The Hollow didn’t breathe.
Not anymore.
Where once the air felt like lungs exhaling, full of whispers and ancient tension, now it was still—eerily so. Not lifeless, but held in suspension, like the realm itself was unsure of what to do with the peace I had forced into it.
Peace was an unfamiliar shape for places like this.
Kael stood beside me, his arms crossed as we stared at the ruins of the shrine. The sealing stones had crumbled. The runes bled no more light. The leyline’s pulse beneath our feet was softer now—steady, like a heartbeat in sleep rather than pain.
“You did it,” Kael murmured, his voice low, reverent. “You really did.”
I didn’t respond right away. My hands still tingled from the merging—from the soul-deep collision with the part of me I’d denied. She wasn’t gone. She
