Hollow System Ascension

Inventory

Not his memory.

That was the first thing he understood, in the half-second before it became too immersive for analytical thought. The quality of it was poor for a personal memory — too distant, the perspective slightly off, the sensory details filtered through a life he didn't recognize—someone else's hands. Someone else's eyes, looking at a world he knew the shape of but not the specifics.

Veldmoor. Or something that would become Veldmoor — the same geography, the same river and coastline, but the buildings were different, older or absent, the skyline unrecognizable. A city in the process of becoming rather than one already made.

He was standing, the person whose memory this was, was standing in a place that would become the industrial quarter where Fracture KS-7 was eventually located. However, there was nothing there yet but open ground and the particular quality of air at a site where something was about to happen.

There were others with him. Faces he couldn't resolve clearly — the memory was fractured, pieces missing the way old things had pieces missing, the gaps not random but structural, as though certain parts had been deliberately removed and what remained was what couldn't be taken. He counted four others. One of them, he almost recognized, an older face, a posture of authority, but the memory slipped when he reached for it.

The memory-person looked down at their hands.

His hands. The same size as Cael's. The same shape. Holding something that glowed, a device, constructed, something built with knowledge Cael didn't have and couldn't reverse-engineer from a fractured second-hand recollection.

'It will work,' the memory-person thought, and Cael felt the thought as though it were his own, layered over his own consciousness imperfectly. 'It has to work. The entropy is too far advanced. We are out of time, and this is the only door left open.'

There was a sense of weight. The weight of a decision already made and already costing something, the way irreversible choices had a mass to them that grew the closer you got to the point of no return. 'I know what I'm giving up,' the thought came again, quieter. 'I know what this means for me. That's not what matters.'

Then the memory fractured further.

A gap, a missing section, something removed or simply lost to time, and on the other side of the gap, the ground was open, and the light coming through it was wrong, and the sound of it was the sound Cael had been hearing his whole life at the edge of every Fracture he'd ever stood outside.

The first one. He was watching the first one open.

Then the figure in the memory turned, and for one fraction of a second before the whole thing dissolved, Cael saw the face.

He was on the floor of the chamber.

He didn't remember sitting down, but he was sitting, back against the alcove, the small dense object still in his hand. His breathing was unsteady in a way he took a moment to address, pulling it back to something regular, something deliberate, the way he'd learned to regulate it in collapsing dungeons when panic threatened to drown him.

The Hollow Hound's presence was steady behind his sternum. Not alarmed. Grounded, in the way it was grounded, the quality of something that had been in this space its whole life and knew its texture, offering that knowledge as ballast against whatever had just happened to him.

He looked at the object in his hand.

'That was the first Hollow,' he thought. 'That was their memory. Or what's left of it.'

What's left of it. Fractured, gaps where whole sections should be, the important parts, the faces of the others, the specifics of the device, the outcome of that moment, either lost or taken. He'd seen enough to know the shape of it without seeing enough to understand it fully, which felt deliberate. Which felt like exactly the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted to leave something behind for someone specific without leaving it where anyone else could use it.

'You knew someone would find this,' he thought, turning the object over in his palm. 'You built this chamber, you left these things, you put a guardian on the door that would stand down for the right person. You planned for someone to come here. After you.'

He thought about the handprint outside. The same size as his palm.

'You knew,' he thought. 'Whoever you were. You knew someone was coming.'

He closed his hand around the object and stood up.

The guardian stood in the centre of the chamber, motionless, its presence reduced to a steady ambient weight — protective rather than threatening now, the difference between a locked door and an open one. The alcoves he hadn't examined held things he would come back to when he had more information and more time. The chamber was not finished with him, and he was not finished with it.

He looked at his system window one more time.

CLASS: HOLLOW. Where the dash had been for six years.

'Okay,' he thought, and the word had a different weight than it usually did. He walked back toward the passage and the gate and whatever the Record's interior had waiting for him next. He sat outside the citadel with his back against the wall and ate half a ration bar, because he'd just gotten a class for the first time in his life and he felt that he deserved at least half a ration bar.

His system window was open in front of him. He kept looking at it the way you looked at something you were afraid might change if you stopped watching it.

CAEL VOSS RANK: UNCLASSIFIED

CLASS: HOLLOW LVL: 1 STR 4 | AGI 5 | END 6 | INT 7 | PER 8

SKILLS: SOUL BOND (Passive) RESIDUAL ABSORPTION (Locked) RECORD SIGHT (Locked)

He stared at the two locked skills for a long moment.

'Of course,' he thought. 'Of course they're locked. Why would anything be straightforward?'

He closed the window and opened it again. Still locked. He tried to interact with the skill entries the way you interacted with standard system prompts, pressing his attention against them the way you pressed a finger against a touchscreen.

Residual Absorption gave him nothing. A locked icon and then, nothing else but a bank space that betrayed nothing to his searching eyes. He sighed and kept his eyes traveling downwards.

Record Sight gave him a description at least, which was something.

RECORD SIGHT (Locked) The ability to read residual soul impressions left on people, objects, and locations. Unlock condition: unknown.