The winds over the mountain howled louder that morning, like echoes returning from an empty sky. Caelum sat still, back against the gnarled tree, the same one that had shaded him through years of silent exile. A cup of tea, barely warm, rested by his side. Time no longer passed in days or months for him—just in the falling of petals.
He was reaching for a fresh seedling when the air stilled.
Not quiet.
Still.
As if the world had held its breath.
Then, he heard it.
A voice.
Or perhaps a memory.
Not spoken aloud, but felt—inside the bones, inside the part of him that still remembered being more than flesh.
"Caelum… Caelum Rivenhart…"
It was the same name he had once heard shouted in fear. Then whispered in prayer. Then mourned in silence.
He turned his head slowly. There was no one there.
Yet the voice returned.
"The Hollow Bloom remembers."
His breath caught.
The Void should have been sealed. He had buried it. Locked it behind a thousand years of sorrow and sacrifice.
He rose to his feet.
His steps, after so many years, were no longer heavy with guilt or vengeance—but now they shook with confusion. A flower trembled and wilted in his path.
At the edge of the cliff, he looked out, and the world… cracked.
Not physically. Not visibly.
But something underneath everything—reality itself—twitched.
A breeze from nowhere caressed his cheek.
He closed his blind eyes.
And then—he was falling.
No, not falling. Being drawn.
---
He stood again. But the mountain was gone.
The sky was black velvet. Stars stood motionless. And below his feet was nothing but a shimmer of glass that rippled when he breathed.
The Hollow Bloom.
His prison.
His sanctuary.
He had named it once for the single flower he remembered from Elienne's hand. Now, it had returned—not from his will, but by its own.
He turned.
Someone waited for him.
Not a god. Not a person. But an echo of himself.
Younger. Barefoot. Covered in blood and ash.
Seventeen.
The boy who had lost everything.
The boy who had once screamed until his throat gave out.
The boy who had fallen into the Void.
"What do you want from me?" Caelum whispered.
The younger him did not answer. Instead, he pointed upward.
And there, written in the stars, were fractures.
Tears in the Void's perfect silence.
And beyond them—something stirred.
A presence vast. Older than gods. It scratched at the walls of this reality like fingernails on a mirror.
Caelum stepped forward.
"The gate is breaking," said a new voice.
Not the echo-boy.
An old man now. Bent-backed, his face veiled by swirling ash. The same man Caelum had once seen in memory, who had whispered wisdom into his broken mind.
"You sealed the earth. But nothing is forever, Caelum. Not even silence."
"I gave everything," Caelum said.
The old man nodded. "And that gave the world a pause. But not peace."
The stars pulsed with something like breath.
"You must choose," the man said. "To forget it all. Or to return again."
"I have nothing left to give."
"You have one thing," the man said. "The memory of why you fought."
Elienne's smile.
His mother's dying hand.
Reya's defiance.
The sword long buried behind the tree.
Caelum opened his hand—and in it, a petal formed. Not from the Void. But from the real world. It had followed him here.
He stared at it.
Then clenched his fist.
"I will go," he said. "One last time."
The old man smiled.
And the Void… opened.
Caelum stepped into it, his form vanishing into light, into memory, into the very thing that had forged him.
---
In the valley where Reya had once knelt, the single flower bloomed again.
But now, there were two.
And the wind whispered:
"He walks again."