Katya and the Hollowborn moved together through the ruins, her steps quick and cautious as she scouted ahead.

  Behind her, the Hollowborn’s voice drifted out, slow and uneven, as though it struggled to shape the words. “I was… wondering. Must you take their belongings? The enemies, I mean.”

  Katya glanced back, snorted. “Of course. Loot’s valuable. We don’t exactly trip over supplies in this wasteland. Resources are scarce, you know.”

  Silence lingered until the Hollowborn spoke again. “Arcadia was once… beautiful. Lush.” The words came heavy, weighted with something that wasn’t quite grief but close. Then it fell quiet.

  “You miss it, huh?” Katya asked, trying to mask her unease with chatter.

  “I do not know.” The voice sharpened with a faint edge of pain. “I am… trying to find myself.”

  Katya frowned, then tested her luck. “What about her?”

  The Hollowborn halted, its gaze distant. The name spilled from its lips like a memory pulled against resistance. “Shayara.”

  It lingered in the air, heavy, deliberate. “I remember her name… her face. But I do not know why.”

  Katya kept quiet. Her thoughts turned inward, did anyone care for her the way this Hollowborn seemed to cling to Shayara? For her, each day was nothing but struggle: scavenging, surviving, trying to piece together her research on the ruined weave. That was her duty. That was what it meant to be Crimson Wing.

  A flicker of movement caught her eye. The soil ahead shifted unnaturally. In the rotten red dirt, something writhed free, a ghoul. Its body was misshapen, caked in the filth it fed on: the necrotic remnants of god-flesh mingled with the earth. They mostly gorged themselves on rot, but sometimes… sometimes they craved the living.

  “Trouble ahead.” Katya tightened her grip on her sword. The enchantment had burned out when she’d struck at the Hollowborn. Now it was just steel in her hands, cold, imperfect steel. But steel was better than nothing.

  “What a magnificent creature,” the Hollowborn’s voice rang out, reverent yet alien. “It is both magic and flesh. But something twisted it, corrupted it into the monstrosity you see.”

  “That’s the weave,” Katya muttered, knuckles white around her sword hilt as the soil slithered beneath her boots.

  The Hollowborn drifted forward.

  “What are you doing?” Katya’s voice cracked with a plea.

  “I wish to see it. Up close.”

  The ghoul burst from the ground with a shriek, hurling itself at the Hollowborn. It was fast—too fast—but the being, gliding just above the earth, was faster still, drifting aside in an unnatural arc. The ghoul, denied its prey, lunged straight for Katya.

  She braced for impact—only to see the impossible.

  The creature’s limbs churned forward, claws raking air, yet its body slid backward, step by step, as though its destination had already been decreed. No matter how it struggled, its path was fixed.

  Katya’s breath caught. She knew what she was seeing. Not sorcery. Not spellcraft. A Law.

  Only the Divine Lords and the Supreme Sorcerers could bend reality so. And now, here, she was witnessing it with her own eyes.

  The ghoul lunged, but its body moved in reverse, each frantic step dragging it backward as though the world itself had already decided its course.

  The Hollowborn caught it by the neck mid-motion, suspending it with effortless strength. The creature convulsed, gagging up a spray of rot meant to sear its enemy’s face but the filth recoiled, splattering back across its own twisted features.

  For the first time, Katya thought she saw a ghoul afraid.

  Then she noticed it: hairline fractures spreading across the Hollowborn’s mended body, cracks glowing faintly where the lattice strained.

  “Mister Hollowborn, you’re breaking again?” Katya blurted, panic rising. The thought chilled her marrow: if he broke, would he consume her soul to mend himself?

  The Hollowborn turned his gaze toward her. No answer came. Instead, he slammed the ghoul into the ground with such force the earth shuddered. The creature writhed, clawing helplessly in the dirt.

  “Finish it,” the Hollowborn said flatly. “Then we move. It is a being. It may trouble other travelers.”

  Katya stared at him, aghast. Travelers? Who traveled here? This was a necrotic desert, only raiders and the mad dared enter these cursed lands.

  But she didn’t argue. With shaking hands, she stepped forward, set the steel tip against the ghoul’s neck, and drove it through.

  They moved in silence, the wasteland swallowing their footsteps. Overhead, the sky was dimming, stained with the bruised colors of dusk.

  “This place gets worse after dark,” Katya said finally, breaking the hush. “There’s a broken structure nearby. We can camp there. I’ve got an ether-lamp, it’ll keep us safe until morning.”

  The Hollowborn gave only a quiet nod.

  When they reached the ruin, he stopped at the threshold. His eyes lingered on the cracked walls, the faint carvings still etched in stone.

  “Looks like… a temple of Amun,” he said, his voice carrying a strange weight, as though remembering something he shouldn’t. “Wards are long dead, but that is why it still stands.”

