The hollow was what the ancient maps had called it — a natural depression in the land,
deepened over centuries by something that had been pulling at the rock from below, until what
remained was a bowl roughly a hundred meters across, walled by crumbling elven stonework and
carpeted in black thorns that grew in perfect geometric precision, as though they had been planted
rather than occurring. At the bowl's center stood the crystal: three meters tall, cracked through its
upper third, glowing with the steady crimson pulse they had seen from outside. Around it, in rings,
robed figures chanted with the particular flat concentration of people engaged in work they
believed in absolutely.
And chained to the stone altar beside the crystal, in robes that had been new a decade ago and
were now the color of old linen, with a shaved head marked by healed ritual scars and eyes that had
gone hard with years but had not gone dim —
Elara.
Arim stood at the hollow's upper rim and looked at her for a long moment without moving.
He had been preparing himself for this possibility since the campfire conversation, and it had not
helped. She was alive. She was thin from what had clearly been a long and systematic
diminishment. The scars on her scalp followed patterns he recognized — blood-drawing sigils, the
kind used to extract essence slowly without killing the source. Years of them. Patient work.
The old guilt did not arrive as he had expected it to. It arrived as a kind of clarifying cold,
burning everything unnecessary away, leaving only the single functional question: how do we get
her out.
The answer was complicated by the witch.
She stood at the altar's head: ancient, thin-boned, draped in robes that moved as though
something alive was arranged beneath them. Her voice was the source of the chant's rhythm,
holding the others in its frequency the way a conductor holds an orchestra, the ritual's architecture
built around her will. Twelve cultists in the outer ring. Two shadow-mastiffs on chains at the
— 9 —
hollow's entry points, massive, eyeless, tracking by the smell of blood.
Arim activated his camouflage. Not invisibility — he had no spell for that, and the forest had
never needed it to teach him to disappear. His skin shifted to the grey-brown of the stone wall
behind him. His breathing slowed to something below the threshold of audible. His scent locked
down, masked by the layers of forest rot he had spent years learning to carry without carrying. He
descended the outer wall thirty feet in complete silence, finding purchase on crumbling stone with
the habituated ease of a body that had forgotten other ways of moving.
He was halfway down when Elara lifted her head.
She couldn't see him. He was certain of that. But she had always been perceptive in ways that
had nothing to do with eyesight, and ten years of captivity had apparently done nothing to diminish
whatever it was she felt when someone familiar entered her range. Her gaze tracked directly to his
position, and her expression changed in a way that the witch, focused on the ritual, did not notice.
He held still. She held still. Then the witch's spirit-wards found Lucas.
* * *
The witch's milky eyes snapped upward to where Lucas had edged too far forward on the rim
for a cleaner shot. The ancestral spirits bound to her service had tasted his half-elven essence
before his foot had fully settled.
The Witch: "Half-blood. Your spirit screams to mine."
The mastiffs' chains went taut. The cultists broke their chanting and reached for weapons. The
ritual's perfect quiet shattered like dropped glass.
Arim let the camouflage go.
He stepped to the edge of a jutting stone outcrop thirty feet above the hollow's floor and
simply stood there, in the full crimson light, and waited for the witch's attention to find him.
It did. The milky eyes widened. Something moved behind them that was older than the body
wearing them — recognition, of the specific kind that arrives when something that has been
predicted finally materializes.
The Witch: "So. The blood-child returns. Did you come to watch your little princess finally
break... or to bleed with her?"
— 10 —
Elara's expression, from the altar, shifted. She was looking at him now with something that
was not relief exactly — too much had happened for uncomplicated relief — but with something
he recognized from before everything went wrong. The look she had given him on the edge of the
treeline just before the orcs came, right before everything.
She mouthed a single word.
Run.
He drew a line across his left palm with one claw.