The Hollow Order

In Merrowlin, the sun never set, and the clocks never ticked. Bells marked the passage of time—seven in all—each one tolling from the Ivory Spire that crowned the heart of the city like a sword plunged into the earth. Every citizen was moved by them. Rose with them. Slept by them. Worshipped by them.

At the Seventh Bell, the Ceremony of Clarity began.

Kael stood near the edge of the plaza, where the shadows of the Spire didn’t reach. The air smelled of limestone and strange flowers—ones that only bloomed after the Sixth Bell, fed by unseen roots beneath the stone. Everyone wore the grey robes of the Order. Everyone bowed their heads and clasped their hands, eyes upturned as the final bell rang out.

All except Kael.

His fingers twitched. His spine stiffened as the familiar pang of memory twisted his gut.

Lira.

She had stood beside him in this same plaza once. Tall. Proud. With laughter that sounded like something the city had forgotten.

Then she vanished.

Three cycles ago, just after the Ceremony, she was gone. “Ascended,” the Order said. Chosen by the Voice. Her name was added to the golden wall of purity, and that was the end of it.

But Kael had found her pendant in a gutter. The chain snapped. A smear of dried blood on the corner of the stone steps. No witnesses. No ceremony. No farewell.

Only silence.

And the Voice.

A humming started high above them. The spire glowed white-hot at its peak, and a halo of light expanded, cascading down in a ring of brilliance. Kael flinched. Everyone else stared into it, motionless, smiling with glazed eyes. The Purge had begun.

He shut his eyes tightly, but the hum found its way inside anyway, writhing behind his eyelids like moths caught in flame.

“Clarity is the root of unity,” the Voice intoned from above, neither male nor female. “Doubt is rot. You are pure. You are clean. You are the Hollow.”

The crowd chanted the last line in unison. “We are the Hollow. We are the Hollow.”

Kael did not speak.

Instead, he listened.

Beneath the humming, beneath the light, something else was there. Like a low whisper in a forgotten tongue. Like someone breathing against his neck in a room that should be empty.

A hand touched his shoulder.

“Brother Kael,” said a Mentor with gold trim around her cuffs, “are you unwell?”

Her name was Maerel. Sharp eyes. A false smile. Her hand gripped tighter than kindness required.

“I am focused,” Kael said. “The light will cleanse me.”

Maerel’s smile grew. “Yes. It always does.”

But he saw it now—how her gaze flicked toward the sentries at the edge of the square. How one of them gave a barely perceptible nod.

Kael forced himself to sway gently like the others. To whisper the hollow chant. To act as though the light filled him, not scorched him.

Because today, he would go beneath.

Every night, Kael worked in the lower aqueducts—maintenance, according to his station. But only the trusted were allowed in the Substructure. And he had earned that trust, slowly, methodically, for this very reason.

The tunnels beneath Merrowlin were old—older than the Spire, older than the Voice. There were murals in places, long since scratched away. And doors sealed with wax and bone.

He passed the cisterns and reached the sealed hatch behind Chamber Six. A rusted grate marked with the Eye of Clarity. He pulled Lira’s pendant from his cloak and slid the tip into the groove. The symbol flared once—bright green—and the hatch unsealed with a hiss.

He descended into darkness.

The room beneath the hatch pulsed with cold energy. Shelves lined the walls, not with books, but with minds—small glass spheres swirling with liquid thought. The Archives. Forbidden. Purged from all Order records.

Lira had told him about them once, in whispers.

"They don’t erase dissenters, Kael," she had said. "They harvest them. Their memories. Their souls. All of it. And store them here. It’s how the Voice knows everything. It feeds on us."

He hadn't believed her then. He had called her paranoid.

But here they were. Hundreds of glowing orbs. The air was heavy with silence.

He reached for one labelled simply “R9 - Lira.”

The moment his fingers touched it, his vision blurred.

She was running.

Lira’s breath came in gasps as the sirens screamed. Her robes were torn. Her eyes were wild with fury.

"They lied," she whispered. "They said the Voice was a saviour. It’s not. It’s a thing, Kael. It’s not even human."

She hid behind a pillar, clutching her pendant. “It’s hollow. Just like they want us to be.”

Footsteps.

Then darkness.

Then screaming.

Kael jerked back, the orb clattering to the floor. The sound echoed too loudly.

From somewhere beyond the shelves, he heard breathing.

Not his own.

High above, in the Spire’s Sanctum, the Voice leaned closer to the glass wall overlooking the plaza. Its shape was human, mostly. Tall. Regal. But its eyes were wrong—too black, too still. As though they were painted on.

Behind it, the true leader of the Order—Archon Deymar—waited.

“The boy resists,” the Voice said, in a voice that never moved its lips.

Deymar bowed. “Shall we eliminate him?”

“No. Not yet. His mind is... open. He hears the whisper.”

The Archon hesitated. “But if he speaks—”

“He won’t. Not until he knows. Let him descend. Let him see.”

It smiled.

“We need him to understand before we take him.”

Kael returned to the surface under the cover of Second Bell. No one questioned him—he had learned how to smile the way they smiled. To blink in rhythm. To appear empty.

But he was not.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d seen. The words Lira had said.

It’s not even human.

That night, he slipped a note into Maerel’s cloak while brushing past her on the garden path.

