The world came apart in a roar of stone and shadow.
Liraeth hit the ground hard, the impact driving the breath from her lungs. Dust choked the air, thick enough to taste—ash and iron and something older, something that stung like lightning on her tongue. The staff’s light had faded to a dull ember, its sigils flickering weakly.
Somewhere in the wreckage, Sorin and Kael were buried.
No.
She dragged herself up, ignoring the hot pain lancing through her ribs. The ruins of Sunspire groaned around her, its shattered pillars leaning like broken teeth. Above, the sky had turned the color of a fresh bruise—purple-black, swirling with something that wasn’t quite cloud, wasn’t quite smoke.
The crown’s doing.
The thought sent a chill through her. The Hollow King’s power had done more than fracture the throne room—it had cracked something deeper. Something worse.
A sound cut through the dust-choked air—a wet, ragged cough.
Kael.
Liraeth stumbled toward the sound, her boots slipping on loose stone. She found him half-pinned beneath a slab of black marble, his mask gone, his golden eyes glazed with pain. Blood streaked the side of his face, dark as old wine.
"Sorin—" he gasped.
Her stomach dropped. "Where?"
Kael’s hand twitched toward a gaping fissure in the ground. "He fell. The crown—" A shudder wracked him. "It’s waking up."
The fissure yawned before her, its edges jagged like broken glass. From its depths came a sound—not wind, not stone settling, but breathing.
Something down there was alive.
And Sorin was trapped with it.
The fissure swallowed light.
Liraeth tied the staff to her back with a strip of torn cloak, its dim glow barely enough to see by. The walls of the crevice were unnaturally smooth, as if something had burned its way through the earth.
Kael’s voice followed her down, hoarse with warning: "Don’t touch the shadows!"
Too late.
Her fingers brushed the wall—and the darkness twisted.
Visions erupted behind her eyes:
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—A city of white stone crumbling into the sea.
—A woman (not her, never her) screaming as gold consumed her skin.
—Sorin (but not Sorin) standing at the edge of the world, a crown of knives in his hands.
Then—
"Liraeth."
A whisper. A plea.
Sorin’s voice.
She wrenched her hand free, the echo of his call still ringing in her skull. The staff’s light flared in response, its sigils burning brighter.
He’s close.
The fissure opened into a cavern so vast its ceiling vanished into gloom. The air here was colder, thicker, tasting of rust and rotting flowers.
And at its center—
Sorin.
He knelt before a pool of liquid shadow, his hands braced against the ground as if holding himself up by sheer will. The Hollow Crown hovered above him, its silver spikes digging into his brow, black veins spreading beneath his skin.
But it was his eyes that stopped her—no longer gold, no longer human.
Hollow.
The crown was winning.
The pool of shadow breathed.
Liraeth froze as the surface rippled, not from any disturbance but from something beneath—something rising. The staff's light dimmed, its glow shrinking back as if afraid.
Sorin didn't move. Didn't blink.
The Hollow Crown pulsed, and his voice slithered through the cavern—but the words weren't his.
"You were always too late."
The pool erupted.
Tendrils of liquid darkness lashed upward, coiling around Sorin's arms, his throat. He didn't fight them. His hollow eyes stared straight through Liraeth as the shadows pulled.
She lunged, staff blazing.
The light struck the tendrils—and they screamed. The sound wasn't mortal; it was the shriek of rusted metal, the groan of breaking bones. The darkness recoiled, but not before she saw—
—faces in the pool.
Hundreds of them. Thousands.
All Sorin's.
Different ages, different scars, but the same hollow eyes.
The crown's voice hissed through the cavern: "Every king needs his ghosts."
Then—
A impact from above.
Kael landed in a crouch beside her, his broken sword dripping with fresh blood. His golden eyes locked onto Sorin, his expression twisting.
"He's not fighting it," he breathed.
Liraeth's grip tightened on the staff. "Then we pull him out."
Kael's laugh was raw. "You don't pull someone from their own grave."
The shadows surged again—but this time, they didn't attack.
They bowed.
To her.
The staff's light flared white-hot, searing her palms. A voice—not the crown's, not Sorin's—whispered through her mind:
"Daughter of the Last Sun."
And suddenly, she remembered.
The memory struck like a blade between the ribs.
—A sun, blackened at the edges, bleeding light into a dying sky.
—A woman (her, but not her) standing before a throne of molten gold, a spear in her grip.
—A boy (Kael, but younger) screaming as the shadows took him.
And him.
The Hollow King.
Not Sorin—never Sorin—but something wearing him, its golden eyes burning with stolen fire.
"You should have let me die," the memory-king whispered.
The vision shattered.
The cavern roared back into focus. The shadows still knelt, their faceless forms trembling. The crown still hovered, its spikes buried in Sorin's skull.
But Sorin—
Sorin was looking at her.
Really looking.
His voice, when it came, was his own—ragged, broken, but his. "Liraeth." A shudder wracked him. "Run."
The pool of shadow exploded.
Darkness geysered upward, swallowing the crown, swallowing Sorin, swallowing the very air. Kael grabbed her arm, yanking her back as the cavern walls began to peel apart, revealing—
—a city.
Not Sunspire. Not Ashgrave.
The First City.
Its spires of white bone gleamed beneath a corpse-light sky. Its streets teemed with figures—not human, not anymore, their faces stretched too long, their limbs too many. And at its heart, a tower, and in that tower, a door, and beyond that door—
"No." Kael's grip turned vise-tight. "Don't look at it."
But it was too late.
Liraeth had seen.
The door was open.
And something was coming through.