  Katya blinked at him. “Amun, huh? Wasn’t he some big-shot god?”

  “He was known as the God-King.”

  She tilted her head at him. “Were you a follower?”

  “I do not know,” he replied. The answer fell flat and cold, as though it was fact carved into him.

  Inside, the ruin was unsettlingly alive. Where the outer wasteland rotted into black soil and bone, here shrubs had forced their way between broken stones, green and stubborn. At the far end loomed the fractured base of an altar, only the feet of a statue remaining, marble toes worn smooth by ages of worship.

  “Alright,” Katya muttered, kneeling. “We’ll need light. Shadows come out after nightfall, and trust me, you don’t want to meet them.” She set an ether-lamp on the ground and flicked the switch. A pale glow washed across the chamber.

  The Hollowborn’s gaze fixed on the lamp. “Shadows?”

  “Yeah,” Katya said, trying to sound casual. “The theory is they’re the dead that linger here. This land’s soaked in corpses. Too many to count. They don’t stay still. They hunt.”

  Katya opened a bottle and tipped it back, sighing. “I was parched.” She glanced at the Hollowborn, his stillness uncanny against the flickering ether-light. “Mister Hollowborn… do you eat?”

  “I used to,” he said after a pause. “Now… I do not know.”

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  She studied him curiously. “Huh. That’s kinda sad.” She hesitated, then brightened. “Oh—hey. I haven’t even said my name. I’m Katya.”

  The Hollowborn nodded once. “I yet do not know my name. My memories are… vague.” His voice dimmed into silence, as if even speaking those words was effort.

  Unbothered, Katya rummaged in her satchel and pulled out a small metal tin. She pried it open and held it out. “This is called kipple. It’s, uh, meat and other stuff, all pressed and treated. Doesn’t rot easy. Basically a researcher’s dream food.”

  The Hollowborn tilted his head. “Researcher?”

  “Mm-hm. You know, people who poke at the weave, try to understand it. Not priests, not sorcerers, just… seekers.”

  “A seeker,” the Hollowborn repeated slowly, as if weighing the word. “I see.”

  Katya grinned. “Exactly. A seeker. Sounds cooler when you say it, though.”

  The Hollowborn said nothing more, but the ether-lamp hissed faintly as its light swayed across his crimson hair and half-mended body.

  After a while, Katya pulled out a small leather-bound diary, flipped it open, and began scribbling. The Hollowborn’s gaze lingered.

  “That insignia,” he said suddenly. “I have seen it before.”

  The voice echoed in the broken temple.

  Katya blinked. “This one?” She tapped the embossed crest on the diary’s cover. “It’s the logo of our organization. Every researcher’s diary has one. Looks plain, but—watch this.”

  She pinched a bit of glittering powder between her fingers. “Mana dust. Helps with tiny spells.” She rubbed it across the leather, whispered a word, and with a flicker the insignia expanded, unfurling into its true form.

  Katya grinned. “Well? Surprised?”

  The Hollowborn studied it for a long moment. Then, with a voice low and unshaken, he said, “The Crimson Wing.”

  Katya’s smile froze. Her eyes widened. How does he know? The Crimson Wing had existed for centuries, long before she was born, long before even the first Hollowborn were said to walk the earth. Could he be some kind of echo, a fragment of the Wing’s forgotten past?

  Her thoughts tangled, but then his voice rang again, distant yet resounding, as though pulled from memory itself.

  “Johan. Borris. Farlow. Gray. Marius.”

  The names fell into the temple air like stones into deep water, sending shivers down Katya’s spine.

  Katya didn’t recognize the other names, but one stood out—Marius. She’d been taught about him in her lessons. She repeated the words almost automatically, as if reciting a half-remembered passage:

  “The founder of the Crimson Wing… Marius. They say he was a great seeker, brilliant, who chose to share his knowledge so others might rise with him. So they might find truth.”

  Her eyes darted to the Hollowborn. “Who are the others? Johan, Borris, Farlow, Gray… who were they?”

  “They are…” the Hollowborn’s voice thickened, like a thread fraying under too much weight. “…the commanders of the Crimson Wing.”

  He suddenly rose to his feet. The movement startled Katya, and she almost dropped her diary.

  “This cannot be.” His voice cracked, more human than it had ever sounded. “I cannot be. Those dead eyes…”

  He closed his own, crimson hair falling over his face. Silence spread through the temple, broken only by the faint hiss of the ether-lamp.

  Katya stared at him for a long while, but the Hollowborn never opened his eyes.

  By morning, she jolted awake, realizing she’d dozed off. He was still exactly as she’d left him, motionless, crimson hair draped like a curtain.

  “Mister Hollowborn?” she asked, rubbing her eyes and gulping from her waterskin. She reached over and dimmed the ether-lamp; the shadows had retreated with the night.

  The Hollowborn’s eyes opened.

  “You spoke a name,” he said.

