Evelyn slept, but it wasn't restful.
Her breathing slowed, stretched—until it no longer followed human rhythm. Her body trembled as if caught between winter's breath and summer's blaze. Beneath her skin, faint trails of firelight flickered and pulsed with each heartbeat.
Torren crouched in the collapsed waystation, surrounded by shattered stone and the skeletal remains of what had once been shelter. Ivy grew unchecked through broken beams. Dust hung in the air like suspended ash. He dared not sleep.
Evelyn muttered.
He turned toward her. Her lips moved without sound at first, then:
"...bind through marrow... recall the thread... we are not forgotten..."
A soundless vibration rolled through the cracked floor. Torren stood fast, hand on the half-rusted hunting knife at his side, though it wouldn't help if another Echoed thing found them now. He stared into the dark beyond the ruin.
Nothing moved.
Yet something shifted—like memory being stirred in the depths of old water.
Evelyn's back arched, her eyes flaring open with a light that wasn't hers.
And she screamed—not in fear, but in clarity.
The world blinked.
And Torren was elsewhere.
—
He stood in a room of shadowed stone, the walls etched with glowing glyphs. They twisted and writhed, never settling into a readable form. Tables lined the space, each covered in fragments of bone, melted crystal, and blackened core shards that pulsed like broken hearts.
At the center stood a woman.
Her hair was long, the same storm-dark as Evelyn's. She hunched over a book bound in fleshweave, pages stiff with age and blood-oil. Her hands trembled as she traced each line. Her voice, when it came, was hoarse with grief.
"I told them no. I told them the core cannot be shared. But still they pressed."
Torren tried to move but his limbs were not his own. He realized with a cold shock that he was not in his body.
He was watching through Evelyn.
She—Evelyn's younger form—stood across from the woman. "Is it true?" her voice asked, childlike but sharp. "That a song lives inside the oldest ones?"
"Yes," her mother whispered. "But songs have shape. And shape has memory. And memory—" She stopped, closing the book with trembling hands. "Memory doesn't forgive."
The woman turned. For a moment, her face was Evelyn's. Then it flickered. Became someone else. Someone ancient and burned by knowing.
"The Hollow sings back, daughter. That's why we must never call it by name."
The room collapsed into smoke.
—
Torren gasped awake, heart hammering like a war drum. Evelyn sat upright across from him, her face pale but awake.
She looked at him without blinking. "You saw it too?"
He nodded slowly. "That was your mother."
"I think so," she whispered. "Or… what she wanted hidden."
They stared at each other. Words flickered and died on Torren's tongue. There was nothing to say that could make it normal.
Outside, the trees bent gently. Wind returned. A bird gave a tentative chirp.
Evelyn drew her knees up and hugged them, watching the dawn leak through the broken rafters.
"I didn't die," she said, voice quiet. "But something in me did."
Torren moved to sit beside her. "What happened when you took the core?"
She was silent for a long time. Then: "I didn't just consume it. It… recognized me. As if it had been waiting."
He let the silence return, let it breathe between them. She looked older now—not in years, but in weight. Her eyes didn't dart nervously anymore. They watched. Measured. Glowed faintly at the edges.
"Your voice," he said. "In the forest. You sang."
"I don't know how I knew the song," she whispered. "But I knew it like a memory."
"From her?"
"Maybe." She touched her chest, over the place where the heat still pulsed. "Or maybe from whatever watches beyond."
They didn't speak again that morning. They simply sat—two survivors in the bones of a lost place—watching the world begin again.
But as the first light warmed the stone and Evelyn's breath steadied, Torren looked at her and knew one thing for certain:
Whatever she was now, she was no longer just a girl.
And something old had taken notice.