Shadow of the Returned Chapter 6: The Hollow Deep

The black circle was still spreading when Ashen ran, the earth behind him cracking like ice beneath fire. He didn’t look back. He couldn’t. Every step he took only made the ground sound less like ground and more like breathing.

The mist swallowed him whole within minutes. The air thickened until it seemed to drag at his bones. Somewhere behind him, the faint pulse of that circle kept beating, a second heart refusing to die. He kept running until the sound vanished, replaced by the hollow rhythm of his boots on asphalt and the whisper that had begun to live inside his head.

Return.

He slowed only when his legs failed him. The world was a blur of grey and shapes that might have been trees, or bones, or the memory of both. When he tried to catch his breath, the air felt wrong—too thin, too wet, as if he were breathing through another body’s lungs.

He knelt, hands pressed to the ground. The surface pulsed beneath his palms. Not alive, not dead. Something between. The mist carried a faint hum that he could feel more than hear, a low vibration crawling up through his skin.

For a moment, he thought it was his own heart again. Then he realized it was the world’s.

He stood and started forward.

The road had dissolved into fragments, pieces of blacktop floating in pale dust. He walked between them, unsure if his feet were touching anything real. His shadow stayed close now, drawn tight against his boots, as though even it feared to stretch too far from him.

He tried to speak, just to hear a voice that wasn’t the mist’s. “Still here?”

The shadow didn’t move. The silence that answered wasn’t empty.

It was listening.

He moved again. The fog grew denser, clinging to his clothes, damp against his face. The faint outlines of buildings appeared and vanished—windows without walls, doors hanging in the air, remnants of a city devoured and half-remembered.

He stopped at what had once been a signpost. Only the top half remained, its letters smeared by time: EAS_ GAT_.

East Gate, maybe. The name meant nothing now.

The mist hissed.

He turned, expecting movement. Nothing. Only the shifting grey. But the sound came again, closer, like breath pressed against the back of his neck.

He spun and found a figure standing a few paces away.

It looked human at first. Then it didn’t.

The face was almost his. Not perfectly, but enough to make his stomach twist. The eyes were black from corner to corner. The mouth opened, and his own voice came out, soft and wrong.

“You shouldn’t have run.”

Ashen froze. His hand went to the knife at his belt, though he wasn’t sure when he had drawn it. “You’re not real.”

“Neither are you.”

He moved before it did. The knife cut air and shadow both. The figure didn’t bleed. It shattered, folding inward like paper catching fire, turning to dust that vanished before it hit the ground.

Ashen stood there shaking, the knife still raised. The shadow beneath him quivered.

“You think I don’t know the trick,” he whispered to it. “You think I can’t see what you’re doing.”

The shadow twitched again, a ripple that might have been laughter.

He pressed the blade to his palm until it drew blood. The pain steadied him. The cut bled black for a heartbeat, then red. He watched it bead, slow and heavy. Real enough, for now.

The whisper in his mind softened, almost gentle. You can’t run from what you are.

He kept walking. The mist thickened until even his own hands blurred. He used the sound of his breathing to keep direction, though he no longer knew where direction was.

After a while, the road sloped downward. The fog thinned for a moment, revealing a field of glass. Not glass—ice, maybe—but dark, veined with streaks of light that pulsed like veins under skin. Beneath it, shapes moved: hundreds of them, slow and weightless, like people dreaming beneath the surface.

He crouched and touched the ice. It was warm.

The shapes stirred.

He pulled his hand back. His reflection followed a moment later, lagging, smiling when he didn’t.

He stumbled away, the mist rushing to fill the gap between him and the frozen ground. The whisper returned, louder now, many voices threading together. Seed. Grow. Return.

He pressed his palms to his ears, but it didn’t help. The voices came from his chest, from the blood in his hands, from the beat beneath his ribs.

He started to run again.

The terrain changed without warning. The ice gave way to dirt, soft and wet. Each step sank deeper until he was wading through mud that smelled of rot. The mist pressed close, almost solid now, pushing against his face like a hand.

He tripped and went to his knees. The ground moved under him. Something beneath the mud exhaled.

He froze. Slowly, he lifted his hand. The soil clung to his skin in strands, pulsing faintly. He wiped it away, but the pulse didn’t stop—it had moved inside him.

A noise came from the dark ahead. Not the whisper this time. A rhythm. Slow. Measured.

Footsteps.

He rose, turning toward it.

Out of the mist walked a figure draped in rags that once might have been armor. It carried a long spear made of bone and shadow fused together. Its face was hidden by a mask of cracked glass. Behind it came others, five, six, a dozen, all walking in silence, their shadows tethered together like chained dogs.

Ashen knew that walk. He had seen it before, in dreams and memory. The march of soldiers in the Nightmare.

The first figure stopped a few steps away and tilted its head. The glass mask caught the dim light, and for an instant, he saw what lay behind it—his own reflection, hollow-eyed and wordless.

They knelt as one.

The mist bent with them, swirling in circles, forming lines that reached toward his feet. His shadow stretched in answer, meeting theirs, connecting.

“No,” he said, stepping back.

The air trembled. The kneeling figures raised their heads in unison. The glass masks cracked.

Voices came through the fractures, hundreds layered into one. You are the root. We are the bloom.

The ground split. Black light poured upward, spilling across the field. The kneeling shapes dissolved into it, their bodies melting like wax, their shadows rushing toward him.

He tried to move, but they were faster. The light hit his chest and spread through him, burning cold. For a heartbeat he saw everything—every nightmare he had survived, every death, every moment he had wished the Spell would forget his name.

Then the world snapped back.

He was standing alone again. The figures were gone. The mist was calm. But the earth beneath him pulsed with the same rhythm as his heart.

He felt lighter. Wrongly so. The kind of lightness that comes after bleeding too much.

He looked down at his hands. The veins had darkened again, but this time the color didn’t fade. It climbed, threading up his arms, spreading beneath his skin like roots.

He clenched his fists. The shadow beneath him deepened, solid now, almost flesh.

He staggered forward, following a path he didn’t remember choosing. The mist parted more easily now, as if making way. The hum beneath his feet grew stronger.

Hours passed. Or minutes. Time had stopped meaning anything.

At last he saw something through the haze—a shape, vast and unmoving. It rose out of the mist like a mountain, but its sides were too smooth, too deliberate. The closer he got, the more it resolved into form.

A tower.

Black stone, or something pretending to be it. The surface rippled faintly, breathing. The air around it shimmered with heat that wasn’t heat.

At its base, a door waited. No handle. No seams. Just a slab of darkness carved into darker stone.

The whisper in his head stilled. The silence was sudden, absolute.

He stood before the door, every nerve screaming for him to stop. But the pull was there again, deeper than hunger, deeper than fear.

He reached out. His fingers hovered an inch from the surface.

The stone rippled once, like the skin of a drum struck from beneath.

Then a single word, soft and endless, filled the air.

Welcome.

The mist surged, swallowing him whole.