall and fell into step beside him as they headed for the Dispatch Office. "Same dream?"
"Doesn't matter."
"It matters if you collapse during a run and get eaten by something in the Reaches' shadow-zones."
"I don't take jobs near the Reaches."
"Which is why you're still the lowest-paid courier in Thornwick." Sera's tone was light, but there was something sharp beneath it—something that felt like she was probing for a specific answer. "The hazard routes pay triple. You could actually afford a room that doesn't smell like goat."
"I like goat smell. It's nostalgic."
She laughed, and the sharpness disappeared so completely that Kael wondered if he'd imagined it. Sera had been his only real friend in the three years since he'd come to Thornwick. She'd found him half-dead from a fever in an alley behind the tanner's shop and had bullied old Mira Veldren into treating him without asking for payment.
Sera did things like that. Found strays. Fixed them. Let them go.
Sometimes Kael wondered why she'd never let him go.
The Dispatch Office was a squat stone building near Thornwick's eastern gate, run by a perpetually exhausted man named Brennick who had lost three fingers to frostbite and his sense of humor to marriage. He looked up as Kael and Sera entered, his expression not changing from its default state of mild despair.
"Two runs today," Brennick said, sliding a pair of sealed letters across the counter. "Ashford, you've got a delivery to the Garrison Commander. Some official nonsense from the capital." He turned to Sera. "Vance, you're taking a package to Old Mira. Medical supplies from the southern traders."
Sera's hand hesitated for just a fraction of a second before taking her assignment. "Medical supplies? Mira usually handles her own stock."
"New regulations. All restricted alchemical compounds go through official channels now." Brennick shrugged. "Warden business. Don't ask me to explain it."
Kael felt a strange prickling at the back of his neck. The kind of sensation he'd learned to trust—the instinct that had kept him alive for nine years on the road, nine years of running from shadows only he could see.
Something's wrong.
But the feeling passed, and he took his letter, and he told himself it was nothing.
The Garrison sat on Thornwick's western edge, a fortress of gray stone and iron that overlooked the only road connecting the frontier to the empire's heartland. Kael had been here dozens of times, but he never got used to the way the Wardens looked at him—like they could sense the thing sleeping in his chest.
Maybe they can.
The Wardens were the empire's elite anti-Hollowed force, each member trained from childhood to detect and neutralize those who had been "touched" by the Abyss. They wore crimson cloaks treated with compounds that supposedly disrupted Void energy, and they carried Severance Blades—weapons forged specifically to cut the connection between a Hollowed and their power.
Kael had seen a Severance execution once, in a town called Millbrook. The Hollowed had been a young woman, barely older than he was now, who had accidentally awakened during a bandit attack. She'd saved her village. They'd thanked her with chains and a public killing.
The Wardens called it "mercy." The alternative, they said, was worse.
Was it mercy, Mama? When you tried to take my heart?
"Courier." The guard at the gate barely glanced at him. "Letter?"
Kael handed it over. Waited as it was inspected, stamped, and passed to a runner who disappeared into the fortress. Standard procedure. Nothing unusual.
Then why couldn't he shake the feeling that he was being watched?
He turned to leave—and froze.
A man stood at the far end of the courtyard, motionless among the bustle of soldiers and functionaries. He was tall, dressed in a white coat that seemed to glow faintly in the morning light, and his face was hidden behind a mask of polished silver that reflected everything around it like a mirror.
But his eyes.
God, his eyes.
They were visible through the mask's eye-holes, and they were empty. Not dark, not hollow—empty. Like someone had carved out the space where eyes should be and left windows looking into absolute nothing.
The man raised one hand.
He pointed directly at Kael.
And smiled.
Kael didn't remember running. One moment he was standing frozen; the next, he was three streets away, his lungs burning and his heart slamming against his ribs like a caged animal. The thing in his chest—his mother's final curse—stirred.
Not awakened. Not yet. But it knew.
It recognized.
Something is coming.
He found Sera outside Old Mira's herbalist shop, and the relief of seeing her face was so overwhelming that he almost missed the strange tension in her posture. She stood with her back to the door, the package still in her hands, her eyes fixed on the sky.
"Sera?"
She didn't look at him. "Do you hear that?"
Kael stopped. Listened.
Thornwick was never quiet—the clatter of carts, the shouts of merchants, the distant rhythm of the miners' work-songs—but beneath the familiar noise, there was something else. A sound like static. Like the world itself was holding its breath.
Then the bells began to ring.
Not the temple bells. Not the hour-bells. These were different—a harsh, discordant clanging that Kael had heard only once before, nine years ago, in a village that no longer existed.
"Emergence," Sera whispered. "There's an Emergence."
Kael's blood turned to ice.
An Emergence meant only one thing: the Abyss was bleeding through. Somewhere in Thornwick—or near it—a tear had opened between reality and the void, and from that tear would come the Remnants. The mindless, consuming horrors that had once been human before they had Hollowed completely.
