Morrow
Falling through the Hollow is like being remembered by something that hates you.
One moment, I felt weightless. The next, I was being shoved out of existence and into someplace worse. My spine hit packed earth that pulsed like a vein, and I gasped as something wet crawled under my torn clothes.
Grimjaw landed beside me with a thud and a low growl. He stood before I did—hellhounds are built for this kind of filth. Me? I was made to bleed in it.
The tent we’d landed in wasn’t part of any mental map. It loomed around us like the inside of a split-open stomach. The canvas overhead was stitched flesh, still twitching. The seams oozed something warm. The poles were made from bones—not clean or ceremonial, but snapped and jammed together like a child’s sculpture of a spine.
And then I heard them.
Trumpets.
But not the celebratory kind. These were cracked and hollow, a funeral dirge played by drunks on broken brass.
The elephants came first.
Massive. Mottled. Misshapen. Their skin sagged in unnatural folds, some of it draped like theater curtains over jutting ribs. Tuskless mouths unhinged too wide. Eyes replaced by spinning coins or corkscrews, or left hollow to leak ash. One dragged a cage behind it—something still moved inside.
They weren’t marching. They were tearing into each other. Trampling. Goring. Screaming in tones no animal should make.
Then came the monkeys. At least, that’s what they were once. Now they scuttled on elongated limbs, covered in bandages and bells, faces stretched like masks halfway through melting. Their claws were sharp. Their laughter—sharpest of all. One had a spine for a tail. Another rode a bicycle that ran on shrieking teeth.
They leapt on the elephants. Tore at wounds. Climbed down throats.
The whole tent was a riot of meat and madness.
And then the sprites joined in the hellfest.
They blinked in like embers coughing into life. These ones were fragile, shivering things with wings like burnt paper and sewing needles. They hovered high, watching the bloodplay below, then spiraled down in wild, gleeful loops. Wherever they touched, the chaos intensified. They weren’t spectators—they were conductors. Pouring energy into the violence like gasoline into a funeral pyre.
Grimjaw watched with his usual detached disgust, claws tapping against his forearm.
“Well,” he said. “If this is the pre-show, I can’t wait to see the finale.”
I pulled myself up, clutching my hammer. My tattered clothes were soaked through with a fluid I refused to identify.
I muttered, “Pretty sure this violates several moral dimensions.”
An elephant collapsed to our left—one leg missing, the other thrashing. A monkey danced in its skull cavity, banging what was left of its brain like a drum.
Grimjaw winced. “I take it back. This might actually be the worst thing I’ve seen.”
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” I said, stepping over a pile of twitching fur.
He glanced at me. “You think Gautier’s behind this?”
“If not, he’s feeding it,” I said. He liked to invite other demons into the audience, to play in his arena. “Like everything he touches—he’s letting it fester until it sings.”
A chorus of laughter erupted from above—sprites circling, faster now, wings catching the light of fire that hadn’t started yet.
Grimjaw made a noise that might’ve been a laugh. Or a snarl. Or both.
We pushed deeper, through the battlefield of beasts and broken bones, toward the heart of the tent—where the ringmaster’s shadow stretched long, and Rina’s name hung in the air like rot in a church bell. It didn’t echo. It lingered. Clung to the back of the throat like ash.
The chaos thinned the farther we moved—less noise, but not less horror.
The elephants had gutted each other and still twitched. One lay splayed open, its organs spilling like bloated balloons, still pulsing, still singing. A low hum, dissonant and cruel, like someone trying to imitate lullabies with a throat full of knives.
Monkeys dangled from the ceiling now, limp but grinning. Some were stitched into the tent walls, their eyes still moving, watching us pass. One mouthed the word home as we walked by. Its teeth fell out when it smiled.
The sprites followed behind like drifting cinders. Every once in a while, one would dart ahead and whisper into something dead—and it would twitch, as if reconsidering its place in the food chain. They weren’t helpers. They were reminders—that nothing in this place stayed dead unless it was told to.
And the Hollow never told anything to rest.
The path narrowed.
Not a hallway, but a throat—lined with tattered banners soaked in bile and bile-colored light. Each one bore a symbol I recognized but refused to name. Symbols from the Hollow’s deeper scripts, the kind you only learn when something peels back your soul and takes notes.
The floor squelched underfoot. The bones weren’t clean here—they were arranged. Spelled into shapes that moved when you weren’t looking.
Then the air changed.
It got warmer. Sweeter. Almost… nostalgic. Like a perfume you'd smelled once in a dream and then spent a lifetime chasing. Rina’s scent.
Grimjaw stopped. He sniffed the air once, twice. “She’s close.”
I nodded. “Or something wants us to think she is.”
He didn’t reply. Just flexed his claws, already preparing to maim whatever lie was waiting.
And then we saw it.
The heart of the tent.
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