Chapter Two: The Hollow Crown

The dark had weight. Not silence, not emptiness—weight. It pressed against me like water, like hands, like stone above a grave. I floated in it, untethered, slipping through dreams I didn’t remember waking from.

I thought I heard footsteps.

Not the pounding of claws. Not the skitter of something hungry. These were slower. Bare. Deliberate.

I tried to open my eyes.

Tried again.

There was warmth beneath me. Not fire. Not comfort. It pulsed like breath—rising, falling, cradling my limbs in something that smelled like wildflowers crushed under snow. I wasn’t dead. Not yet. My throat ached. My chest stung with every inhale, raw as if breath itself was the enemy.

And then—I felt it.

A hand. Gentle. Calloused. Inhuman.

It was brushing a blood-matted strand of hair from my cheek.

I forced my eyes open.

Light danced above me, dim and strange, like starlight caught in water. The ceiling was too high to see. The walls curved outward in vast rings, layered with ivy that shouldn’t have grown in stone. I was lying on a platform—no, a pedestal—flat and cold, rimmed with runes that shimmered faintly beneath me. The slab pulsed once under my spine, like it had a heartbeat.

And beside it, standing in a shadow he didn’t seem to cast… him.

The figure—I didn't know what he was.

He didn’t breathe like a man. He didn’t stand like one. Tall—too tall—his body wrapped in a long, pale cloak that shimmered like spider silk, his bare chest inked with swirling marks that seemed to move when I wasn’t looking directly at them.

And those horns.

Two great, arched spirals of bone, black as void and veined with light, rising from his temples like a crown forged of ruin. His eyes glowed faintly—no color, just light—set in a face that was too beautiful to be trusted. Or real.

He watched me like he already knew how the story ended.

I opened my mouth to speak—and memory surged like a storm.

The vampire’s eyes, hungry and red. The white-hot pain of fangs splitting skin. The wolf’s bellowing roar. My body collapsing, breath catching, the world tilting sideways into darkness. It flooded me in an instant, like drowning in fire and blood. I whimpered, recoiling into the slab, hands trembling.

My limbs ached as I moved them. I tried to sit, gasping at the flare of protest from every joint, every tendon. My fingers brushed the edge of the pedestal, met with heat pulsing like a second heartbeat. I tried to rise—but the stone refused. The runes glowed bright, searing, and my vision stuttered white.

I sank back down, panting.

"What are you?"

My voice trembled as I asked, and in that moment, I realized—I had no idea what I was looking at. No name, no memory, no story from hearth or book had ever prepared me for this. The figure before me defied sense, wearing a face too perfect to belong in this realm of monsters.

"A fae," he answered simply, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

The word rang in my ears, hollow and meaningless. Fae. That didn’t explain the horns, the light, the stillness that wrapped around him like its own atmosphere. That didn’t explain the way the pedestal pulsed beneath me like it knew I was awake.

"Why…" My voice cracked. I coughed, wincing as pain flared like fire down my throat. "Why am I not dead?"

A pause.

He tilted his head, slow and graceful, inhumanly so.

Then, in a voice that slipped around my ears like silk over glass, he said, "Because I didn’t let you die."

That was all.

Just that. Like the answer should satisfy me. Like I should thank him.

I blinked, trying to find meaning in the silence between us. "You… pulled me from the others?"

Another pause. Longer this time. The weight of it pressed down on me.

"No."

No?

That word splintered something. My memory fractured and scattered, fragments sharp enough to cut. The vampire’s teeth. The wolf’s roar. My blood on the stone.

I pushed myself up on shaking elbows, nausea rolling through me like a tide. The stone beneath me felt warmer now. Familiar in the worst way. Wrong.

"But I saw you," I whispered, barely trusting the shape of the words. "You came to me."

"I came when it was time," he replied. No inflection. No warmth. Just fact—as if anything else would have been wasteful.

I stared at him, heart pounding in places I didn’t even know could feel. My skin crawled with something ancient, some buried instinct trying to wrench me away. "What do you want from me?"

He didn’t move at first. Didn’t blink. Then, softly, with all the certainty of a blade finding the gap in armor, "Purpose."

I flinched like the word hit me. It echoed too loudly in my head, too sharp.

"Your kind has wandered for so long without it," he went on. "You survive. You build. You forget. But something in you still remembers the old pacts. The old fears. This place… it waits for what was promised."

He smiled, but it was a ghost of a thing. Like a shadow caught smiling. It didn’t reach his eyes. Didn’t pretend to.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"You bled," he said, stepping closer—and the air seemed to narrow, like the chamber inhaled. "You woke the gate. That makes you ours."

Ours.

The word curled through me like smoke. Like a noose. My stomach twisted, cold and sour. "I didn’t mean to—"

"No one ever does," he murmured, crouching beside the pedestal with the grace of falling dusk. "The stone is old. Older than the ruin. Older than your kind’s memory. It does not open for blood unwilling."

"That’s not true," I breathed, my voice fraying.

He said nothing. Just held my gaze, those pale eyes narrowing, as if daring me to keep lying—knowing I already was.

I tried to sit up further, only for my muscles to lock in protest. A hiss slipped from my lips. He reached a hand toward me—and I flinched.

