Velan didn't speak.
He simply lay curled in the stone circle, skin bark-like, breath barely there. It was as if he had grown from the Hollow itself—roots tangled with his spine, his hair slick with moss. His chest rose and fell in shallow rhythm, like the ticking of a long-buried clock.
Lyra stepped closer. "He's not dead."
Elias nodded, keeping his voice low. "No. Just waiting. Like the Hollow preserved him."
"For what?"
Neither had the answer.
---
They brought books from the library down to the chamber—tomes on early rites, ancestral bindings, the founding bloodlines of the Vale. The name Velan repeated, but never explained. A ghost in the margins. A founder. A heretic. A seed.
One entry stood out, scrawled in a brittle ledger: He who first heard the Hollow. He who fed it a name.
Lyra shivered. "What does that mean—fed it?"
Elias didn't look up. "Maybe he gave it a soul."
---
That night, Lyra dreamed of roots tightening around her wrists. She was being pulled downward—not into the earth, but into memory. Velan stood at the center of a burning garden, his eyes black, his mouth moving soundlessly.
The Hollow was never built. It was born.
She woke gasping.
Outside her window, the garden bud had bloomed fully—its petals pale and veined like skin.
---
They returned to the chamber the next morning. Velan was still breathing.
"I think he's linked to the Hollow the way Elira was," Elias said. "But deeper. He's... core."
Lyra crouched beside him. "If he wakes, what happens?"
Elias hesitated. "I don't know."
The roots above them trembled slightly, almost imperceptibly.
Lyra reached for Velan's hand.
His fingers twitched.
The Hollow exhaled.