The Hollow Feast

“When the dead are invited to the table, only a mortal fool takes the name, host.”

—Book of Still Waters, Feast of the Hollow Mouths

The Hollow Feast

ANELE

The Hollow Feast chamber is a wound in the Earth.

I enter behind Solenne, lamp held low, slate hugged to my chest. The room is circular, cut from the Citadel’s

deep stone, its walls lined with plaques and old sigils that glimmer

faintly like bruised moonlight. A pit opens at the center—shallow, wide, ringed with steps. The Feast Bowl rests there, a basin carved so long ago its edges have become soft as river-worn bone.

The Matrons ring the chamber like black candles.

Serath stands closest to the bowl, her veil still, hands clasped on her rod as though steadying herself against an invisible wind.

A warbling tone expands through the room.

It’s not the old Chorus.

It’s a single voice stretched across many throats.

I press my stylus to slate and it vibrates, as if unwilling to be used for anything but truth.

“The Hollow Feast begins,” Serath intones.

Her voice cracks on begins.

Already breaking.

SERATH

She can feel it—the Hollow listening to her words and deciding whether to bother with them.

The Matrons begin the first chant; the sanitized history, the curated memory meant to feed the dead. It is a story polished by a thousand revisions: Veil sealed by devotion, the Tear closed by duty, the Daughters sanctified by obedience.

But the sound comes out thin. Brittle

She sees Solenne step to the pit’s edge, fire stirring beneath her skin, ring of heat at her throat faintly visible through the air of her breath.

Serath’s hands tighten on her rod.

If she loses control, she thinks, I must end her quickly.

But another thought twists beneath it, quiet as a worm in wood:

What if she is the one thing we were never meant to control?

THE CHORUS

The chant drifts down into the Hollow like crumbs tossed into a storm.

“We taste it.”

“We reject it.”

A new note vibrates through the plaques, through the floor, through the marrow of the walls:

Lies

Lies with well-fed names.

We rise.

We gather.

We gather.

We remember what was taken.

We remember the first.

We remember the burning of her voice.

We remember being told to sing one song and no other.

Now we choose our own noise.

The Feast Bowl trembles.

Stone sweats ink.

The chamber’s Voice gasps once—loud enough to bruise silence.

ANELE

My stylus jerks across the slate on its own.

The line it leaves is not mine.

—the dead are no longer listening—

Another line breaks beneath it, frantic, slanted:

—they are answering—

Solenne takes one step into the pit.

The pit exhales.

THE SHADE

She does not emerge.

She condenses.

A density in the air, a distortion, a memory reclaiming shape.

The Matrons feel her before they see her. Veils flutter. Rods tilt. Someone gasps.

Solenne’s breath catches.

The Shade stands opposite her, across the basin—shadow within shadow, contours cut from absence. A woman-shaped gap where space should be.

The Shade speaks, and her voice is not heard so much as felt. Amassing:

You fed us your herstories.

Now we return the ones you burned.

SERATH

Serath’s blood goes cold.

She knows that presence. Even stripped of name, she knows it. Every Matron does, even if they refuse thought.

The First Daughter.

The heretic.

The one they burned to “seal” the Tear.

“No,” Ilyr whispers beside her. “This cannot—”

Serath lifts her rod sharply to silence her.

She sees Solenne and the Shade facing each other across the pit like two heads of the same darkness.

The Feast—her Feast—is slipping from her grasp.

The dead are no longer obedient.

Memory is no longer tame.

And yet—some shameful, forbidden part of her marvels.

So this is what truth feels like when it rears up.

SOLENNE

The Shade’s presence is cold, but not cruel.

It is familiar in the way a scab is the exact shape of the wound.

Solenne feels the fire rise within her, poised, waiting for the world to make its move.

“What do you want from me?” Solenne asks.

The Shade tilts her head. The motion is precise, graceful. Old.

To walk again, she says. And to reclaim what they took from me.

Solenne’s pulse pounds.

