Shadow of the Returned Chapter 5: The Hollow Road

Ashen ran until the world lost shape.

The land beyond the wall wasn’t a place. It was an echo stretched too thin, color scraped away until only grey and the suggestion of weight remained. The mist clung to him, thick as breath, whispering in voices that had no throats. Sometimes they used his name. Sometimes they used the others, the ones who’d died before the end.

He stopped when his lungs burned. The road beneath him was cracked asphalt, half-buried in ash, the lines faded into nothing. To his left, what might once have been a forest hunched low and black, every tree trunk hollowed by something that had fed and moved on.

He waited for the sound of pursuit—engines, boots, anything human—but the Dominion didn’t follow him here. No one sane crossed into the zones.

His shadow followed, patient, wide as the road. It made no sound. It hadn’t since the fight.

He stared down at it. “You enjoying this?”

The shadow shifted, an answering twitch that might have been amusement.

“Figures.”

He kept walking. The air thickened with each step, a slow suffocation that had nothing to do with breath. Sometimes he thought he saw movement at the edge of sight: a woman in a torn coat, a child crouched by the road’s shoulder, a figure leaning against a tree that wasn’t there when he looked twice.

The mist showed him memories the way nightmares showed hope—bright for a second, gone before he could reach.

He tried not to listen.

An hour passed, or maybe a day. Time slid wrong here. The sun above the haze never moved, only swelled and shrank like a dying ember.

The first real thing he found was a car half-buried in the road. Its doors hung open. Inside, a skeleton sat behind the wheel, hands fused to the steering column by black resin. On the passenger seat lay a photograph, colors faded to bruised grey. A woman. Two children. A house with a porch and a dog that still had a name somewhere in someone’s mouth.

He closed the door. The sound was louder than it should have been.

That was when he felt it—the pull beneath his ribs, the same gravity that had dragged him through every nightmare before this one. His shadow rippled, then froze, pointing toward the forest.

He almost ignored it. Then the ground trembled.

Something was coming.

The mist parted like a curtain drawn by invisible hands. Through it stepped a creature that had once been human. Its spine arched backward, bones shining through skin like glass, and its face was a smear of colorless flesh, eyes sunk too deep to catch the light. It smelled of iron and sleep.

Ashen didn’t move. The creature tilted its head. Its shadow stretched toward him—thin, fragile, not its own.

He recognized it then.

A Returned.

It moved in a broken gait, half-crawl, half-fall, its mouth opening and closing around a word it couldn’t finish.

He felt the pull again, stronger this time, the instinct to consume. To absorb. The shadow behind him rose like smoke in a furnace.

“No,” he whispered, but the darkness didn’t listen.

When the creature reached for him, his shadow leapt.

The sound it made was like paper tearing underwater.

The thing fell apart, dissolving into a fine dust that glittered briefly, then vanished. The ground where it had stood shimmered with the same faint pulse that had marked the wall after the last battle.

Ashen’s knees gave out. He braced himself against the car, breath ragged. The hunger didn’t fade this time. It crawled through his chest, cold and relentless.

He looked down. His veins were dark. Not black—something deeper, like light that had gone bad.

His hands shook. “What are you doing to me?”

The shadow didn’t answer, but the mist did. It whispered in dozens of voices, low and rhythmic, the words threading together until he could almost understand.

Seed. Grow. Return.

He pressed his palms to his ears, but the sound was inside him now, pulsing with his heartbeat. He saw flashes of the Sovereign’s throne, the Spell’s faceless shape, the wound in the sky.

“Home,” he’d said.

The Spell had obeyed.

A shape formed in the mist ahead—a woman this time, tall, hair like smoke. Her eyes were bright and wrong. She looked familiar until she smiled.

Mira’s face, but twisted, the way a reflection bends on water.

“You brought it back,” she said. “You think you escaped, but you’re just the door.”

He stumbled back, shaking his head. “You’re not real.”

“Does it matter?”

He tried to move, but his feet wouldn’t obey. The shadow had sunk into the ground, anchoring him.

The false Mira stepped closer. The air around her blurred, filled with faint, shifting shapes—hands, faces, echoes of the people he had lost.

“You wanted peace,” she whispered. “You’ll bring it. The quiet kind.”

He reached for his blade and found only darkness.

The shadow surged up again, wrapping around him like armor, cold and wet and alive. It swallowed her whole.

When it was over, there was nothing left but silence.

Ashen fell to his knees, his body shaking, his hands black to the wrists. The hunger eased, but only because it was satisfied.

He stared at the ground, at the blackened circle spreading beneath him.

Something was growing there—thin roots of shadow, creeping outward like veins through soil.

He backed away, stumbling. The circle widened. From its center came a faint heartbeat, echoing his own.

He understood then.

The mist wasn’t just a remnant of the Nightmare. It was soil. And he was what had been planted.

The Spell hadn’t lied.

Seed.

He looked up. The horizon had changed. Towers of mist were rising in the distance, tall and spined, shaped like the ruins of cities but breathing.

Behind him, the road cracked open, a low sound like thunder.

Ashen turned and ran again, but the whisper followed, calm and certain, filling the air, the ground, his own voice as he gasped for breath.

Return.

The world obeyed.

And somewhere beyond the haze, the first new shadow bloomed.