The "Crave" was a sound before it was a sight. It was the collective grinding of teeth, the wet rasp of thousands of lungs inhaling the empty air, and the rhythmic dragging of feet across the salt. As I stood my ground, the Hollowed didn't attack me with the mindless fury of warbeasts. They circled. They knelt. They wept.
To them, I wasn't a girl; I was a sun that had risen in the middle of a graveyard.
"Get back!" I shouted, the gold light from my palm pulsing in time with my frantic heart. But the command had the opposite effect. The closer they got, the more the violet haze in the air seemed to settle, drawn into the vacuum of the shard embedded in my flesh.
I looked down at the man I had accidentally obliterated. The purple soot was gone, absorbed into the gold thorns that were now winding up my forearm like a living tattoo. I wasn't just erasing magic anymore; I was reclaiming it, refining the toxic waste of the old world into something new, something concentrated.
"Rowen! Run, you idiot!"
Aiden hadn't left. He was standing on a ridge of rubble twenty yards away, throwing stones at the approaching Hollowed. It was a pathetic, human gesture, but it was all he had. One of the Hollowed—a woman who still wore the tattered lace of a high-born lady of Eden—turned toward his voice. Her neck snapped at an unnatural angle, her empty eyes searching for the source of the noise.
"Aiden, get out of here!" I screamed.
The woman lunged toward him. She moved with a jerky, stop-motion speed, her fingers twitching. Aiden swung his steel sword, but she didn't dodge. She let the blade sink into her shoulder, her lack of mana making her body dense and resistant to pain. She grabbed the blade with her bare hands, the steel hissing as if it were touching acid.
"No!"
I didn't reach for the earth. I reached for her.
I focused on the gold spark in my hand and imagined a thread, a tether. A bolt of golden-grey energy shot from my fingertips, striking the woman in the center of her back. I expected her to explode like the man before. Instead, she stiffened. The violet haze around her was sucked into the bolt, flowing back into me like water through a straw.
She collapsed, but she didn't vanish. Her skin regained a hint of its natural color. Her eyes cleared for a fleeting second, looking at the sky with a profound, terrifying clarity before she fell into a deep, catatonic sleep.
I gasped, the influx of her "Crave" hitting me like a shot of adrenaline. My vision sharpened to a predatory degree. I could see the individual grains of salt on the ground; I could hear the ants crawling beneath the rubble.
"The City..." the voice of the Archon whispered in my skull, no longer a chorus, but a singular, mocking presence. "Take them to the City, Rowen. The Father is waiting for his harvest."
"What city?" I hissed at the empty air.
"The one beneath the Spire," the voice replied. "The one you didn't see because you were too busy looking at the sky."
I looked toward the crater where the Spire had once stood. The dust had settled, and the transparency I had triggered was fading. But in its place, a massive, obsidian staircase had appeared, descending deep into the bowels of the earth. It hadn't been built; it had been uncovered.
Aiden scrambled down from the ridge, his face pale as he looked at the sleeping woman. "You... you saved her? Or did you just take what was left?"
"I don't know," I said, my voice trembling. "Aiden, the Archon... she's still here. She's telling me to go down. Into the crater."
"Don't," Aiden said, grabbing my non-glowing hand. "It's a trap, Rowen. Subject Zero—the Father—he knew the Spire would break. He wanted the magic distributed so the world would become desperate. He's not a rebel; he's an usher. He's ushering in a world where everyone is a slave to the one who holds the spark."
"And that's me," I realized. The weight of it was crushing. I wasn't the girl who broke the rules. I was the new rule.
The swarm of Hollowed began to press in again, hundreds of them now, drawn by the display of power. They weren't growling anymore; they were humming a low, discordant tune that vibrated in my bones. It was a prayer.
"I have to go down," I said, looking at the obsidian stairs. "If I stay here, they'll tear the world apart trying to get to me. If the Father is down there, I'm going to end this. Truly end it."
"Then I'm going with you," Aiden said, his jaw set in that stubborn line I had grown to love and fear.
"You can't. The air down there... it'll be pure Anomaly energy. It'll hollow you out in seconds."
Aiden reached into his pocket and pulled out the shattered remnants of his obsidian pendant—the shards that had been embedded in his palm. They were dull, but they still carried the scent of my old power. "I'm already half-hollow, Rowen. I've been your anchor for years. My body doesn't know how to be anything else."