His hand stopped mid-air. Open. Waiting.

"I won’t hurt you," he said, softly now. "Not unless you beg me to."

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I wanted to scream. To run. To understand. My pulse thundered in my ears, a primal warning that laced every breath with unease. The words crawled over my skin like silk threads spun from menace, deceptively soft and unbearably taut.

But all I could do was stare at the creature who spoke like prophecy and moved like dusk. Like shadow given form. Every question I asked, he answered—just enough to count. Never enough to help. Never enough to soothe the frantic beat of my heart or the tight ache in my chest that whispered you’re not getting out of this.

"What is this place?" I asked, throat dry, voice brittle as autumn leaves. My lips felt cracked. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and still I forced the words out—because silence felt like surrender.

He smiled again, but it was smaller now. Sadder. The kind of smile you wear when mourning something no one else remembers. "A tomb. A prison. A throne room, once."

"And now?"

He looked up—toward the endless dark above.

"Now, it waits."

I swallowed. "For what?"

He turned back to me.

"For you."

I stared at him in disbelief, the words echoing in the hollow chamber like a verdict. "Me? Why me?"

"You crossed the threshold. You gave blood to stone. The prison opens only when called."

I shook my head; more panic than denial. "I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t want this."

"No," he agreed. "But you were chosen all the same."

"By whom?"

He moved closer, feet silent against the runes. "By the ones bound beneath. By the ruin you bled upon. By the gate that remembers the name you’ve forgotten."

A chill chased down my spine. The runes flared in response.

"I don’t know any name. I don’t know what this place is."

He knelt beside the pedestal, eyes like distant moons. "Not yet."

I looked down at my hands. Blood crusted my fingertips—dried and dark, like a secret sealed to my skin. My breath caught. I remembered the teeth, the fire of pain, the wolf’s growl echoing like a war cry through my ribs. My stomach churned.

Was this what woke the gate? My blood? It felt like a violation, like some intimate part of me had been stolen and spent without my consent. Guilt prickled under my skin, but confusion warred with it. How could something I never offered have been enough to unlock an ancient prison? I didn’t know whether to be afraid of what I’d done—or what had been done to me.

"What… what happened to the vampire?"

My voice cracked, the question barely more than a tremble escaping my lips. It felt absurd the moment I said it—like asking if a nightmare bled when you stabbed it. The words sounded too small, too human, hanging in the air between us like a wisp of smoke waiting to be snuffed out.

A bitter laugh tried to claw its way up my throat, but it caught on the rawness there and died before it reached my lips. I wanted to scoff at myself, to dismiss the question as hysteria—but the ache in my throat pulsed with memory. My body remembered. The puncture. The pull. That burning, helpless drain that left me gasping, weightless, and dying.

I didn’t want to believe it had been real. I wanted to rewrite it as hallucination, as fevered fiction conjured by fear and blood loss. But denial couldn’t erase the phantom of fangs in my skin or the throb that still pulsed in time with that too-sharp memory.

I hugged my arms across my chest. My fingers were cold, even as the slab beneath me burned faintly through the back of my spine, like a second pulse whispering truth, truth, truth.

Please lie to me, I thought. Tell me I imagined it. Tell me I wasn’t really drained by a creature I didn’t even know existed five minutes ago. Tell me monsters aren't real.

But he didn’t.

He didn’t say anything at first. Just watched me—quiet, calculating—as if measuring how much I could take before something inside me cracked.

Then, in a voice that slid beneath my skin like a chill through marrow, he said, “Caged again. For now.”

For now.

The words landed like a drop of blood in still water.

Not gone. Not dead. Not even defeated. Just… caged. Contained. Temporarily.

My lungs tightened, breath catching in my throat. For now, meant not forever. It meant the story wasn’t over. It meant the thing that fed on me, that drank from my body like it had the right, was still out there. Waiting.

I didn’t realize I was shaking until the tremor reached my hands.

"And the other?"

His gaze didn't falter. "The wolf howls. The hollow waits. They feel you."

A shudder ran through me, an involuntary twist in my gut. Feel me? As if I were a scent on the air, a heartbeat through the stone. As if my presence here had woken more than just pain and memory.

I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to. The edges of comprehension felt sharp, dangerous. If I reached too far, something would cut back.

"You said this was a prison," I said, trying to anchor myself with logic, even if my voice shook.

"Yes."

"Then why aren’t you locked away?"

This time, he smiled—but it wasn’t kind. There was no mirth in it, no warmth. Just a curve of lips that held the weight of centuries. "Who says I’m not?"

The words sank into me like stones into water.

The runes pulsed beneath my spine, a low thrum that grew louder with each breath. Not just sound—but feeling. Like something unseen was tuning itself to the rhythm of my blood.

And in the hush that followed, something shifted.

A whisper that wasn’t wind stirred in the ivy above. A shimmer, like breath exhaled by stone. My skin prickled—goosebumps rising like a tide. Every hair on my arms lifted. The chamber seemed to watch me.

My pulse skipped.

And in my bones—so deep I could barely name the place—it answered. A resonance, ancient and strange, like I had touched something sacred and profane in the same breath.

I didn’t know what it meant.

But something inside me did.