Book Hollowed Out Novels & Stories

It was as if Reaper’s Hollow operated in its own bubble—a dated bubble at that. There was one other male in the room. A tall, thin, though well-built, African American sat at a table in the back, his long legs not fitting under the table. He was flipping through a sports magazine, and Cutter noticed he hadn’t bothered to bring anything else but a pencil. He looked up at Cutter and ran a hand over his bald head before declaring. “Dang—they really did hire another dude.” Trying to curtail his laughter, Cutter stepped over. “Hi. Just the two of us then?”

At the altar sat a sealed obsidian vessel, faintly glowing red—the Blood of the Ashen Saint. As Bain and Seraphina approached, the ground trembled. With a sudden crack, humanoid figures burst from beneath the floorboards. Twisted, eyeless, and stitched together from fragments of failed Hollow experiments — failed children, abandoned vessels. “They’re Hollow Shells!” Elias shouted. Sokolov drew his twin blades while Vulture blasted one straight through the chest, sending it skidding across the stone. “They’re trying to stall us!” Seraphina cried. “They know we’re close!”

Evangeline swallowed, her throat raw. “The Outer Veil. We’re moving west, towards Aetherreach. The Hollow breached the inner sanctum less than an hour ago.” “I don’t even know what the Hollow is.” Evangeline’s chest tightened as Cassius met her unblinking and steady eyes “They are what was left when hope was ripped from something that used to be alive.” he replied, grumpily, as though forced to speak. "That’s not even an answer.” Evangeline blinked. “True, but it’s the only one that fits, goddess.” Selene shrugged.

"The Hollowed are not wolves. They are echoes. If they touch you, they will try to pull the light from your marrow to fill their own voids." "I'm not hiding anymore, Kaelen," I said, my voice steady despite the trembling in my knees. I looked toward the Father of Roots. The colossal tree was shedding its obsidian skin in great, glass-like shards. Beneath the black crust, the bark was glowing with a deep, liquid gold. "You defend the perimeter. I need to reach the heart."

“Gods… Ragnor, that’s—” “The Hollow.” My voice came out as a low growl, steady despite the icy dread crawling up my spine. Valkyrie turned to me, her eyes searching mine for confirmation—for denial. But I had none to give. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “It can’t be.” It was. The Hollow was more than just a spirit. It was a force beyond this world, a parasite that didn’t just consume bodies—it devoured souls, leaving nothing but an empty, twisted husk behind. A fate worse than death.

It washed over the dying tundra. For a second, nothing happened. Then, the world screamed. THE HARVEST It started with the sound of cracking bone. The Hollow Men closest to Leo didn't disintegrate. They sprouted. Vines exploded from their chests, shattering their white ribcages. Their limbs twisted, elongating, turning from bone-wood into gnarled oak. Their blank faces split open as ferns burst from their mouths. They weren't dying. They were being aggressively terraformed.

_*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> It is a hollow in the wall, carved rather than formed naturally, fitted with a stone covering that someone has already removed and not replaced. The hollow is empty now, the stone inside it clean in a way that is different from the rest of the chamber, the cleanness of something recently disturbed rather than simply ancient. _*]:min-w-0 gap-3"> At the hollow's interior base, carved into the stone in the same old script as the text below the murals, is a name.

Jack pushed the door open. The interior was a cramped, cluttered workshop that smelled of hot metal and dimensional grease. Tools hung from the ceiling on invisible hooks, self-adjusting to the gravitational orientation of whoever was using them. In the center of the workshop, hunched over a workbench that existed in at least three dimensions simultaneously, was the Hollowsmith. He was small, impossibly old, and made entirely of tarnished bronze clockwork. His eyes were mismatched glass lenses, one red, one green, and his fingers were needle-thin precision instruments that moved with the delicate grace of a spider weaving a web.

But the habit of caring about him hadn’t faded yet. “Almost there,” Fen said. “You keep saying that.” “I keep meaning it.” Then the trees opened up, and I stopped. The Hollow wasn’t what I expected. I’d pictured something gloomy, like the rest of the Growth, full of rot, murk, and things with strange eyes. But this was different. The trees here were old, older than anything I’d seen, with trunks as wide as houses and roots rising from the ground in arches tall enough to walk under. In the center was a pool, still and black, perfectly round, as if someone had pressed a coin into the earth. The air shivered with a faint hum, so low I felt it more than heard it, vibrating somewhere in my bones.

The air in the cavern was no longer thick with the scent of pine; it was choked with the acrid stench of ozone, burnt magnesium, and the cold, metallic breath of the "Slipstream" engines. The ceiling of the Hollow, once a dark cathedral of stone, was now a jagged landscape of blinding blue spotlights and the silhouettes of descending "New Geneva" strike teams.