We reached the edge of the crater. The obsidian stairs were polished to a mirror sheen, reflecting the gold glow of my hand. As we descended, the temperature dropped, and the air began to taste of cold metal and ancient dust.
After what felt like miles of descending into the dark, the stairs opened into a cavern so vast it felt like another world. And there, beneath the crust of the earth, was the City of the Hollowed.
It wasn't a ruin. It was a masterpiece of dark geometry. Buildings made of solidified shadow rose from the cavern floor, connected by bridges of translucent grey light. There were thousands of them—figures moving through the streets with a grace that the people above had lost. But they weren't people. They were shells, perfectly preserved, their lives sustained by the "leakage" from the Spire that had been dripping down here for centuries.
In the center of the city stood a palace of bone and crystal. And waiting on the balcony was the Father.
He didn't look like the broken, porcelain man from the bone-fields. He was vibrant. His silver eyes were now a deep, swirling violet. He was draped in robes made of woven starlight.
"Welcome, my daughter," he boomed, his voice echoing through the silent city. "Welcome to the real Eden."
I stepped onto the bridge of light, Aiden close behind me. "You lied to me. You didn't want to free the world. You wanted to starve it so you could rule the survivors."
The Father laughed, a sound that felt like glass breaking. "I wanted to evolve it. The Arcanum's magic was a drug that made people soft. The Crave makes them sharp. It makes them loyal. Look at them, Rowen. No more war. No more greed. Only the hunger for the Source. And you brought the Source right to my doorstep."
He pointed to a massive, empty throne at his side. "The Archon was a machine. She had no soul, no desire. But you... you have the fire of a mortal and the void of a god. Sit, and we will feed this world until it forgets what it was to be human."
I looked at the throne, then at the thousands of Hollowed who were now filling the streets below, looking up at me with expectant, empty eyes. I felt the gold shard in my hand throb, a seductive pull toward the seat of power. It would be so easy. I could give them what they wanted. I could be loved. I could be a god.
Then I felt Aiden's hand on my shoulder. It was a small, warm weight. A reminder of a world where people bled, and cried, and died for things as small as a secret note under a pillow.
"Rowen," he whispered. "Look at his feet."
I narrowed my gold-tinted eyes. Beneath the Father's star-woven robes, his feet weren't touching the floor. They were merging with it. Thin, violet roots were growing out of his heels, disappearing into the palace itself.
He wasn't a king. He was a parasite. He was just another part of the machine, trying to replace the Archon with a version that had a face.
"You aren't evolving anything," I said, my voice cold. "You're just another cage-maker."
The Father's smile vanished. The violet in his eyes flared. "Then you are a failure, just like No. 1. If you won't be the heart, you will be the fuel."
He raised his hands, and the City of the Hollowed began to scream. Not with voices, but with a psychic wave of pure, unadulterated need. The thousands of residents below turned toward me, their hands reaching out. I could feel my own power being pulled from my skin, drawn toward the palace.
The Father wasn't attacking me. He was "opening" the City to me. He was forcing me to feed them all at once, knowing it would drain me until there was nothing left but a husk.
"Aiden, get back!"
I slammed my gold-lit hand onto the bridge of light.
"You want the Source?" I roared, the gold thorns on my arm glowing so bright the shadows in the city began to burn. "Then take it all!"
I didn't push the energy this time. I ignited it.
The gold shard in my hand shattered—not from his power, but from my own. I forced the energy to turn inward, into the void that had always been inside me. If the Father wanted to use me as a battery, I would become a supernova.
The City of the Hollowed went white.
But as the light consumed the palace, I felt a sharp, cold blade slide between my ribs. I gasped, the power flickering. I looked down to see a hand holding the hilt of a dagger.
A hand I recognized.
"I'm sorry, Rowen," Aiden whispered in my ear, his voice breaking. "But the note was right. I'm the only one who knows how to kill you."
He didn't pull the blade out. He twisted it. And as my blood—now a brilliant, glowing gold—spilled onto the bridge, I realized the final, most devastating surprise of all.
Aiden wasn't a victim. He wasn't a pawn.
He was the Backup.