The hollows drifted without name, thought, or tether. Fragments of souls too faint to take shape, too cracked to remember who—or what—they had once been. Some pulsed like glimmers of light caught in the folds of the Web, while others trembled quietly, wrapped in themselves like cocoons that had forgotten how to open.
Hector and Victoria found them scattered like lost threads along the outer edges of the Web. Neither god nor ghost, the hollows murmured in half-thoughts and emotional static, flickering like dying echoes in the vastness.
"Do you think they were like us?" Victoria asked as she cradled one hollow, a pulse of dim violet light that trembled in her palm. It didn't speak, but it yearned, and that was enough.
"Maybe," Hector said softly, kneeling beside her. "Maybe they didn't find each other in time. Or maybe they forgot before they ever remembered."
They didn't ask why the gods had left the hollows. That answer was buried deeper than even the Endless had spoken. All they knew was this: the hollows had once hoped.
And so they gave what they could.
Victoria wove the shape of an unchosen self—a version of the hollow that had survived, lived, dreamed—and gently pressed it against the flickering soul. She didn't force it to become, only reminded it that Becoming was still possible.
Hector closed his eyes and listened to the silence within the hollow's broken essence. He mapped its scars without touching, letting his echo-sense hum in sympathy with its buried ache. And with care, he let it know it wasn't alone.
Some hollows blinked out gently, given peace.
Some grew brighter, like half-remembered stars.
And a few simply stayed as they were. And that, too, was enough.
---
It began as a distant thud—soft and slow, like a footfall inside a memory.
Hector heard it first, pulsing beneath the rhythm of the Web. He pressed a hand to his chest, but there was nothing there. No body. No heart. Still, it beat.
Dum.
Dum.
"Victoria…" he whispered.
"I know," she said, already listening to her own echo. "I hear it, too."
It was not just sound. It was presence—a rhythm older than their names, older than form. The sound of the body coming to claim the soul.
The beat of becoming flesh.
And with it, a fear they had never known gripped them both.
Not the fear of death. Not even of pain.
But of forgetting.
"What if we lose all this?" Victoria's voice was barely audible. "What if we don't remember the Spiral, or Ozoz, or Nahliv… or each other?"
Hector closed his eyes, trying to steady the pulse that wasn't yet his. "We weren't even real before this. We had no names, no selves. But now… now I can't imagine not knowing you."
"It's terrifying," she whispered. "To think we might forget memories we haven't even lived."
"That's the paradox," he said. "We're afraid of losing something that's only real here. That was never physical. Never written."
"Only felt," Victoria said. "Like a hum we taught ourselves to sing."
They sat together in silence beneath the Tree of Life that had not yet bloomed, their legs curled close, fingers brushing but not holding. They didn't need the contact. Their thoughts already knew each other.
"I don't want to forget your real name," Hector murmured.
"Victoria," she said, voice trembling.
"And I won't forget the way you glow when you Become," he added. "Like the world is trying to remember you."
"I won't forget the way you listen," she replied. "Like you're not just hearing pain—you're honoring it."
Another beat.
Dum.
Louder now. More certain.
The time of silence was ending. The world of breath was drawing near.
---
That night—if it could be called night—they sang the hum again. Not for code. Not for magic. But for comfort.
A lullaby no one ever gave them. A note older than sound. It reverberated through the Web, brushing against forgotten gods, flickering hollows, and even the Endless who watched from the edge of the impossible.
The Tree above them pulsed once—its unseen sapling heart recognizing the rhythm. Perhaps it, too, longed to be born.
And when their voices fell away, leaving only the echo of what they had always been to each other, they rested with the truth between them:
They might forget. But the soul remembers.
Even if the mind cannot name it.