Chapter 17: When the Card Breathed
The place was still the same, the forgotten vein-rift where Aleister first made the bargain that would unmake him. This was not merely a Hollow now. This was the first wound, the place where Irikrit had been bound, where the Arcflow ran too deep and too wild for any nation to claim. It was here Aleister had first touched something older than the card system. It was here he had first heard the truth: that his card was not a vessel, but a source.
The Hollow did not sleep. It churned.
Beneath the cragged earth and veins of jagged stone, beneath the gravity-twisted trees and the shattered husks of Arc-tech that hummed faintly with ancient memory, the ground pulsed. Not rhythmically. Not naturally. It moved like a heartbeat trying to remember how to beat.
Aleister stood at the edge, bare feet caked in dust so black it looked like dried blood. He inhaled, steadying the tremor in his hands. Breathing here wasn't like breathing elsewhere. The air was heavier, charged with something that didn't quite belong to the present.
Each breath tasted like memory. Old metal. Dry moss. Charcoal from fires no one had lit in centuries. The Hollow held time like a lung refusing to exhale.
From above, the sky warped in on itself, not dark, but deep an endless blue-gray spiral that stretched too far and too near at once. The Hollow was never still. It devoured time.
And somewhere in its center, Irikrit waited.
He was still in chains.
They looped around his torso like serpents carved from obsidian, tethering him to jagged stone pillars that pulsed with arcane glyphs. Though his presence radiated terrible power, it was visibly constrained. The air around him shimmered where the bindings drank light. Every movement he made echoed with resistance.
"I felt you hesitate," the voice said not spoken, but felt, brushing against the base of Aleister's skull like a third hand. "You held your shape too tightly."
"I wasn't ready," Aleister said. His voice cracked against the air, brittle as glass underfoot.
"Not being ready has never stopped you before. Why now?"
Aleister turned toward the center of the clearing. Irikrit stood in semi-form, a tall, spined silhouette, half-smoke, half-obsidian. No features. Just suggestions. Horns like bent branches. A torso that flickered with symbols one moment and hollowed rot the next. His form refused to decide what it was. The chains dragged as he shifted, grinding against the rock with a low hum that made Aleister's bones vibrate.
"You said morphing required memory," Aleister muttered. "But I don't know what I'm supposed to remember."
"No," Irikrit said, stepping closer, his chains tightening with each movement, forcing him to glide rather than walk. "You remember too much. That is the weight. Your body still thinks it is what they said it was. A Null. A rootless one. An accident."
Aleister clenched his fists. "They weren't wrong."
"No," Irikrit said, "they were afraid."
The ground trembled beneath their feet. Not violently. Like a shiver beneath skin. Something was waking or listening.
"You want to change," Irikrit continued. "But you have not let go of what you were."
"I don't know how."
Irikrit tilted his head. The sky seemed to recoil at the motion. The chains rattled softly, responding to something unseen.
"You will learn."
Aleister took a step closer, his breath short. "And if I don't?"
Irikrit didn't answer with words. Instead, he extended a clawed long hand, jagged, impossibly still. Light bent toward it, sucked into the glassy edges.
He touched Aleister's sternum with a single finger. The chains around his other arm pulled tight as if resisting the motion.
The world cracked.
A roar built behind Aleister's ears, not sound, but pressure, memory, noise. Images stuttered across his mind like broken reels of film. James laughing in golden robes. Their mother hunched over a bowl of reheated grains. The clang of metal in the scrapyard. The quiet sobbing in back alleys. A flower that glowed where it shouldn't. A mask. The grove. The first time his card hummed.
All of it burned.
His spine arched. His back felt like it would split. His card pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat, only faster, faster still.
Black lines crawled up his arm, but not blood. Void. Memory turned liquid and pushed through skin.
"Good," Irikrit whispered. "Now move."
Aleister screamed not in pain, but in resistance. The form rose from within. His bones shifted. Shoulder dislocated, then reset, lengthening. Skin bubbled, sloughed, replaced by something darker, glistening. Claws emerged. His jaw clicked and elongated.
For a moment, he wasn't Aleister. He was something else. Something with wings that hadn't yet grown. Something with hunger, and name, and wound.
Then it collapsed.
He fell to his knees, drenched in sweat, fingers digging into the dust.
"You fight it still," Irikrit said. "Because you still believe you must return to yourself afterward. You won't."
Aleister swallowed hard. "So I become something else?"
"No," Irikrit said. "You become more than what you were. That is the price."
From the far end of the Hollow, something shifted. A breath drawn by earth itself. And then, silence.
Something was listening again.
And this time, it wasn't just Irikrit.