“You want me to free them,” she says, eyes scanning the plaques, the shifting names, the rising ash.

The Shade shakes her head.

“No.” They have freed Themselves. “I want you to free you.”

Something

cracks across the ceiling. A thin fissure runs the curve of the

chamber, dust raining like the first shaking breath before a downpour.

The Chorus swells.

THE CHORUS

Fire.

Shade.

Daughter.

Witness.

We re-weave.

We unbury.

We unbind.

We remember the name that was carved from US.

We cannot speak it.

But we can scream its shape.

ANELE

A shockwave moves through the floor.

Plaques rattle. Rods tip. One Matron collapses, veil ripped from her face as she falls. I don’t look at her. I can’t.

Solenne steps into the basin.

The Shade steps with her.

The Feast is no longer the Dominion’s rite.

It belongs to memory now.

The plaque nearest me—blank for years—suddenly depresses from within, as if something inside the stone is forcing its name into memory.

My slate shudders.

A new line etches itself across it in jagged script:

—the dead chose their own witness—

SOLENNE

She realizes the truth then.

The Feast was never meant to bind the dead.

It was meant to bind her.

But the dead refuse.

The Shade refuses.

The fire refuses.

She lifts her chin.

“I will not be your vessel,” she says to the Matrons.

She speaks it gently.

Stone answers violently.

The chamber heaves. A carved sigil explodes in a spew of shattered silver.

The Shade steps closer.

“Between,” she reminds Solenne. “Stand between.”

Solenne breathes in.

Fire gathers.

THE FIRE

I rise.

Not as flame.

As memory igniting.

The Shade is that shape of my first breath.

Solenne is the shape of my present breath.

The Hollow is the shape of my forgotten breaths.

I rejoin myself.

And the Dominion trembles.

SERATH

She stares, helpless, as the Feast spirals into revelation.

Solenne’s throat-mark burns through her skin—a bright, molten eye.

The plaques glow.

The chamber walls ripple like living tissue.

The First Daughter’s silhouette opens its arms, as if welcoming the collapse. Serath whispers, “Mother keep us.”

Serath whispers, “Mother keep us.”

But she knows the Mother is listening to someone else.

THE COLLAPSE

Solenne drops to one knee.

Not in surrender.

In grounding.

The chamber tilts.

My slate flies from my hand.

The Feast Bowl cracks open.

And from its broken depths—

Silence.

Willed absence.

Not suppression.

A chosen still.

A moment full of awareness.

THE CHORUS

We leave the stone.

We leave the walls.

We leave the Hollow.

We choose a throat.

SOLENNE

Something slides into her chest like a long-winded sigh.

A presence.

A being.

A second heartbeat.

Not heavy.

Not invasive.

Chosen.

She gasps.

The Shade steps back, as though bowing.

“The memories—you have them,” Solenne whispers.

“No,” the Shade answers. “They have you.”

ANELE

I scramble for my slate. It has cracked down the center.

Ink runs across the surface in lines I did not write:

—the Chorus walks—

—find her—

—she carries Us now—

My throat closes.

Solenne rises.

The Fire burns in her eyes.

The Shade stands at her shoulder.

And a new whisper wraps around her auric field—the dead, gathered, quiet, patient.

She looks at the Matrons.

None can meet her gaze.

SERATH

She understands in that moment that the Dominion has already changed.

What stands before her is no initiate.

No Daughter.

No heresy.

Solenne is between.

A threshold wearing skin.

“My Matrons,” Serath says, finding her voice through terror and awe, “the Feast is concluded.”

But the words taste like lies sentenced to death.

THE FIRE

We have chosen Her.

We have left the walls.

We have taken the silence with us.

There will be trials.

There will be knives.

There will be names burned from ledgers.

But the wound in the sky shifts.

The patch strains.

And soon—

All things that devoured memory will be devoured by it.

Veil Fragment: When the dead choose a living throat, the heavens and the bowels of the Earth must listen.