Chương 9

Two afternoons ago John had asked for parchment and something to write with. The request had gone up the corridor, paused in some office, and come back with conditions. No sealed correspondence. No messages to the city. The stack would be counted when it left the room. John had agreed to all of it, which cost him nothing, and a junior attendant had set twelve cheap sheets and a graphite stick on the side table with the air of a man delivering mild contraband.

Lady Sera, when she heard, approved on the further condition that John stay flat while he worked — which he was doing, more or less: propped against the pillow, blanket bunched at his waist, the first page balanced on a book the healer had left for exactly this purpose. He wrote in English. That decision had not required much thought. Only a fool would put what he intended to put on paper in the local tongue, for any maid or guard to stumble upon.

The graphite made its small scritch, scritch, and then stopped, hovering a finger's width above the page. What was the title again? he mused. The Hollow Crown. Or Crown of Hollows. One of those was right. Probably. He had read the story cover to cover — a webserial, fourteen hundred chapters — and could not remember which order the words went in. Once, that would have been a funny bit of failed trivia. It was less funny now that the book in question could determine the course of his remaining lifespan.

He wrote: THE HOLLOW CROWN? Beneath it: OR: CROWN OF HOLLOWS? Beneath that, small, in brackets: (not sure which). The pencil was already dulling. Sharpening it would mean asking the guards for a knife, which promised to be an interesting conversation, so he pressed harder instead and considered what he wanted from the remaining eleven and a half sheets. The goal was easy to state and absurd to attempt: reconstruct the novel.

Set down everything he remembered of its lore and its timeline before this world sanded any more of it away. The trouble was the source. The serial had covered roughly ten in-world years, from the protagonist's academy enrolment to the sealing of the Black Gate, at a pace of production that guaranteed it contradicted itself. Dates drifted. A journey that took three days in one arc took a week in another and became, in a supplemental post, a ride between neighbouring towns.

Key characters stopped being relevant without dying, marrying, or otherwise accounting for themselves. Whole subplots were raised with great ceremony and then dropped so completely that, by the later volumes, even the author seemed to have lost the thread. A perfect reader could not have fully trusted it. John had not been a perfect reader. He had read it casually, over about four months, wedged between classes and meals and the general business of being a medical student who tried very hard to be unremarkable.

Sometimes he'd read the side stories, or the author's supplemental lore posts, if they looked interesting. They usually didn't. He looked down at his progress so far. A title he was half sure of, a question mark, and a note to himself in brackets. A strong start. He kept going anyway, because the arithmetic hadn't changed. He would need every advantage he could lay hands on to survive this world, and memory — incomplete, contradictory, four months of skimming — was the only one he had been issued.

It was still an improvement on the original plan. In his first days here, the plan had been to end this life early rather than risk the alternative. He had not been willing to chance falling into the hands of the people hunting Elara; magic in this world could be gruesome, and a flesh-shaper with sufficient imagination could arrange for a man something very close to Ted's fate at the end of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Set against that, a quiet dose of Widow's Tear had seemed almost sensible.

Whether he could have gone through with it was another question. Dying by accident had been frightening enough; doing it on purpose, with time to think, was another order of thing entirely, and if his request for execution had been refused, he was not certain he would have found the nerve for the alternative. Mercifully, the question had been retired. Elara had extended the protection she enjoyed inside the Academy to cover him as well. Her enrolment was still three days away.

But John remained hopeful that nothing would disrupt the plan. Still, even her offer had a ceiling. She was not entirely safe inside the Academy herself, and they could not shelter behind its walls forever. He needed to get Stronger. Much stronger. A Bronze-ranked Martial warrior didn't even qualify as cannon-fodder in the face of what was coming. So: every advantage. Beginning with the ones that fit on paper. He set the point to the page and started with was he was sure of. The Hollow King, AMMAS.

His origins were contested even in the book. There had been a tragic backstory — John had skimmed it, deeming it unimportant. A foundling, a temple, the usual machinery of doomed children; the serial had contained a great many doomed children, and after the first four hundred chapters they blurred.

What survived the author's revisions and John's inattention alike was the core, and the core was this: Some seven centuries ago, cultists of the old sun-faith took a temple foundling named Ammas and bound him to an ancient demon imprisoned in purgatory, meaning to channel the thing's power and hold its leash. In their hubris they had corrupted the boy, and weakened the seal that held the demon. The demon's influence began to leak into the world. Somewhere in that process, Ammas became the Hollow King.

