Chapter 184
Chapter 184
Jiselle
It was still dark when I woke, but not with sleep in my bones. I was trembling. Not from cold, not from pain from knowing. A knowing that i couldn’t name or reason with, only feel like a pressure behind my eyes and beneath my ribs, like something alive inside me was beginning to stretch. Like it had waited long enough.
The air around me thrummed. Not in a physical way there was no sound, no tangible shift. But it was there. Every breath I took seemed to pull the world closer, and when I exhaled, it pushed back. Like the leyline that ran beneath the academy had stopped whispering to me and had begun to listen through me.
I sat up slowly, careful not to wake Nate. His chest rose and fell steadily beside me, one arm still draped over my waist. There were faint beads of sweat at his temple, and the lines around his mouth were tight even in sleep. He v
Was dreaming again. Maybe the same dream that had woken him screaming hours before. Maybe something worse.
I pulled away gently and stood, wrapping one of his shirts around me as I padded toward the small altar at the back of the cavern–a stone outcrop Eva and I had started using for scrollwork and safe study when the infirmary walls felt too thin. I lit a small oil lamp, shielding the flame with my hand as it flickered to life. The warmth didn’t soothe me.
The charcoal sketch I’d drawn the day before was still there, and as I looked down at it, I realized the lines had changed.
No one had touched it. No one could have.
But the symbol had deepened, the curves more exact, the script sharper. Hollow–Born. Unseen return. That’s what Eva had called it. I hadn’t meant to draw it, but my hand had moved on its own. Now it looked etched rather than sketched–like the page had absorbed the truth and hardened around it.
I traced the edges, and the symbol responded. A pulse of heat coiled up my fingertips, not painful, but deliberate. The same sensation I’d felt in the dreams–like being watched from the inside.
I should have been afraid.
I wasn’t.
I was angry.
Not at the child. Not at Nate. At the world that kept twisting around us with new names for ancient monsters and prophecies no one understood until it was too late. I was done being a vessel for secrets. If this power lived in me, then I would use it.
I called for Eva.
She came groggy but alert, her braid loose and eyes already scanning the walls like she expected runes to be bleeding from the stones.
“I need to know what you haven’t told me,” I said. “About the Hollow–Born.”
She blinked. “I told you everything I saw.”
“Not everything you read. You said Serina had notes in her locked journals–notes about Hollow–Born script. What else did she leave behind?”
Eva hesitated.
1 stepped closer. “Please. If I’m going
Sto
protect this child–if any of us are—I need to know what we’re fighting against.”
She sighed and moved toward the shelf she’d built from salvaged stone. From behind a loose slab, she pulled out a worn leather–bound book, half- melted at the corners. She handed it to me, her voice low.
“Serina only referenced the Hollow–Born three times in all her writings. Once in theory. Once in prophecy. And once in warning.
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Chapter 184
I opened to the first marked page. The script was dense, curling and precise.
They were not born of moonlight, nor made of magic. They were something else. A race cast out before language list shape, beteta tha Gala, são wound. They do not breed. They do not die. They exist through vessels–souls they tether and repurpose. They were sealed bryond the red bod sealed things can be summoned,
I read it again.
Then again.
“Summoned,” I repeated.
“Serina believed the Hollow–Born weren’t a people,” Eva said. “They were an infection. A hunger, Intelligent, but not alive in the way we understand it They don’t need to be born. They only need a door.”
My stomach twisted. “And I’m the door.”
Eva didn’t deny it.
“The child, maybe,” she said. “But Serina wasn’t clear. The entries are… fragmented. She feared that when the Ethereal and the Veil–born bloodlines merged, something would awaken. Something old. Something patient.”
“Why didn’t Bastain say anything?”
“He didn’t have the journal. She hid it in a place only another female Ethereal could find.”
The words hit me like ice.
I stepped back, clutching the book to my chest. My mind was reeling, spinning between the flicker of the dreams, the pull in my chest, the burn beneath Nate’s skin.
“We need to tell them,” I said. “Ethan. Nate. Bastain.”
Eva nodded.
“But there’s something else you need to see first.”
We didn’t go far. Just to the edge of the crater where the Gate had collapsed. The ground there had been scorched clean, but now it pulsed with faint lines of silver and black, like something had been branded into the dirt and left to cool.
“It’s a sigil,” Eva said. “Same one you drew.”.
It spread in a spiral, looping outward from the center like a flower unfolding in reverse. I stared at it, the hum in my blood quickening.
“You didn’t make this?”
“No one did. It appeared the morning after the rogue
I stepped into the center of it.
djed.”
The moment I did, the air shifted. Not violently. Not loudly. But every tree, every stone, every piece of shattered ruin listened.
And something beneath the earth stirred.
By midday, we had gathered everyone. Ethan, Nate. Bastain. Even Lincoln and Eric, who had returned to help guard the perimeter. The mood was tense. Everyone could feel the shift in the leyline, even if they didn’t have words for it.
I laid the journal on the table. Opened to the final page.
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Chapter 184
Eva read aloud:
She will not be born. She will be returned. She will not cry. She will remember. And the Hollow will come to kiss her name.
A silence fell over the room.
Nate reached for my hand.
Bastain was pale. His mouth opened once, then closed again.
“So what are we saying?” Ethan asked, voice low. “That Jiselle’s child… isn’t a child at all?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I only know that I love it. And whatever it is, it chose me to carry it. Maybe as a weapon. Maybe as a hope. But it’s mine.
No one argued.
They couldn’t.
That night, as I walked the edge of the courtyard alone, a figure emerged from the trees.
He was tall. Hooded. Wrapped in dark robes marked with the symbol I had drawn.
He didn’t bow. Didn’t speak. Just held out a small, palm–sized mirror etched in obsidian and moonstone.
When I took it, his voice finally broke the silence.
“Sovereign of Smoke,” he said, “we’ve been waiting.”
Sara Lili is a daring romance writer who turns icy landscapes into scenes of fiery passion. She loves crafting hot love stories while embracing the chill of Iceland’s breathtaking cold.
