THE HOLLOW THRONE OF ASHVEIN

CHAPTER 4: WHISPERS OF HOLLOWMERE

Zephyr had managed to memorize only fragments of the journal before it was stolen, scraps of his mother's careful handwriting that he turned over and over in his mind like stones worn smooth by a river. Hollowmere. A pack erased from every official record. A bloodline that should not have survived. He spent the next two days chasing those fragments through every archive Ashvein still allowed citizens to access, and found almost nothing for his trouble.

That absence told him more than any record could have.

Entire shelves in the public archive that should have held histories of the smaller packs simply did not exist. Where Frostfang and Duskroot and Ironclaw filled volume after volume with treaties and territorial disputes and genealogies stretching back centuries, Hollowmere appeared exactly twice, both times in single sentence references that gave no context and answered no questions. A pack believed extinct generations ago. Nothing more.

Someone had gone to enormous trouble to erase a people from history. Zephyr wanted to know why.

He found an old historian named Bren Oswick, half blind and well into his eighties, who had spent sixty years cataloguing pack lineages before his retirement. The old man answered the door of his cottage with visible reluctance, but something about the desperation in Zephyr's questions seemed to wear down his caution.

Hollowmere wasn't extinct, Bren told him eventually, voice lowered as though the walls themselves might be listening. They were exiled. And exile, in those days, was rarely survivable.

Exiled for what, Zephyr asked.

Bren's expression closed like a door slamming shut. That, he said, is a question that has gotten people killed before you ever thought to ask it.

He would say nothing more that night, but he agreed, reluctantly, to meet again in two days with whatever records he could find in his own private collection, the notes he had kept from his career that had never made it into the official archive. Zephyr left with the first real lead he'd had since the ceremony, and the unfamiliar, uncomfortable feeling of hope.

He did not know that across the city, Nyra had been released from detention that same afternoon, the council unable to find any evidence tying her to the murders beyond her unfortunate proximity. She had not gone home, because she had no home in Ashvein to return to. Instead she had begun her own quiet investigation, working from a single clue she had not shared with the guards who questioned her: the symbol on the dais matched one tattooed on the inside of her own wrist, a mark she had carried since birth and never once been able to explain.

She was three streets from Bren Oswick's cottage, asking her own careful questions about a pack called Hollowmere, when she heard the screaming.

Zephyr heard it too, from the opposite direction, and broke into a run.

By the time either of them reached the cottage, it no longer mattered. Bren Oswick lay dead across his own threshold, his private collection of notes scattered and burning in a hearth someone had deliberately stoked too high, the flames already consuming whatever truth he might have shared in two days' time.

There was no sign of his killer. There was only, carved into the doorframe above his body, freshly cut and still pale against the old wood, the symbol that had now followed Zephyr through every step of this investigation.

A circle. Three claws. A warning, or a promise, that whoever was erasing Hollowmere from history did not intend to let anyone finish writing it back in.