John paused and flexed his writing hand. Purgatory wasn't quite the book's term — the cosmology had its own vocabulary — but it was close enough. A prison dimension. The details didn't matter. What mattered was the prisoner it held. The demon had many names, most of which John remembered precisely because they were, frankly, cool, and because the author had been constitutionally incapable of using one name where eight would serve.

He listed them down the left margin: Devorator Mundi — the formal name, from the Church condemnations. Ba'al-Shaggath. Zemuel the Unshriven. Munnvargr — mouth-wolf, to the seafaring northerners. Chernoust, black-mouth. Starivrag, the old enemy. The Kindly Famine. Him Below. Mister Mouth. Uncle — the folk name, on the superstition that speaking any of the true ones might might invoke him. And beneath them all, the real one. Maar. In the demon tongue it meant Appetite.

The prophecy held that Maar would devour the world if its escape from purgatory was not stopped — an escape that would be accomplished through the rift left behind as a result of the binding of Maar to Ammas. In later centuries the rift would earn a name of its own: the Black Gate. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Ammas — known through most of the book only by his title, the Hollow King — spent the story trying to release the demon.

His reasons the author had kept coy, and John had not paid close enough attention to reconstruct them from whatever clues were left behind. What mattered was the mechanism. The binding had given Ammas a share of Maar's nature. He devoured souls. He devoured other mages' mana — divine magic most readily of all, which he metabolised like a delicacy, so that the Church's brightest weapons were not merely useless against him but nourishing.

He had the hollowing touch, and with it the means to mass-produce husks: hordes of mind-wiped, fearless, painless soldiers. Only two magics in the entire story were any good against him. Null, which he could not perceive at all. And Shadow, the one affinity that suppressed the hollowing outright. John sat a little straighter. The movement pulled at his side. He ignored it. Null had belonged to the story's original protagonist.

A Null soul sat at the centre of the affinity wheel, able to learn every affinity at a uniform pace, immune to the soul-setting that locked ordinary mages into a single path — One, usually. Two or three, if they were gifted or stubborn. A Null did not specialise. A Null simply learned. It was exactly the sort of cheat whose absence John had spent his first days in this world resenting. Shadow belonged to Elara. And before Elara, it had belonged to another. VEYRA THE SABLE.

He was more confident of her than of half the living cast; the later arcs had repeated her the way a serial repeats a load-bearing wall — often, and with slightly different measurements each time. A Shadow sorceress. Roughly seven hundred years ago, at the drowned city of Carrow in what was now the Sundered March, she had broken Ammas's first ascension. She could not kill what he had become. But she had sealed the Gate, and delayed Maar's coming another seven centuries. The seal had a price.

It required a living keystone: a willing Shadow mage of her own blood, given to the stone. Her recorded death had in truth been a binding. Some remnant of her persisted inside the seal even now, worn down to a thread. Her line had survived by hiding — descendants living as minor gentry under a clipped version of her name, rising over the centuries into House Vey. The Shadow affinity kept resurfacing in the blood, irregularly, and the family kept suppressing it wherever it appeared.

Lord Casmir knew the lineage traced back to Veyra — to the woman history remembered as the Hollow King's demon consort — but not the sealing truth beneath the slander. The house had been infiltrated by the Hollow King's apostles generations back and quietly steered into scrubbing its own records, so thoroughly that the Veys no longer understood they were the lock's only key, and the fulcrum on which the fate of every living thing balanced. Only one family text had survived the scrubbing.

The Sable Psalter: Veyra's grimoire, disguised as a hymnal and walled into the chapel crypt at Veymoor, the Vey seat. In the book the protagonist found it late, while digging for anything about Elara that might help him stop her — by which point she was already burning the three kingdoms. The Psalter told him what the real threat was. It sent him to persuade her to turn her fire on the Hollow King instead, a thing she would not, in her grief and anger, agree to do until nearly the final moment.

In canon, the failing seal eventually took Elara as the second keystone. The epilogue implied her awareness persisted inside the stone, and the fandom had fought about what that meant for weeks. John had read two pages of the argument, decided he did not care enough, and closed the tab. He cared now. Remarkable, what a change of address did for a man's literary engagement. He turned the sheet. The graphite dragged greyer.

It had been confirmed, at the end of the story, that Shadow's reputation was a political construction. The Church of the Lumen, already infiltrated by the King's apostles, had rewritten the sealing within a generation of it. Veyra became the demon consort. The victory went to the light of the Lumen, wielded by a Saint Averil who never existed. Two consequences followed, and both were still in motion. The first: the lie killed the heroes.

