Chapter 35: Run While You Can

Evelyn didn't run.

Not at first.

The flash of light from Arlen's no, Aeryn's declaration had torn the darkness back, revealing a brief glimpse of something ancient and wounded beneath it. Not just a creature… a force. One that had been watching, waiting, suffering.

Now, it screamed. A soundless scream that pulsed like a tremor in the soul.

Arlen stood before it, a thin line of blood trailing from his nose. He was burning not with fire, but with name-magic, truth-magic, soul-magic. The essence of who he had been and who he had become clashed inside him, and the Gate howled in recognition.

"You think naming yourself again makes you worthy?" the void spat. "You are unworthy. Broken. Forgotten."

Arlen didn't flinch.

"I am broken. But I choose what that means."

Evelyn grabbed his arm. "I'm not leaving you."

"You have to," he said. "If you don't run now, it takes us both."

His voice was steady, but his body swayed, like a candle burning down to the wick.

She hesitated.

Then something touched her. A memory that wasn't hers.

A child crying in a cradle. A woman screaming in a fire. A boy Aeryn watching from the snow, unable to save them.

The void was feeding her his pain.

"It's showing me your life," she gasped.

Arlen nodded slowly. "It wants to bury you in it."

And suddenly Evelyn understood.

This wasn't just about the Gate. It wasn't about names or power or curses.

It was about grief.

The kind that festers.

The kind that breaks entire worlds.

The kind that calls things from beyond.

She kissed his forehead.

Then she turned and ran.

Between Realms

Mira saw her first Evelyn bursting through the half-formed breach in the collapsing runes.

She collapsed in Mira's arms, gasping, covered in ash and echoes.

"Where's Arlen?" Mira asked.

"He's buying us time," Evelyn whispered. "He's going to bind it with his name."

Torren's face paled. "That'll kill him."

"Worse," Mira said grimly. "It'll make him a part of it."

The Gate trembled violently. A scream Arlen's ripped through the world, not with sound, but feeling. Pain. Hope. Defiance. It surged through the ritual circle like a flood of raw magic.

The sky cracked open.

And for a moment, just a moment, they saw Arlen within it.

Eyes glowing. Hands aflame with glyphs of old power.

And around him a prison of light and memory. The entity clawed at him, but he held it fast, screaming its name back at it:

"You are the Forgotten. The Bound. The Hollow King."

Lightning split the air.

And the Gate

Exploded inward.

The Aftermath

When Evelyn awoke, it was snowing.

Mira sat nearby, silently tending the wounded. The ritual circle was gone, blackened into the earth. Torren stood like a statue, watching the sky.

"Is it over?" Evelyn asked.

No one answered.

Because no one knew.

She looked up and saw it. One star among many that didn't belong. A crack in the cosmos.

And behind it… a single golden eye.

Watching.

Waiting.

Somewhere inside that crack… Arlen still fought.

Still bound.

Still burning.

---

A Cage of Mirrors

The silence here was alive.

It breathed.

It waited.

Arlen floated in nothing a void shaped by will, by pain, by memory. His body was gone, or perhaps reborn into this place between names and flesh. He was no longer Arlen Gray. No longer even Aeryn Vale.

He was both. And neither.

Around him, countless reflections shimmered like shards of a shattered mirror, each suspended in air. Within them, scenes flickered: his mother's funeral pyre, his father's final scream, Evelyn reaching for him across the breach, Mira chanting desperately, Torren's cold gaze softened by guilt.

And at the center of it all it waited.

The Hollow King.

No longer just a whisper.

No longer a suggestion in the dark.

It stood before him now, towering and skeletal, its face a shifting mask of every soul it had consumed. One moment it wore his face. The next, Evelyn's. Then his mother's, hollow-eyed and silent.

"You gave me your name," it said, voice layered in screams. "You bound me. Clever. Foolish."

Arlen stood tall, even as his knees buckled under invisible weight. "I didn't bind you," he said. "I bound my pain… and you came with it."

"Then you are the prison," it sneered. "Do you know what that makes you?"

Arlen didn't answer.

He already knew.

The Chains Within

Pain surged again memories attacking him not from without, but within. Every buried emotion, every denied truth became a noose tightening around his spirit.

He relived it all.

His sister, screaming for help as the fire consumed her.

His younger self, begging the gods for strength and hearing only silence.

The day he first met Evelyn, and felt something like hope again… only to fear it, push it away.

The Hollow King laughed.

"You think you are the hero here. But you are the lock. The key. The sacrifice."

