Dream Theatre Hollow Years Novels & Stories

Love. Death Distance Time The Hollow feeds on those truths Twisting them. Deepening them. And suddenly I understand what it really is Not merely hunger. Not merely entropy. Despair The belief that connection is meaningless because it ends. My knees weaken slightly The void presses harder around me. Memories surface painfully Every goodbye. Every loss. Every fear of abandonment I’ve ever had. The Hollow pushes deeper “You will lose them.” Theodore laughing. Aurelion smiling softly. Vireon’s calm eyes.

Grant Holloway stole my promotion six months ago and I’ve been imagining his destruction every day since. Not metaphorical destruction – detailed, vivid fantasies of dismantling his career the way he dismantled mine. Catching him in a lie during a board meeting. Finding the email where he cc’d himself on my strategy deck and presented it as his own. Watching his smug face collapse when security escorts him out with a cardboard box and everyone in the department watches and nobody says goodbye.

Back then, my head was full of love, like a dream made of cotton candy. Who could have guessed that I would return here three years later—not in a wedding dress, not hand in hand with him, with smiles on our faces, but quietly moving through empty aisles. Jason didn't say a word. He just watched as I wandered through the church. His eyes darkened, as if finally understanding something. To be honest, he looked worse than I did. He was so skinny that he looked bony, his face was ghostly pale, and he was so frail that a gust of wind could knock him over.

“That is my Hybrid Human side that masks that side of me. I am coming for you, Vampire. Your kind is not wanted or needed in this town. You are being warned now.” He chuckles. This irritates her, and she gives him a puzzled and angry expression. “Okay, sweetheart! Well, I am no threat, and you have got to be kidding me. I have seen you in action, and you are good but not against a vampire like myself.” She lunges for him and grabs him by the hand. She suddenly stops in her tracks. She is frozen with a strange sense and can’t let go. He, too, feels the same and is absolutely paralyzed in that moment as well. He is then rushed back into his body, at home with such speed and force he almost fal

The phone clicked, she gasped. "Hello?" the heavy low voice on the other side answered. "Malcolm?" her voice almost inaudible. There was silence for a few seconds. "Cathy?" Even after 20 years, they could recognize a familiar voice.

Instead, she was being hurried off to a meeting at a place that gave her the heebie-jeebies with a group of people she was pretty sure might be certifiably insane. “It’s okay,” Lyric shrugged. “I don’t mind just listening to the music. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.” One of Ru’s favorite songs, “Revelations” by Audioslave, was playing, and she hadn’t even noticed. “Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied, forcing a smile. “You know, listening to the lyrics of this song, it’s kinda fitting,” Lyric half laughed. “Especially the part about knowing what he’s dreaming and holding the keys and the rules. I guess I never thought about that before.”

Every chapter, every word, was part of my own catharsis, and it is with a full heart that I share this with you today. This will be the last book in the Dreams series. The journey of Shadrach, Wynter, and the others has come to its beautiful conclusion, and I have no intentions of returning to continue their story. As much as I’m sad to close this chapter, I know it’s time for me to move on to new beginnings.

He said again as he looked at Megan for reassurance to continue. “We four form the elemental across the world and we call forth one David Blackwater to fill this room.” They chanted the 900-year-old spell that would help bring back her father for the answer they needed. Everyone watched as a mist began to fill the room. The flames of the candles began to grow, and when they reached a certain height, David appeared in front of them. Megan was exhausted after the spell. “What the hell?” Megan was pissed, and David could see that and even before she could speak he held up his hand.

The Hollow Choir is gone. And somewhere in the silence between worlds, something ancient exhales for the first time in two thousand years.

**KELLY THOMPSON'S POV** The quiet was a liar. Three days after Rhydian tore the First Pack's essence from his chest, the nightmares began. Not mine-*theirs*. Every wolf in the territory woke screaming, their minds invaded by visions of a starless sky and a voice that wasn't a voice, but a *pressure*, like the deep-sea weight of something ancient surfacing. Isolde called it *the Hollowing*. "It's not the Dusk Mother," she said, her fingers trembling as she sketched the new sigils scorched into Eden's doorframe. "This is older. *Hungrier.*"