They came for him at dawn, if the term meant anything anymore in that place where the light never changed and time bent like steam above brine. The cultists did not knock. They did not speak. They simply appeared, barefoot in the corridor, heads bowed beneath veils stitched with symbols that flickered like heat mirages.
The boy didn't resist.
He followed them down a passage he didn't recognize, although he was sure he'd walked it before. The stone here was older than the rest, veins of black running through pale rock like words beneath skin. The walls whispered without air, faint phonemes too brittle to be full speech, like the sound of bones almost breaking.
They brought him to a door.
Unlike the others in this place, it wasn't shaped like anything human. No handles. No hinges. Just a vertical slit wide enough for the body, but not the soul. It opened with a breath, exhaling brine-soaked memory. As he passed through, the scent hit him like a name half-recalled, sharp, sad, and wrong.
The Hollowing Room.
That's what they called it. Though no one ever said it aloud. It was a room of endings, not beginnings. A room where the parts of you that couldn't bear silence were peeled away until only what remained could listen.
Inside, rows of jars lined the shelves, hundreds of them, maybe more. Each held a swirling wisp of color, some blue like regret, some red like shame, some gray like names left unfinished. None were labeled. They didn't need to be.
Voices filled the space.
Not in chorus. Not in dialogue. Just... fragments. Overlapping echoes of people who had been, almost had been, or had failed to be. They murmured from the jars, but also from the walls, the cracks, the space behind the boy's teeth. His ears rang with syllables that weren't meant for him. Or maybe they were. That was the danger.
He stepped forward.
One jar pulsed brighter than the rest, a gold-threaded wisp trembling like a heartbeat. Drawn to it without meaning to, he reached out and placed his hand atop the glass.
A sound burst into his skull.
Not a memory. A confession.
A boy's voice, younger than his own, said:
"I didn't scream when she drowned. I watched."
The boy staggered backward, heart hammering. The jar didn't move. But now it glowed dimly. As if it had finished what it came to do.
Another whisper slithered across the room. A woman's voice, aged and splintered, confessed:
"I gave up my name so I could forget my child's."
He covered his ears.
It didn't help.
The voices weren't around him. They were in him, curling through his ribs, threading down his spine. A choir of failures. Not accusations, not even regrets. Just truths too heavy to carry any further.
The cultists said nothing.
One of them approached with a basin filled with silence-brine. This time, it was black as pitch and still as death. She dipped her fingers in and smeared the boy's temples with it.
"You are almost ready," she whispered.
He turned to her. "For what?"
"To know which voice is yours."
He didn't ask how. He didn't need to. Because just then, from the farthest corner of the chamber, a voice rose that sounded exactly like his, only older.
Not grown. Just… hollowed. Burned out at the edges. Stripped of context.
It said his name.
Not the one he answered to.
Not the one his mother had whispered when she thought he was asleep.
The first one. The true one.
The one the Hole had spoken on his twelfth birthday.
He knew it instantly. The way a wound knows the blade that made it.
And it didn't sound right.
It sounded... off.
Not wrong.
Just unfinished.
As if it had been spoken once, then abandoned.
He fell to his knees.
The jar containing the voice cracked. The golden wisp leaked out, wrapping itself around his chest, his throat, his eyes.
He wanted to scream.
But his voice fractured before it reached his lips.
And in that moment, he understood what the Hollowing Room was for.
Not punishment.
Preparation.