Because doctrine said light had banished the King, the eventual grand strategy — the Regalia, the Anointed champions, the shining climax of Arc VII — was built on a falsehood. Divine magic did not banish Ammas. Divine magic fed him. John remembered the battle as a spectacular, expensive disaster, and also as a stretch of chapters he had skimmed, because by then the author had become very interested in named swords. The second consequence was the Office of the Lantern.

It was an inquisitorial branch of the Church that knew the truth and was hunting for a way out of it that would not also destroy the Church's legitimacy. It held the Gate Actuary — years of arcane examination proving the seal's accelerating decay. And it ran the Nightwork: secret research into weaponising Shadow, the very heresy it publicly burned, because Shadow was the only demonstrated counter to hollowing. Its enforcers, the Lanterns, hunted Shadow-users whereever they appeared.

Their prize acquisition was Maghren the Unlit, a Sixth-Circle Shadow mage, interred in the deep cells of Greyspire priory for something like ninety years. Uncooperative for all of them. Elara had been intended for Subject II. In canon, she became it. Taken at the tollhouse, delivered to Greyspire, and taught — eventually — by Maghren, through a spectral projection the old woman managed by weakening the seals on her own power, year over year, in the dark.

It had not begun as kindness, but eventually Maghren, would grow affectionate of the younger mage. In the end, she burned the last of her magic, and then her soul, to break the wards on them both, and Elara Vey walked out of Greyspire a Fifth-Circle Shadow sorceress on a warpath to erase the Church, its allies, and everyone who had ever believed them. The sequence had been well written.

It had also been monstrous: years of confinement, interrogation, and experimentation, until what remained of the original girl had exactly enough power and exactly enough hatred to burn the world. John had taken that future off the table. He was not sorry. He was, however, beginning to understand the full extent of what he had done. John thought back to yesterday's conversation with Elara then.

He still was not certain — but he had been confident enough to say it aloud: House Agnew was behind the attempted kidnapping. After the deposition, after considering the matter for longer, he had dredged up, from memory, a chapter from Arc VI titled something like The Agnew Extinction. An old woman on her knees in a burning hall, confessing to the Demon Queen — memorable mostly for the revenge.

The confession had established that the Dowager, Lady Maud Agnew, over the caution of her son Lord Edgar, had caught wind of a rumour that the Vey line — an old rival — carried "the demoness's blood." She had wanted a living Vey child to test. Proof, if she could get it, to weaken if not destroy House Vey root and branch. Why Elara specifically, john didn't remember. But he could guess. Seventh of twelve. Sent to Asterhall with one governess and three rented swords.

The child a house could most easily fail to protect, and therefore the child a rival could most easily take. He had told her anyway. Without proof, without sources he could disclose. The alternative was letting her walk blind into whatever Maud Agnew still had in motion, and that was no alternative at all. He hoped he was right. He shifted on the bed, grimaced, and read back through the stack. Six of the twelve sheets gone; his hand aching; the pencil worn to a blunt shine.

And there was no putting off the uncomfortable structural fact any longer, so he wrote it plainly: The book never had an Academy arc for Elara. In the book, she was taken at the tollhouse. Everything after that morning, he had already broken. Every choice she made inside these walls — every class, every rival, every accidental kindness or insult — was unwritten. And one cost he could already name: she would never be taught by Maghren.

Whatever a Sixth-Circle teacher was worth to the girl who was supposed to save the world, John had spent it at a tollhouse, and he did not know the price. He held the position regardless. Given the same morning again, he would change nothing. But the consequence sat there on the page, refusing to be smaller than it was.

If the Gate was still failing — and nothing about his arrival suggested it had repaired a seven-century seal — then a solution would have to be found, and found soon, by people who did not yet know one was needed. He needed time. He needed rank. He needed— The static behind his thoughts resolved, all at once, into a name. He was on his feet before he had decided to stand.

Pain tore white across his flank; the pages slid and fanned across the floor; out in the corridor a chair scraped and a guard's voice started a question John did not hear. The novel's actual protagonist. Aren Mills. A miller's orphan, raised at a Lumen chapel-school in Bletchmoor. Winner of a Crown scholarship to Asterhall on the strength of freak mana density, mistaken for a Fire mage because fire was the first thing anyone saw him learn. The Null at the centre of the wheel.

The boy the apostles were already hunting for a vessel, whether or not they yet had his name. The boy who, in another version of this decade, would make his last stand against the Hollow King and buy, with everything he had, the delay that made Elara's victory possible. He should be enrolling at Asterhall. John stood in the middle of the infirmary, one hand clamped to his side, his notes scattered around his feet, trying to remember whether that meant this intake or the next. The door opened.

One of the guards said his name — the false one, the only one they had. John barely heard that, either. This intake. Or the next. He could not remember.