A chain wrapped around his chest runed with old truths.

Arlen screamed.

The reflections cracked.

And then, he saw something he hadn't expected: a door.

Buried beneath the memories. Old wood. Iron hinges. Familiar. His childhood home's door.

It pulsed with light Evelyn's voice whispering from behind it.

"You don't have to carry it alone."

He staggered toward it.

The Hollow King lunged.

The Break

Outside the Gate, Evelyn screamed.

Her hand burned, marked by the same sigil Arlen had branded in the void. She clutched the earth as if it could anchor her to him. Mira shouted incantations, desperate. Torren held the circle steady, blood dripping from his nose.

"We have to reach him," Evelyn gasped. "There's still time."

"He's inside the entity," Mira said. "That's suicide."

"No," she said, standing. "That's love."

She placed her hand to the circle and pushed.

Inside the Mind-Prison

The Hollow King reeled as light surged through the cracks.

Evelyn's voice rang out, not in the air, but in him.

In Arlen.

"You are not alone anymore."

The chains snapped.

The mirrors shattered.

And Arlen reached the door flung it open

and for the first time in years, he saw himself.

Not the broken boy.

Not the masked wanderer.

But the man he had become. Scarred. Flawed. Whole.

And in his hand… a blade made of light.

His true name, forged into steel.

He turned to the Hollow King, eyes burning with clarity.

"Let's finish this."

---

The Sword of Silence

The Hollow King screamed, a shriek that fractured thought itself. The air inside the void boiled with corrupted whispers, as if a thousand damned voices cried out in unison denied their feast.

Arlen gripped the blade tighter.

It wasn't forged of steel. It was forged of truth.

Of every broken promise, every lie he told himself to survive. It was his name Aeryn Vale burning bright in golden glyphs across the length of the blade.

"You would strike me with your pain?" the Hollow King hissed. "Fool. I am your pain!"

"No," Arlen said, stepping forward. "You're the part of me that refused to heal. That fed off silence. But I've remembered now."

The Hollow King lunged, skeletal claws like spears of shadow.

Arlen moved like wind through frost fast, fluid. His blade clashed against void-bone, sending shockwaves through the mirrored prison. With every strike, more light erupted. More of the darkness receded.

Each blow was a memory reclaimed.

His sister's laughter before the fire.

His father teaching him to carve.

Evelyn's hand in his, trembling the night they first kissed, pretending it was just for warmth.

"You cannot kill me," the Hollow King spat, staggering.

"I don't need to," Arlen said, voice low. "I just need to bury you where you belong inside me, no longer in control."

And then

He plunged the blade into the Hollow King's chest.

The Collapse

Outside, Evelyn convulsed as the connection flared.

"Something's happening!" Mira yelled. The sigils surrounding the Gate had begun to twist, spiral then snap back, one by one. "The entity is destabilizing!"

Torren shouted above the roar, "Is he winning?"

Evelyn didn't answer.

She fell to her knees, clutching her heart. "I feel him. He's fighting."

The Gate screamed. Not just in sound, but in light and pressure, a keening wail as reality itself resisted being rewritten.

Through the vortex of unraveling magic, a figure began to form.

Broken.

Bleeding.

Glowing.

Inside the Prison

Arlen sank to one knee, his blade buried in the Hollow King's chest. The creature howled, its form unraveling shadows peeling back into thoughtless void.

But with its death, the prison began to collapse.

The mirrors shattered inward, shards turning to dust. The ground cracked into stardust and wind. Arlen looked up saw the doorway again.

Beyond it: Evelyn.

Calling for him.

He stood. Walked.

Each step felt like moving through centuries of regret but lighter now. The burden wasn't gone.

He just wasn't carrying it alone anymore.

He stepped through the doorway.

The Return

The Gate exploded in light.

A shockwave of pure silence knocked Mira and Torren backward.

And then Arlen fell through.

Alive.

Barely.

Evelyn caught him before he hit the ground, her arms wrapping around him as if anchoring him to reality itself.

"You idiot," she whispered. "You came back."

"I said I would," he rasped. "Couldn't leave you to deal with Torren's attitude alone."

Torren scoffed. "Still arrogant. He's fine."

Mira exhaled in relief, her hands glowing as she began mending the burns across Arlen's chest.

But Evelyn didn't let go.

And neither did he.

The Aftermath

Far above the remnants of the Gate, the sky churned but the darkness had retreated.

For now.

But deep below, something else stirred.

The Hollow King was gone.

But the wound he left in the world still bled.

And something older… something worse... had noticed.