1: The Mourning After
The crows did not leave Seris’s body.
They perched on her grave in the Ashen Gardens, a forgotten cemetery where the dead were buried with their faces turned downward—so they wouldn’t climb back out. Elias had never seen crows act this way. They didn’t eat. They didn’t caw. They simply watched.
And then, on the third night, one of them spoke.
"She is not gone."
The voice was Seris’s.
Elias stumbled back as the crow tilted its head, ink-black eyes gleaming with something too human.
"The Hollow King took my memories, but memory is just another kind of ghost. And ghosts don’t stay buried in Vareth."
2: The Crow Sermon
The crow led Elias to the Whispering Cathedral, a crumbling church where the city’s outcasts gathered to trade secrets. Inside, a congregation of hollow-eyed men and women sat in pews, their lips sewn shut with black thread.
At the pulpit stood Father Dusk, a priest whose skin was stitched together from different corpses.
"You’ve met the Hollow King," he said, though his mouth never moved. The voice came from the crows nesting in his ribcage. "But do you know why he chose you?"
Elias had always assumed it was chance. But Father Dusk laughed—a sound like rusted hinges.
"You are the last descendant of the man who first sealed the Hollow King away. Your blood is the lock. And your bones are the key."
3: The Skin-Bridge
To find the truth, Elias had to cross the Skin-Bridge—a living, breathing span of flesh and sinew that connected Vareth to the Drowning District’s deepest level.
Few who crossed it returned whole.
As Elias stepped onto the bridge, it pulsed beneath his feet. Faces pressed against the membrane, mouths gasping soundlessly. The bridge remembered every soul who had ever walked it.
At the center stood a figure wrapped in crow feathers.
Seris.
Or what was left of her.
Her body was half-dissolved into the bridge, her veins threading through its structure like roots.
"You shouldn’t have come back," she whispered. "The Hollow King isn’t the only thing beneath the city."
Then the bridge screamed, and something stirred in the ichor below.
4: The Drowned Saint
The legends spoke of the Drowned Saint, a martyr who had tried to cleanse the ichor centuries ago. Instead, she became part of it—a weeping, bloated thing that lurked in the deepest canals.
And she had been waiting for Elias.
Her fingers, long as daggers, pierced the bridge and dragged him into the black.
The last thing he saw before the ichor filled his lungs was Seris’s crows diving after him.
Then—silence.
5: The Hollow Crown
Elias woke in a palace of bones.
The Hollow King sat before him, his face shifting between a hundred different stolen visages.
"You were always meant to wear the crown," the king said, lifting a circlet of teeth and crow feathers. "Not as my vessel—but as my successor."
The truth unfolded like a rotting flower:
The Hollow King was not one being, but many. A lineage of rulers who had sacrificed themselves to keep the dead god sleeping.
And now, it was Elias’s turn.
6: The Last Sacrifice
Seris’s voice echoed in his mind. "There’s another way."
Elias looked at the crown, then at the Hollow King.
And he shattered it.
The dead god woke.
The city screamed.
And the crows rose like a storm.
Epilogue: A Kingdom of Ghosts
Vareth did not drown.
It changed.
The ichor receded, but the streets now whispered with the voices of the dead. The crows spoke in riddles. And Elias walked among them, neither living nor dead—a king without a crown, a thief without a past.
Somewhere in the ruins, Seris laughed.
And the Hollow King’s throne remained empty.
Waiting for the next fool brave enough to sit upon it.
