Chapter 17: The Hollowed Self

Riven hit the ground hard.

For a moment, the world lagged—like his mind was a second too slow to register where he was. He expected pain, the harsh bite of impact rattling his bones, but instead—nothing.

No air rushing into his lungs.

No warmth from his own skin.

Just a dull, suffocating pressure pressing in from all sides.

Slowly, he pushed himself up, breath coming in short, sharp bursts. The space around him was dark, but not the empty kind of darkness—it moved. Shadows curled and twisted, pulsing like something alive, stretching beyond what his eyes could comprehend.

This wasn't the Hollow City.

This was something deeper.

And then—he felt it.

A presence. Watching. Waiting.

Riven turned sharply, every instinct screaming run.

A figure stood ahead, just at the edges of the moving dark.

At first, it was a blur—a shape too familiar, yet impossible to grasp. It didn't step forward, didn't move. Just… lingered. Silent. Still.

Then, a whisper slithered through the void.

"You were never meant to leave."

The words struck like a hammer against glass, ringing through him, inside him. The weight of them dug deep, settling beneath his thoughts.

He had heard this before.

No.

He had felt it before.

A sharp pressure twisted behind his eyes, a pulse of something wrong. And for the first time, a horrible question surfaced in his mind—one he hadn't dared to consider until now.

"What if I never really left?"

The figure moved.

Slow, fluid steps. Each one silent, but impossibly heavy, as if reality itself was warping beneath its weight. And as it stepped into the dim, flickering half-light—

Riven stopped breathing.

It was him.

But not like before. Not like the doppelgänger that had confronted him in the city.

This version of him was hollowed out.

Its skin was stretched too tight, its limbs slightly elongated, the edges of its form flickering like static. Its eyes—his eyes—were sunken, the color stripped away, leaving only depthless, blackened voids.

But the worst part wasn't how it looked.

It was how it felt.

Like an old wound reopening.

Like a fragment of himself, something he had unknowingly left behind.

"You left me," the hollow thing murmured, voice jagged at the edges, like broken glass grinding against stone. Accusing.

Riven took a step back.

A mistake.

Because the moment he moved, the whole world shifted.

The ground beneath him wasn't solid. It was memory, unraveling at the seams. He caught flashes—glimpses of things he shouldn't remember. The Hollow City before it was hollow. The last moments of the heroes who had vanished. Himself—screaming.

This wasn't just a prison.

This was a graveyard of the forgotten.

And he was starting to forget.

"You were never meant to leave," the thing whispered again.

Its voice was closer now.

Riven's heart slammed against his ribs. He forced his hands into fists, forcing control back into his breathing. This wasn't real. This was just another trick, another illusion meant to—

A hand grabbed his wrist.

Cold.

Wrong.

Riven's vision fractured.

The second their skin touched, it was like something reached inside him and tore free everything that made him who he was. The world split open, unraveling into a flood of broken moments—his past, his present, his self—being devoured all at once.

And through the rushing storm of memory and darkness, the hollowed Riven's expression shifted.

It smiled.

A grin too wide. Too knowing.

"You are not Riven Steele."

Riven screamed.

And the world swallowed him whole.

---

Elsewhere—The Real World

Vera took a sharp step forward, grabbing Vex by the collar.

"What the hell is happening to him?" she snarled.

Vex didn't answer. His jaw was tight, his eyes locked on Riven's body.

Because Riven wasn't moving.

One second, he had been there—standing, breathing, fighting—and the next, it was like he had been hollowed out. His eyes were open, unblinking, staring into something neither of them could see.

A slow, creeping wrongness settled over the room.

Vera's grip on Vex tightened. "Fix it."

Vex swallowed, barely whispering, "I don't think I can."

And in that moment, for the first time—

Vera realized Riven might already be gone.