The cracked moon hung low, bleeding shadows that slithered like vipers across the ruined streets. Nerin's breath came in ragged bursts, each exhale tasting of ash and iron—the city's eternal scent of decay and broken promises. The Hollow Mark burned with a fierce, insistent pulse, a blistering brand that seemed to consume more than flesh: it gnawed at his soul.
Ahead, through the choking dusk, rose the silhouette of an ancient tower, jagged and cruel—The Spire of the Shattered Covenant. Its blackened spires pierced the bruised sky like broken teeth, dripping with corrosive shadows that hissed secrets no mortal should hear.
Nerin's steps faltered as memories—fragments, splinters—assaulted him. Faces of the fallen, of those bound by blood and betrayal centuries ago, twisted in silent screams. The Hollowed City was more than a prison; it was a mausoleum of broken oaths.
The trial had led him here—for the covenant to be reforged or shattered forever.
A voice coiled in the dark, low and velvety, cutting through the silence like a dagger.
"You seek to break chains forged in blood, Hollowed. But chains are forged to hold, to protect... and to punish."
From the shadows emerged a figure—cloaked in tattered black, eyes gleaming like abyssal stars. A woman, ancient yet ageless, her smile a blade of ice.
"Why do you fight what you are?" she whispered, each word a shard of venom. "The Mark binds you to the city's heart. To deny it is to bleed into oblivion."
Nerin gripped the bone knife tighter, the cold flame of the Mark flaring in defiance.
"I fight to reclaim what was stolen—the shards of my soul swallowed by this cursed place. I am not its prisoner."
She stepped closer, shadows curling like serpents around her form.
"The covenant was broken when the city fell. The Hollowed were its prison, but also its key. If you shatter it, the city will bleed—flesh and spirit alike."
Nerin's mind raced. To reforging the covenant meant binding himself deeper into the city's dark heart. To breaking it meant chaos, death—and possibly freedom.
The sky cracked open with a deafening roar—the fractured moon shedding tears of black fire.
The trial's cruel calculus pressed upon him.
His voice was a cold steel whisper: "I choose to break the covenant. No more chains."
The woman's smile vanished, replaced by a snarl of shadow and rage.
"So be it, Hollowed. The city will remember. And your soul will burn with its fire."
As darkness surged forward to claim him, Nerin's scream tore through the night—a promise forged in pain and blood.
The war for the Hollowed City had only just begun.
The echoes of Nerin's scream faded into the hollow silence of the shattered city, swallowed by the bruised dusk that thickened like a suffocating shroud. The Spire of the Shattered Covenant behind him groaned as if mourning a wound freshly torn open—a wound that now pulsed through the veins of the city itself.
The moment he declared defiance, the Hollow Mark flared violently, its cold blue fire scorching flesh and bone like a predator's bite. It was no longer just a brand; it was a living curse, a parasite writhing beneath his skin, twisting his blood and soul into jagged shards.
The woman—now a shadow of wrath and fury—vanished into the darkness, but her warning hung heavy in the air: the city would remember. And his soul would burn.
Nerin stumbled forward, the city twisting grotesquely around him. Buildings bent and writhed as if alive, their hollow windows like gaping mouths whispering the names of the lost. The blood-red moss spread faster, reaching for him with tendrils slick with decay.
He clutched his chest where the Mark burned. His breath hitched—something was changing inside him. A dark hunger gnawed at his ribs, a thirst not for water or blood, but for power born from agony.
He collapsed against a crumbling wall, bone knife falling to the ground with a hollow clatter.
From the depths beneath the cracked stones, a slow, grinding sound began—a funeral dirge played by unseen hands. The earth trembled, and shadows pooled at his feet, thickening, twisting into shapes that clawed at his sanity.
A guttural voice emerged from the abyss, ancient and hungry:
"You broke the covenant, Hollowed. Now pay the price."
The shadows surged, and from the darkness stepped grotesque figures—once-human, now twisted by the city's curse into hollowed wraiths. Their eyes were empty voids, mouths split into too-wide grins that swallowed light.
One reached out, its clawed fingers grazing Nerin's skin, sending shards of icy pain through his veins.
"Your defiance unbinds us," it rasped. "But freedom is a blade that cuts both ways."
Nerin gritted his teeth, pain blooming like black roses beneath his skin.
The Mark flared again, and with it came a surge of clarity—a brutal, ruthless logic that sharpened his instincts. He could feel the curse feeding on his suffering, yes—but also granting him strength.
To wield that power, he had to surrender a part of himself.
A choice screamed in his mind:
Sacrifice his memories... his humanity... or let the city consume him whole.
The city's shadows closed in, the price of breaking the covenant exacted in full.
Nerin's voice was a vow carved in bone and fire:
"I will pay any price. Even if I am the last shard left standing."
And as the Hollowed City whispered its eternal curse, Nerin embraced the darkness—not as a victim, but as a predator awakened.
The sacrifice was no ritual. It was a tearing—a brutal unraveling of self that bled into every shard of Nerin's fractured mind. Memories peeled away like flayed skin, each one a shard of light snuffed by an encroaching void. The price for breaking the covenant wasn't just agony. It was erasure.
He staggered through the blood-stained streets, the city around him a living wound of rot and whispers. Faces of those he once knew flickered like dying stars in his fractured mind—each a ghost fading into the endless dusk.
The Mark on his palm pulsed coldly, no longer just a brand, but a conduit of hollowed power. The blue fire burned deeper, now a pulse syncing with the throb of his own heart, or what remained of it.
His body moved on instinct, a predator stripped of memory but sharpened by pain and ruthless logic.
Ahead, the ruins of an ancient cathedral loomed—a shattered beacon where the city's dark heart bled through the cracked stones. Nerin knew, without knowing why, that this place held answers—or perhaps more curses.
Inside, the air tasted of ash and forgotten sins. Shadows clung to the walls like living scars, whispering secrets in a tongue older than time.
From the darkness emerged a figure—a man draped in tattered robes, eyes blazing with a cold light that pierced the abyss.
"You are the Hollowed Remnant," the stranger intoned, voice echoing like a death knell. "The last echo of a soul broken but unyielding."
Nerin's gaze locked on him, the pain behind those words a mirror of his own fractured being.
"The city's curse is not just a prison," the man continued. "It is a crucible. And you... are its forge."
The stranger extended a hand, veins pulsing with shadows. "I offer you a choice—embrace the Hollowed power and transcend the ruins, or succumb and become yet another whisper lost in the dusk."
Nerin's fingers trembled, the knife in his hand a lifeline tethered to a past slipping through his grasp.
The cold fire in the Mark flared brighter, and for a moment, the pain was a symphony—harsh, unrelenting, but alive.
"I choose to forge," Nerin said, voice low, resolute. "Not to be broken, but remade."
The stranger nodded, shadows spiraling like chains around them.
As the city groaned beneath the weight of forgotten blood and shattered covenants, a new chapter began—born in fire, forged in pain, and destined to burn brighter than the hollowed dusk itself.