They whispered his name in the ruins of old temples, where the wind carried the voices of the dead.
Elias of the Hollow Order.
They said he was the last of the Pale Monks, keepers of the Veil that separated the waking world from the things that lurked beyond. But that was before the Cataclysm, before the sky fractured and the darkness bled through.
Now, they said he was mad.
He lived alone in the remnants of a chapel, at the edge of the Blighted Vale, where no grass grew, only crimson ash that drifted like snow. No one dared approach. The villagers told tales of his raving, of the symbol he scratched into the stone with the last fragment of his shattered staff.
A black figure with wings like shadow, crowned with obsidian thorns, its eyes twin wounds in the sky.
They called it The Warden.
And they said Elias had seen it. Spoken to it.
Tonight, under a sky that wept green light, Elias knelt in the field of cinders, his robes threadbare, his flesh pale as bone. He whispered the verses of the Hollow Tongue, the language of the old world, the only words the Warden would understand.
He heard them in his mind.
You have gazed beyond the Veil, Elias.
The voice came not from the shadows, but from the fractures in his thoughts.
"You have tasted the truth hidden in the marrow of the world. Now you will kneel, and you will watch as I devour the sky."Elias clutched his temple. The ground beneath him pulsed, veins of molten darkness oozing through the cracks. He tried to avert his gaze, but it was already too late. His soul was tethered to the thing that towered over him—a silhouette more nightmare than flesh, a deity forgotten even by the damned.
The villagers called him mad.
But he was not.
He was chosen.
Chosen to be the Warden’s anchor. The vessel through which the world would drown in shadows.
Yet tonight, something stirred within him. A fragment of defiance buried beneath the layers of despair. He remembered the oaths of the Hollow Order. Even in madness, even in hopelessness, the Order fought to the last breath.
He raised his trembling hand, reciting the old canticle. The light flickered in the sigil carved into his palm—a desperate, flickering star in an ocean of ink.
"You cannot defy me, mortal." The Warden’s laughter shook the mountains.But Elias smiled, hollow and broken.
"I am not here to defy you," he whispered. "I am here to bind you."And as the final verse left his lips, the crimson ash swirled into the air like a storm, wrapping them both in a cocoon of forgotten spells.
Either the world would break tonight, or he would.
And perhaps that was mercy.
