Chapter Nine: The Throne Beneath the World
The Hollow King
Time did not pass in the Hollow Realm. It bled.
It dripped like candlewax over the bones of gods, like sorrow carved into stone. Here, night did not fall — it loomed, heavy and slow, a sentient hush that swallowed memory and light alike.
And in the heart of it all, he waited.
Still.
Unmoving.
Unmaking.
The Hollow King sat upon his throne of blackened roots and ruined starlight, eyes closed, yet burning behind the lids. A thousand voices whispered in the walls — memories of mortals, of kings and queens and every echo of magic that had ever dared to dream.
He heard her again.
Elira.
But this time, she did not speak his name as a stranger.
This time… she remembered.
---
He felt it the moment she touched the pendant.
The moment her soul peeled back its disguise and stared at him with the eyes of a goddess he had once worshipped and destroyed.
The memory came like blood:
A field of fire.
A kiss at the edge of annihilation.
A promise made with a blade pressed to his throat.
"I will seal you, love. Even if it shatters me."
She had.
And it had.
He had screamed her name as the void claimed him. Not in hate.
In grief.
In betrayal.
---
Now she was awake again.
And the bond between them stirred like a beast stretching after centuries of sleep.
He opened his eyes.
The Hollow Realm shuddered.
---
His temple was empty save for the Veil Choir — shadows in the shape of women who had once borne light and lost it. They did not speak. They sang, low and haunting, a harmony of mourning and madness.
He rose from the throne, his steps echoing not on stone but on time itself.
"Prepare the gate," he said.
The shadows bowed.
"She comes," they whispered, voices overlapping.
"She remembers."
"She fears."
"She burns."
The Hollow King smiled, a cruel and ancient thing. "Let her."
---
He walked through the gallery of lost faces — statues of those who had defied him, loved him, worshipped him. There were many.
But only one had been his equal.
Only one had touched the raw fabric of his being and not recoiled.
Elira the First.
His flame.
His end.
---
He saw her through the cracks in the veil now.
Not visions. Not prophecy.
Truth.
She stood before the court with no crown, yet the world bent for her. She summoned flame and shadow as if they were her birthright — because they were.
He did not speak across the veil.
He did not whisper in her mind.
He simply waited.
And watched.
Because this time, he would not beg.
This time, she would come to him.
---
"Your Majesty," came a voice — soft, melodic, almost mortal.
It was Meara, his oldest blade. Once a priestess, now a creature of shadow molded by his will.
"She approaches the threshold."
He turned to her, half-crowned in darkness, eyes pools of silver ruin.
"She no longer fears herself," he murmured.
"Shall we raise the gates?"
"No."
Meara tilted her head.
"She must break them herself," he said.
"She must want it."
He stepped toward the edge of the Hollow Temple and looked down — not into earth, but into memory, into the moment she had sealed him.
"I was born when she betrayed me," he said. "And I will die when she forgives me."
Meara said nothing.
There were no words for such truths.
---
He returned to the chamber of forgotten vows, where time itself curled like smoke.
He placed his hand upon the Heartstone — a shard of Elira's old magic, stolen before the seal fell.
It burned him.
It always had.
But he pressed his palm flat anyway and whispered her true name — the one no mortal tongue remembered.
And the stone screamed.
---
Visions poured into him.
Elira laughing under starlight, younger than memory.
Elira standing on a battlefield, eyes wild with flame.
Elira kissing Kaelen.
Elira hesitating.
Elira… breaking.
His hands trembled.
Not from rage.
From hope.
---
He still remembered the last time he touched her.
The way her skin had tasted of starlight and blood.
The way she had cried when she bound him in chains woven of her own ribs — metaphor, and not.
He had loved her then.
He still did.
And he hated that about himself.
---
In the deep chamber of whispers, his council gathered — remnants of forgotten kings, cursed gods, beings who fed on agony and sang hymns of despair.
"She grows strong," hissed the Drowned Warden.
"She will kill us," rasped the Cradle Widow.
"She is ours," purred the Dreamless Knight.
"She is mine," said the Hollow King, voice quiet and absolute.
"She was," corrected the Widow. "Now she is something else."
"Let her be," he said.
"If she crosses the veil, she will come as herself. Not for love. Not for guilt."
He paused.
"But for choice."
---
The Hollow King returned to his throne at last.
He looked up at the endless sky above — stars that hadn't moved since she sealed him beneath them.
"I feel you," he whispered.
Across realms. Across time.
"You are becoming what I always saw in you."
He rested his head back against the obsidian spine of the throne.
"I only wonder…"
He closed his eyes.
"…whether you'll become it with me…"
A pause.
"…or to destroy me again."
---
In the realm between, a ripple stirred.
A heartbeat.
A whisper.
A step.
And he smiled.
She was coming.