“I know about the Archives. Meet me in the roots at Third Bell. Come alone.”

He didn’t expect her to come.

But she did.

She arrived late, hood drawn, face pale.

“You’re a fool,” she hissed. “If they find out you went down there—”

“They already know,” Kael said. “I think they wanted me to.”

Maerel flinched. “Then why did you call me?”

“Because you’ve hesitated. I’ve seen it. Your eyes flick away when the Voice speaks. You doubt.”

She didn’t deny it.

“I had a sister,” Kael said. “She was taken. She tried to warn me.”

“I remember Lira,” Maerel whispered. “She wasn’t the first to disappear.”

Kael stepped closer. “Then help me. There’s more beneath the Archives. A gate I couldn’t open. I think that’s where it sleeps.”

“You want to wake it?”

“No,” Kael said. “I want to kill it.”

They waited until the Sixth Bell, when the Spire’s focus shifted for the final Ceremony.

Together, they descended through the Substructure, past the Archives, past the burial chambers where the walls wept red.

At the base, a stone door sat sealed with seven glyphs. One by one, Maerel chanted the words of the Order—only this time, backward. Each phrase unlocks a lock.

When the last glyph fell, the door creaked open.

Behind it was not a chamber.

It was a cavern. Living, breathing, pulsating like the inside of a throat.

Kael stepped inside.

At its centre stood a throne of bone and wires.

And on it, a figure, robed in silver, its face featureless, like melted wax. Tubes connected it to the cavern walls, feeding it with a constant stream of fluid—memories.

Maerel gasped. “It’s not the Voice. It’s the receiver.”

“The real Voice is dead,” Kael realized. “This is just... an echo. A shell. The Order’s using it to keep control.”

But even as he said it, the creature stirred.

And then—spoke.

“You do not understand,” it rasped. “I am not control. I am containment.”

Kael froze.

“What do you mean?”

“I was made to trap the voice. The real one. It came from beyond the stars. A thought too vast for flesh. It came to Merrowlin. It spoke... and minds broke. I am what remains of the last who tried to hold it.”

“You’re a prison,” Maerel whispered.

“Yes. But your Order... they mistook the lock for the key. And now the real Voice is leaking through.”

The creature looked up, its eyeless sockets glowing.

“It hears you, Kael. Because part of you is Hollow now.”

Kael stepped forward, heart pounding.

“Can it be stopped?”

The creature groaned. “You must finish what the first did not. Destroy this body. End me. But it will come through. Fully. And it will speak.”

Maerel grabbed Kael’s wrist. “If it does, we’ll all go mad.”

“Maybe,” Kael said. “But maybe truth is worth madness.”

He pulled Lira’s pendant from his cloak. The edge gleamed like a blade.

And he plunged it into the creature’s chest.

The scream echoed not in the ears, but in the soul.

Above, the Spire cracked. The bells rang all at once. People staggered from their homes, clutching their heads.

The Voice—the real one—spoke.

Words that had no form. Meanings without shape. The sky bled light. The earth wept. The Order fell, screaming.

Kael stood in the centre of it all, eyes blank, arms outstretched.

Not Hollow.

But full.

Maerel found him the next morning, kneeling in the ruins of the plaza.

“What... are you now?” she whispered.

Kael turned, his eyes glowing.

“I remember everything.”

Epilogue: The Eighth Bell

It was said there were only seven bells in Merrowlin.

But after the fall, an eighth one rang.

No one saw where it came from. No tower. No rope. Just a sound in the bones of the earth—deep, resonant, and mournful. A bell for what was lost. A bell for what was freed.

Kael sat atop the ruins of the Ivory Spire, staring down at the broken city.

The robes of the Order were gone. The people walked without rhythm now without chants. Some screamed in the streets. Some wept. Some simply stood in silence, staring into the horizon as if waiting for something—anything—to make sense again.

The Voice had spoken, and it had left its mark.

Some had gone mad.

Some had become lucid.

And a rare few, like Kael, had heard it fully—and survived.

Maerel stood beside him. Her face was thinner now, her eyes older. She hadn’t spoken much since that day.

He broke the silence. “They’re afraid of freedom.”

“They were trained to be,” she said. “To obey. To forget. To be Hollow.”

“But they’re not, anymore.” Kael’s voice was quieter now, as if speaking too loudly might shatter what little remained. “They just don’t know what they are yet.”

“What are you, Kael?”

He didn’t answer right away.

He looked up at the sky—the first time in his life he’d ever seen real clouds. The illusion that had always cloaked Merrowlin had vanished along with the Spire. Now there were stars. And wind. And voices on the edge of the world.

Not the Voice.

Others.

“Something’s still coming,” he said at last. “Something bigger than this.”

Maerel nodded slowly. “Then we rebuild. And we remember.”

Kael rose. The pendant—Lira’s pendant—still hung from his neck, now cracked and darkened at the edges. A relic of the prison that had once held the Voice. A reminder of what belief could become when twisted.

“We start again,” he said, turning to the remnants of Merrowlin. “But not with control. Not with fear. We tell them the truth, even if it breaks them.”

Maerel placed a hand on his arm.

“And if the Voice returns?”

Kael smiled, faint and sad.

“Then this time, we’ll be ready.”

Far above, a new light shimmered in the sky—soft and gold, not forced, not blinding.

And beneath it, for the first time in living memory, no bells rang.