Hollows Series Novels & Stories

Before he could respond, the hall went quiet. Not gradually. All at once. Next thing she knew. The Hallowed Hall was the kind of room that made you understand why certain spaces were built large not for capacity. Stone arches rose sixty feet overhead. and the modern lighting suspended within them managed the remarkable feat of feeling both cold and warm simultaneously. The floor was dark marble. The seating was arranged in a wide semicircle facing a raised dais at the front. and every seat was filled with vampire students to the left Nora had been cataloguing the room since she sat down.

Every flicker made the obelisk seem alive, as if it were watching them, waiting. Sereth stood before them, her silhouette etched in soft light. “The Hollow exists because we feed it,” she said, voice low but carrying authority that pressed against the edges of the night. “The wards are strong, but not infinite. Every soul we shelter, every step you take here, consumes energy. Life. Memory. Name.” Aria’s pulse tightened. “A price? What do you mean?”

I need her close. I make my way through the Hollow, the familiar scents wrapping around me, ash, sweat, damp earth. Kids dart through the alleys with sticks for swords. Women haul buckets of water from the cracked well. Men sharpen blades, preparing for a war not yet on our horizons. But just in case. That’s the rhythm of our lives: scrape by, prepare, repeat. The Hollow isn’t beautiful nor entirely safe, by safety standards. But who gives safety standards though? Lycan’s Hollow is real. Although I think it is high time the council changes its name.

There were no announcements. No declarations. No war drums or pulse-beats from the bloom. In the weeks following the collapse of the Veil wrights’ artificial network and the Hollow's full emergence, the world slipped into a strange stillness. Not peace. Cautious pause. As if even the wind was listening for what would come next. In the Hollow Circle, now scattered across vast roots and drifting Bloomfields, Ari sat beside a narrow stream made of condensed resonance. Children played nearby. Some sketched runes in the air; others asked questions she couldn’t always answer.

CHAPTER 33 — The Spine corridor didn’t end. It ruptured. Not with stone falling—Hollow tunnels didn’t collapse like ordinary earth. They swallowed and redirected, turning bodies into shadows, turning shouts into echoes that couldn’t find their way back. Rowan’s howl still rang in the marrow of the walls. Hollow wolves surged to Caelan like he’d been carved into their law a long time ago and they’d only just remembered it. Teeth and bone blades flashed. The corridor became a living knot of fury.

**KELLY THOMPSON'S POV** The moon's corpse left a void in the sky, a starless wound that bled silence. In its absence, the laws of the world frayed. Rivers ran backward. Wolves gave birth to stillborn shadows. The plague-veins in Eden's arms lay dormant but restless, a sleeping storm neither he nor Isolde could name. The packs called it *the Hollowing*-a sickness of the soul, a hunger for what the moon had taken.

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 government’s towers were nothing but blackened skeletons of twisted steel, but the damage they had inflicted was walking toward us on two legs. They emerged from the fog in clusters: silent, rhythmic, and terrifyingly orderly. These were the "Hollows." Unlike the Unbound, who carried the chaotic, violet fire of the Elder blood in their eyes, these people were empty. Their pupils were fixed and dilated, their faces devoid of the micro-expressions that signal human thought or emotion. In clinical terms, they were suffering from a Total Cognitive Erasure. The frequency wall had not just blocked their resonance: it had performed a localized "Format" of their cerebral cortex.

It was five o’clock that evening, and Carter was enjoying a glass of Hennessey on the rocks. Hugo had been gone since eleven thirty. Carter didn’t text him, though. He was a grown man and could go and stay where he pleased. Back in the old days, Carter would get worried when Hugo was gone too long because the rival gangs were relentless against the Mitchells. After the Mitchells had finally prevailed and took over the neighborhood fifteen years ago, Carter didn’t worry about anyone taking out his family members anymore.