The Hollow King’s POV
The world had burned once.
And it would burn again.
He stood at the precipice of his throne chamber, where darkness breathed and fire remembered. A citadel of bone and ruin sprawled beneath him—entombed within the corpse of a long-dead empire, hidden beneath the crust of a scorched world. The fortress had not been built. It had been bled—carved into the belly of the mountain like a wound that had never healed.
The walls were volcanic obsidian, veined with emberglass that pulsed in slow waves—like the arteries of some slumbering titan. They whispered when the air shifted. They remembered. Screams echoed within them, buried beneath centuries of ash and sorrow.
Above him, pillars rose like ribs—crooked and fused with roots as thick as tree trunks, their bark petrifi
