Book Hollowed Out Novels & Stories

Its eyes burned like molten obsidian. The ritual ended with a sound like a crack of thunder inside the earth. Kane opened his eyes, and for a heartbeat, I didn’t recognize him. His gaze was still his… but rimmed with shadow. His skin seemed to drink in the light. Then the Hollow came. It tore itself from the fissure, massive and terrible, a shape of shifting stone and shadow bound together by a core of blinding hunger. Its eyes, that’s if they could be called that locked on me, and I felt its intent as clearly as if it had spoken: I was prey.

The sound built until the hollow shook with it—a den speaking itself back into truth. The route convulsed. The towering figure in the hollow staggered as if the names themselves had become blades. Brine burst from the earth in black sheets. The hidden lines under the house, the nursery, the old archive, the sanctuary remains, all lit at once in jagged red veins and then began to fail. Ty’s witness locked onto me with merciless steadiness as I reached down into the pulsing structure under the hollow and tore. Not flesh. Not stone. Connection. The old path screamed as it came apart.

"The 'Maintenance Crew' usually finishes the deletion in under ten minutes. You’ve got about six left before they hit the 'Empty Trash' button." "Who are you?" Elara demanded, her silver fire flaring. "Did the Bank send you to finish the job?" The man laughed, a dry, wheezing sound. "The Bank? Honey, I’m the guy who built the vault before they even had a key. Name’s Holloway. I’m a 'Contract Adjuster.' And right now, you’re the only thing on this planet that isn't a line of dead code." Holloway stepped out of his golden circle. As he did, the grey fog rolled over him, but he didn't freeze. His coat shimmered with a dull, leaden light that seemed to repel the static.

We just turned off the street when a huge explosion could be heard coming from behind us, causing the whole ground to shake, I look back seeing barrels of smoke fill the air, fear immediately making its way through me. "Don't worry about that doll, people down there are always doing stuff like that" he simple says, answering my question before I asked it, I look over at him where his face was just straight, turning us into the dual carriage way. We drive for around half an hour, until we turn in to what looked like an abandoned road, right at the end was a car with Aidan and the new guy Thomas waiting outside. Anthony pulls up telling me he won't be long before getting out with them, Aidan w

Caelan The Hollow King waits. He stands beneath the twisted canopy of the oldest trees, a crown of bleached antlers shadowing his skeletal face. Each antler is carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly, and bones hang from them like macabre ornaments. Finger bones, rib bones, small skulls that might once have been birds or rabbits or children. His eyes are hollow sockets, darkness so complete it seems to swallow light, but they see me. Every secret, every buried truth, every fragment of who I used to be.

"It noticed." "What is it?" I ask. "Specifically." She is quiet for a moment — not the quiet of not knowing, but the quiet of choosing how to carry something into language. "In the old texts," she says, "it is called a Hollowing. Something that moves into a space that was designed for something else and lives there long enough to reshape itself to fit." She looks at the maps on the shelves around us. "A city without a Warden develops — a vacuum. Most things fill vacuums. This one filled the Warden-shaped space and has been performing a version of the balance. Poorly. But performing it."

Draven goes very, very still. Because the Hollow just chose. Not him. Me.

By noon, the news spreads through Silverpine like wildfire: the south is breaking, and we are all the refuge left. Elowen’s voice is soft at first, but it fills the hall. The witches from the south speak not only in words but in tremors that seem to pass through every floorboard, every wary heart listening. She describes the Hollowing—a devourer, ancient and without true name or shape. It is not a demon and not a spirit, but something that eats the world’s heart quietly, leaving nothing behind. No bodies, no bones. Only the hush of something erased, the faint, acrid scent of a scorch mark in the grass, or, in the coldest dawns, a rim of white frost swirling in unnatural spirals around the ru

“Piano. Something slow. I think you played it once.” “I did. Before Eidolon, I taught for a while.” “That makes sense,” he said softly. “There’s something about your hands. Like they know both creation… and destruction.” That brought a tight laugh to my throat. “You don’t forget some things.” He didn’t answer, but when our fingers brushed as I handed him the canteen, he didn’t pull away. Small miracles. The Hollow was a concrete scar in the mountains. Once, it had relayed global signals through an array of underground servers. Now, it was dead—except for the chamber Paladin had marked in red ink. There, behind layers of steel and rock, lay a terminal unlike any I’d seen before.