Horrors like his mother had become.
"We need to get to the shelters," he said, grabbing Sera's arm. "Now."
But even as the words left his mouth, he knew it wouldn't be enough.
Because across the eastern district, reality broke.
Later, Kael would remember it in fragments. The way the sky tore like wet paper. The darkness that poured through—not shadow, but the absence of light, an impossible anti-glow that made his eyes water just to perceive. The screaming that began immediately, a chorus of terror and confusion as Thornwick's eastern quarter was swallowed by things that had no name.
The Remnants came in a wave.
They had been human once—Kael could see the traces of humanity in their twisted forms. A woman whose face had melted into a single vertical mouth ringed with teeth. A child whose body had elongated until it was all limbs, skittering on too many joints. A man who had become a mass of hands, each finger ending in an eye that wept black tears.
They didn't think. They didn't speak. They only consumed.
And there were dozens of them.
"MOVE!" A Warden shouldered past Kael, Severance Blade drawn, crimson cloak billowing as he charged toward the horde. Two more followed. Then five. Then a dozen. The garrison was responding, but the Remnants kept coming, and the defenders were falling back even as they fought.
Kael grabbed Sera's hand and ran.
The streets became a nightmare of chaos. Civilians fled in all directions, colliding with each other, trampling the fallen. A merchant's cart overturned, spilling vegetables that were immediately crushed beneath stampeding feet. A mother screamed for her child. A Remnant descended on her from above, all mouths and hunger, and her screaming stopped.
Don't look. Don't think. Just run.
They made it three blocks before the creature appeared in front of them.
It had been a man, once. Maybe a miner, judging by the shreds of work-clothes still clinging to its twisted frame. Its body had folded in on itself, becoming a hunched mass of bone and muscle that moved on all fours like a predator. Its head hung upside-down from its chest, jaw unhinged, and from its throat came a sound like wind through dead trees.
The same sound from his dreams.
Kael's body locked. He couldn't move. Couldn't think. The thing in his chest screamed.
DANGER. DANGER. WAKE UP. WAKE UP.
The Remnant lunged.
And Sera moved.
She shoved Kael aside with desperate strength, putting herself between him and the horror, her courier's satchel raised like a shield—a pathetic, useless gesture against a monster that could shatter stone.
Time slowed.
Kael watched the Remnant's claws descend toward Sera's unprotected body. Watched her eyes widen with the realization of her own death. Watched everything he had rebuilt in three years of hiding, three years of running, three years of pretending to be normal, shatter in a single instant.
No.
The thing in his chest stopped screaming.
It woke up.
The world went white.
Not light—something else. Something that existed in the space between seeing and understanding. Kael felt his body move without his permission, felt his hand extend toward the descending Remnant, felt something tear loose inside his soul.
And then the Remnant was gone.
Not destroyed. Erased. One moment it existed; the next, there was simply a space where it had been, a void in reality that lasted for half a heartbeat before collapsing in on itself.
Kael fell to his knees.
His left arm was black. Not burned, not injured—black, as if someone had dipped it in liquid shadow up to the elbow. Veins of darkness crawled beneath his skin, pulsing with each heartbeat, and where they touched, he felt nothing.
No pain. No cold. No sensation at all.
"Kael..." Sera's voice came from far away. "Kael, your eyes..."
He looked up at her. Saw his reflection in her terrified gaze.
His eyes were no longer gray.
They were empty.
Like the man in the silver mask.
Around them, the street had gone silent. The surviving Wardens had stopped fighting. The remaining Remnants had frozen in place, their malformed bodies oriented toward Kael like flowers toward the sun.
No—not like flowers.
Like worshippers.
And from somewhere far above, from the tear in reality still bleeding darkness into the sky, a voice spoke. It was not loud. It was not small. It simply was, present in every particle of air, resonating in every fragment of matter, filling the world with a single word that made Kael's awakened power recoil in recognition.
"FOUND YOU."
The tear expanded.
Something massive began to emerge.
And Kael understood, with the terrible clarity that comes only at the end of all illusions, that the attack on Thornwick had never been random.
They were looking for me.
All of this—everyone dying—
It's my fault.
The darkness in his arm pulsed. The Remnants began to move toward him. The Wardens raised their blades—but they weren't pointing them at the monsters.
They were pointing them at Kael.
"Hollowed identified!" someone shouted. "Newly awakened! Category unknown—readings are off the scale!"
And Sera—Sera who had saved him, Sera who had found him when he had nothing—
Sera stepped back.
Her hand went to her hip. To the knife hidden beneath her courier's satchel. And in her eyes, Kael saw something that broke him more completely than any Remnant ever could.
Recognition.
She knew. She always knew what I was.
She was waiting for this.
"I'm sorry, Kael," Sera whispered. "I really am."
Above them, the tear finished expanding.
And the thing that emerged looked down at the burning ruins of Thornwick with eyes older than the world itself.
[END OF CHAPTER ONE]