The Hollow That Hungers

The name came to me through marrow, not memory.

Selvannara.

I woke with it burning on my tongue, tasting of iron and starlight and the particular sweetness that comes before flesh rots. The shard contracted behind my ribs, tight as wire pulled too far, like fear tasting its own reflection.

Around me, the threadless children stirred. Seven had started sleeping pressed against my sides. Seven more in the next ring. Seven beyond that. Always sevens now, as if the universe was teaching them mathematics through proximity.

"You spoke," the mirror-boy said, crouched at perfect distance. "In the old tongue. The trees answered."

I sat up, felt the world tilt wrong. The forest had changed in the night—or I had. Every leaf held too much color. Every shadow breathed with intent. And beneath us, beneath earth and stone and the bones of ancient things, something pulled.

Come, it whispered. Not the shard. Something older. Something that knew the name that made gods flinch.

The children were already standing. They moved like one organism now, learned behavior becoming instinct becoming something else entirely. When I rose, they flowed around me—not following but anticipating. Reading the pull in my bones before I'd acknowledged it myself.

"Where?" Dorian's voice from the edge. He'd slept apart again, wrapped in distance that tasted like grief.

I pointed down. Not direction—dimension. The children understood immediately, began moving toward the cluster of trees that had wept silver. But now they wept darker things. Sap ran red-black down ancient bark, and where it pooled, the earth split into patterns that hurt to perceive.

Seven turns through the forest. Seven stones that weren't there yesterday. Seven steps down into a hollow that shouldn't exist but had always been waiting.

The descent took us beneath root systems older than pack law. The walls glowed with phosphorescent moss that pulsed in rhythm with my marks. Both of them. All of them. Marks I'd forgotten carving into flesh that might not have been mine.

"Mother-Who-Burns," one child whispered, but her voice came out wrong. Older. Layered. "We remember this place. We died here. We were born here. We—"

She collapsed, convulsing. I reached for her, but another child was already speaking in that same not-voice:

"—were given to the roots when the moon had different names. Fed to earth when threads were new. Made foundation for—"

Another collapse. Another voice picking up the story:

"—the binding that would hold wolves to wolves to wolves forever unless—"

They were all speaking now. Different mouths, same memory. The story pouring through them like water through broken vessels. And I understood with the kind of clarity that felt like drowning: these weren't just threadless children.

They were descendants of sacrifice. Bloodlines of those fed to ancient magic. The unbound returning to unmake what their ancestors had died to create.

The hollow opened into a chamber that defied architecture. Roots formed a cathedral ceiling. Stones arranged themselves in patterns that shifted when watched directly. And at the center, an altar made of what might have been bone or might have been crystallized moonlight.

My hands moved without permission. Found ash from fires that had burned before humans discovered flame. Drew symbols that preceded language but spoke directly to blood. The bone shard from yesterday's grave fit perfectly in the center, like a key returning to its lock.

The children arranged themselves in sevens around sevens. Their mouths opened, and what came out wasn't words but harmonics. The sound of threads being woven. The sound of threads being cut. The sound of the space between, where something new might grow.

The shard writhed beneath my ribs like a living thing drowning in its own element. Heat and cold and the particular pain of divine things recognizing their betters.

But my hands kept moving. The ritual had momentum beyond my will, beyond the shard's jealous claim. This was older magic. Deeper magic. The kind that came before gods decided they owned the world.

One child stepped forward. The scarred boy with his transformed finger, silver burns across his chest from my failed healing. He knelt at the altar's edge, placed his mangled hand on the bone shard, and smiled with too much peace.

"I offer—"

"No." The word tore from my throat. I wouldn't take them. Wouldn't feed them to power like their ancestors. Wouldn't—

But the magic was already moving. Demanding payment. Demanding transformation. The chamber filled with pressure like the moment before lightning, and I understood:

It would take him. Or it would take them all.

Unless.

The flame came different this time. Not from the shard, not from my rage or pain or divine infection. This came from the hollow place where my thread used to live. From the wound that would never heal. From the part of me that remembered being Selvannara, being Miralys, being a thousand names for the same refusal to break correctly.

I felt it gather. Felt it split like light through a prism, reaching for each small heartbeat in the hollow that hungered. The children's harmonics rose, their voices weaving something that had no name in any language still spoken.

The bone shard began to glow. The altar cracked. The very air grew thick with the taste of transformation about to birth itself into the world.

"Selvannara," the mirror-boy said, his voice cutting through the rising power. "The name that means 'the thread that cuts itself.' We remember now."

The silver flame hovered at the edge of release, at the moment before everything would change. I could feel it pulling at each child, ready to rewrite what they were into what they might become. Ready to forge something new from the ashes of the threadless.

Dorian stood at the chamber's entrance, his face carved from shadow and old grief.

"You've crossed into something I don't know how to love."

The words landed between heartbeats, between the gathering and the release, between the girl I'd been and the thing I was becoming.

The flame pulsed once, bright as birth, terrible as truth.

And then—