Crown of the Hollow Queen

Crown of the Hollow Queen

To claim the throne, she must lose everything—even her soul.

The moment her fingers touched the crown, the world shattered.

Light bled from her fingertips, twisting and writhing like a serpent around her arm. The obsidian floor cracked beneath her feet, glowing with sigils that had slumbered for a thousand years. The bones of the throne groaned, shifting as if waking from a long sleep.

Elira staggered but did not let go. The crown pulsed with a rhythm that didn’t match her heartbeat. It was older, slower, more deliberate—like the echo of a war drum played by the dead.

A voice slithered into her mind.

"You have touched what only the Hollow may wear."

She gasped, her vision swimming. The air grew thick with memory—blood spilled on a marble floor, her mother’s scream, fire rising in the night sky, a silver blade flashing as it cut her father's throat.

“Why show me this?” she hissed.

To remind you of what you have given. What you still must give."

The crown lifted from her hands and settled onto her brow. It was cold—so cold it burned. Her knees buckled, but she didn’t fall. The room dimmed, the throne loomed higher, and the darkness whispered around her.

She opened her eyes.

And she was no longer in the throne room.

She stood in a vast, grey wasteland.

No sky. No ground. Just fog and silence.

Shapes moved within the mist—vague outlines of people, frozen in motion. Her sister Nalia, mid-laugh. Her mother, arms stretched for an embrace. Her father, standing tall, blood trailing from his lips.

They didn’t speak. They didn’t move.

Elira stepped forward.

“Is this... death?”

"No,"the voice replied. "This is the Hollow. The space between what was and what must be. You are not dead. Yet."

She turned. A figure cloaked in ash and shadow stood beside her.

“I’ve passed your trials,” she said, trembling. “I gave up my name, my memories, my blood. I am the last heir of the line of Serel. Give me my throne.”

The figure raised a skeletal hand and pointed behind her.

She turned—and saw herself.

Draped in royal black, eyes hollow as storm clouds, sitting upon the bone-forged throne.

A queen. A husk.

“No,” Elira whispered.

"Yes," the voice intoned. "To rule here, you must become nothing. You must surrender your final tether. Your soul."

Her hands curled into fists. “There must be another way.”

The mist stirred.

One of the frozen figures turned.

Her sister.

Nalia’s lips moved—barely a whisper—but Elira heard it as if shouted through her veins:

“Come back.”

Tears welled in her eyes.

For years, she had chased vengeance. She had buried love for power. She had believed that claiming the crown would make her whole again. But now

she saw the truth.

The Hollow did not make queens.

It unmade them.

She stepped back from the figure in the mist.

The crown on her head pulsed angrily, sending waves of pain through her skull.

The cloaked figure tilted its head. "Do you reject the Hollow?"

Elira stared at the vision of herself on the throne—empty, cold, powerful—and then back to her sister.

“I do.”

The world screamed.

The fog collapsed. The vision of her hollow self cracked like glass, shattering into obsidian shards that flew at her—but she raised her hand and shouted, “I am still Elira! Daughter of Serel! And I choose life!”

Light exploded from her chest, not warm, not cold—but pure.

Elira awoke on the throne room floor, coughing.

The Hollow Crown lay beside her—dull now, lifeless.

Around her, the throne room had changed. The bones had crumbled to dust. The obsidian walls now shimmered faintly, and vines had begun to creep through the cracks in the stone.

She stood.

The weight she had carried—of grief, of vengeance, of hollow ambition—was gone.

But so was something else.

She looked in a mirror of broken glass near the steps.

Her eyes were hers. But deeper. Wiser.

Sadder.

Days passed. Then weeks.

She remained in the Hollow Keep, not as a queen, but as a keeper.

Word spread slowly through the kingdoms that the rightful heir had returned. They expected her to march on the false king, to raise an army, to conquer.

But she did not.

She wrote.

She walked the gardens that now bloomed around the keep.

She spoke with the spirits that wandered through the halls, no longer bound by wrath or hunger, but curiosity and peace.

And the Hollow no longer whispered to her.

It listened.

One evening, as twilight cloaked the mountains in violet mist, a rider approached the gates. Young, breathless, clutching a scroll.

He knelt before her.

“My lady,” he said. “Your uncle is dead. The kingdom is in chaos. The nobles await your return.”

Elira looked past him at the horizon.

“I am no longer the girl who fled those halls in blood and fire,” she said quietly. “Let them find their king.”

“But... you are the true queen,” he protested.

She gave him a sad smile.

“I was.”

He stared in confusion. Then saw the truth in her eyes.

The Hollow had taken her soul—but not to keep.

It had returned it to her in fragments. Broken, scarred, but her own.

And in letting go of the throne, she had finally claimed something far greater:

Herself.

Epilogue

Years later, a new legend spread through the taverns and temples:

Of a woman with storm-grey eyes who ruled no land but healed old magic. Who mended the veil between the living and the lost. Who turned the cursed Hollowlands into the Blooming Vale.

Some called her the Queen Without a Crown.

Others whispered she was a goddess in disguise.

But the few who met her—and saw her kindness, her strength, her sorrow—knew the truth:

She had once stood at the edge of darkness, offered her soul to wear a hollow crown...

And chose instead to be whole.