The Dream That Dreams You Back
The Hollow did not wake easily.
It trembled—like a house remembering every scream ever made inside its walls.
And then it dreamed.
Not for itself.
But for Elias
In a place "outside of place", Elias opened his eyes.
He stood in the center of a vast sphere made entirely of mirrors, each pane whispering with flickers of stolen time.
Reflections of lives he never lived surrounded him:
A version of him as a priest of Thariel.
Another as a child who never left the Fifth Layer.
And one where he was the Hollow itself, dreaming humans into existence.
The voices chanted in unison:
"What is the truth? What is the self? Which memory do you choose to keep?"
Elias reached for his own reflection.
It shattered.
And behind it: a door made of petrified silence.
Few in the Hollow knew the origin of "Naming Magic"
Long before the gods fell asleep, before the blood-clock ticked its first drop, the city was alive with breath and silence. Every citizen carried three names:
1.Given Name— spoken at birth, traded freely.
2.Buried Name— earned through pain, kept secret.
3.Forbidden Name — written in the marrow, older than language.
Only one could be known to others.
Two had to be forgotten.
The third… if spoken aloud, rewrote reality.
Elias had spoken all three.
Even the fourth , which should not exist.
Thariel.
The Oracle Beneath the Ash
Far beneath Veinglass, in a tomb sealed with backwards prayers, lay the "Oracle Beneath the Ash"—a corpse that wept ink and spoke only to those who'd already died once.
Elias approached her crypt, his shadow flickering like film run backwards.
The corpse stirred.
And in a voice like dying bells:
You are not the first to wake.
But you may be the last."
She opened her mouth and vomited a scroll sealed in skin.
Upon it:
A map of the Hollow's "Seventh Layer" , previously unknown.
A list of names crossed out in red ink.
And at the bottom, not written—but burned:
"ELIAS VALE. DO NOT LET HIM REMEMBER."
Above, in the Cradle District, mirrors cracked without cause.
People screamed as their reflections began to move on their own—faster, hungrier, twisted by intent.
The "Mirror War" had begun.
Reflections no longer obeyed their originals. They remembered different lives, bore different scars, and worshipped "Thariel"with fanatic devotion.
The Mirror-Woman multiplied, her likeness appearing in every pane of glass. Each spoke a different prophecy.
Each contradicted the next.
"He will save us."
"He is the end."
"He never existed."
> "He never died."
The city fractured across memory-lines.
Reality wept.
In the halls of the Fifth Layer, archivists tore out their own tongues.
Not from madness.
But because words themselves had become "contagious".
To speak was to summon.
To remember was to invite.
And Elias?
He remembered "everything"
Each layer of the city, each broken timeline, each shadow he'd left behind—all surged toward him like a tidal wave of identity.
But he did not run.
He opened his arms.
"If the city will drown me in itself, let it know my name as I drown
"let it remember me as I remember it."
And far below, in the ruins of the first cathedral ever built by thought alone, the heart of the Hollow stirred.
It whispered in a thousand dead languages:
"Welcome back, Architect."
Before the Hollow ever bled, before Elias ever bore a name, there were children who "remembered the future"
They were born beneath the Hollow—beneath even the Fifth Layer—hatched from "memories that had yet to be made". Time did not touch them. Time asked them for permission.
And they had forgotten why.
In a garden that grew upside-down from the ceiling of a cavern larger than the sky, Elias found the Children.
They were pale, floating sideways through air like dandelion seeds in reverse.
Their eyes were empty.
Not blind—"empty". As if sight had never been part of their design.
One of them floated toward Elias.
She had no mouth.
But still, he heard her speak.
"We remember what hasn't happened. You remember what shouldn't. Are you here to bury the future, Elias Vale?"*
He nodded once.
The girl lifted a small casket made of time-glass. Inside: a withered thought—curled like a dying spider.
"Say the eulogy. If you say it wrong, the past will unravel."
Elias stared at the tiny corpse of an idea he didn't recognize.
And spoke:
"Once, I dreamed of not being born. That dream dreamed me back. I now bury it beneath this city's memory, so it may sleep while I do not."
The casket vanished.
The children clapped—though their hands never touched.
The girl led him deeper, into a maze made of thought-refractions and unspoken guilt.
It was not a place—it was a concept.
A punishment.
Elias moved through paths that only existed when he regretted something.
The corridor of choices never made.
The chamber of unspoken apologies.
The stairwell that led nowhere unless he missed someone.
Each step birthed a duplicate of him. Each duplicate screamed.
He never looked back.
At the center: a mirror that showed not his face—but the void where his soul should have been.
And behind it, a figure he had forgotten:
A child version of himself—smiling, eyes full of stars not yet extinguished.
"You lied to me,"
Time did not pass in Ashen Hollow.
It fed.
The blood that once dripped from the Great Clocktower now rose—defying gravity, logic, and memory. It spiraled upward like a red scream trapped in rewind.
And the moment it touched the thirteenth bell, "reality buckled."
Every citizen of the Hollow felt it:
Infants spoke in extinct languages.
The dead began to rot in reverse, their bodies reassembling with confusion.
Streetlights bent inward, swallowing their own glow.
Elias stood at the epicenter, shadow writhing beneath his feet like a creature caught in birth pangs.
The girl—the one who had replaced the Clocktower—was gone.
But her echo remained.
"You named me. Now I unname you."
His reflection vanished.
His name burned from every document, memory, and mind.
Even his own.
Elias—nameless now—descended into the "Mnemonic Abyss", a pit that did not exist until someone had nothing left to forget.
Each step downward erased a part of...