  “What?” Katya blinked, confused.

  “Marius. Where did you hear it?”

  “I was taught, like any other researcher,” Katya said quickly, voice tightening as if readying for a rebuke. “He was the founder of the Crimson Wing. Everyone knows that.”

  She braced herself, half-expecting the Hollowborn to snap at her. But instead, his lips curved into the faintest, most alien smile.

  “Did you know him?” Katya asked cautiously.

  “I did,” the Hollowborn replied. “There are vague memories… he was as shrewd and cunning as a man could be. But he…” the voice lingered, softened for the first time, “...he felt like my closest friend.”

  Katya blinked, taken aback. She had just stumbled onto a being that might have actually known the founder of the Crimson Wing.

  “We should leave Arcadia today,” she said quickly, shifting back to practical concerns. “I’m running low on supplies. There’s a Pangui village nearby, they run a teleportation gate. It’ll take us to the edge of this zone, into the Iscor plains. But…” She looked him up and down, uneasy. “You can’t go like this. Your face passes, but your body still looks like…” she hesitated, “a Hollowborn.”

  “Are people afraid of Hollowborn?” the being asked.

  “Afraid and intrigued,” Katya admitted with a shrug. “Some sorcerers would kill to capture one for study.” She smirked, flashing him a sidelong glance. “Not me, though… not anymore.”

  Outside the temple, Katya broke the silence. “Can you… do the thing again? You know. Suck their souls?” A shiver crept down her spine even as she asked, but the thought had already taken root. If it worked, they could pick fights with raiders, take their belongings, and mend the Hollowborn in the process. Survival, profit, and discovery all in one.

  The Hollowborn tilted his head. “Suck souls? I never did such a thing.”

  “What?” Katya blinked. “Then how did the raiders die? And how did you mend?”

  “They died from the backlash of the Weave,” the Hollowborn answered evenly. “Their own energy was reclaimed by it, and the Weave used that energy to restore me.”

  Katya exhaled with relief. “So you don’t actually eat living souls. Good to know.”

  The Hollowborn’s gaze sharpened. “So you thought I was the same kind of beast as the ghoul?”

  A chill raced through her. She forced a smile, hands up as if to ward off suspicion. “Of course not. No… never.”

  Katya didn’t want to waste any more time. She tugged a pocket watch from her coat, flicked it open, and muttered, “We’ll stick to this path. It’s five now—should get there by six. They know me, so we’ll be fine. Panguis are peaceful folk. Mostly. But they can fight, and even raiders don’t mess with them. We can get you proper clothes there.” She snapped the watch shut and strode off, boots crunching against the ashen dirt. The Hollowborn drifted silently at her side.

  “Panguis?” the Hollowborn finally asked.

  “You’ve never met them?” Katya shot him a quick grin. “Little people—about a meter tall, faces covered in beards.”

  “Meter?”

  She stopped long enough to demonstrate with her hands. “This high. It’s a new system for measuring length. Been around a few decades now, nice and consistent. All the scholars love it.” Her voice bubbled with excitement, as if she couldn’t help herself.

  “You are a seeker of this… Crimson Wing?” the Hollowborn asked.

  “Mm-hm. Still a novice, though. Which is why I’m out here.” She twirled the pocket watch once on its chain before tucking it away. “Gotta prove myself. I don’t plan on rotting into an old novice researcher.”

  They moved quickly through the necrotic wastes. Katya knew the way by heart, skirting ghouls and carnivorous plants with practiced ease.

  “What is that?” the Hollowborn asked.

  “That’s a Seperia plant,” Katya said, pointing warily. “They spew poison mist if you get too close. So be careful.”

  The Hollowborn ignored her and drifted toward it. The bulbous plant hissed, releasing a thick cloud of noxious vapor. Katya swore, stumbling back and yanking her scarf over her mouth.

  “What in the infernal are you doing? You’ll die!” she coughed.

  Nothing happened. The Hollowborn walked back through the haze unscathed.

  “There is poison there,” he said plainly.

  “I told you!”

  “It is… uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable?” Katya threw up her hands. “You’re lucky you’re still alive! Inhaling poison mist will rot your lungs from the inside out, I don’t have any more shots for that!”

  “I do not need it. It was only… uncomfortable.” With that, he drifted forward again, unbothered.

  Katya muttered to herself, shaking her head as she hurried to catch up. Before long, a massive wall of stone loomed ahead.

  Her steps slowed. “Why is the wall broken?” she asked nervously.

  “This is a wasteland, is it not? A broken wall should not be surprising,” the Hollowborn said.

  “No,” Katya replied quickly. Her voice faltered. “The Pangui village is over that wall.” She chewed her lip, debating whether to turn back or keep going.

  “Shall we check?”

  “What? …Okay,” Katya said nervously.

  As they approached, a sharp voice rang out from above. “Halt, or we shoot!”