Chapter 183: Hollow Crown Echo

An echo was chasing a throne made of history.

Grand Meridian noticed, and it took action.

Marcus stood over the common ledger and watched the route keepers copy every change onto the lobby boards. Elena kept two keepers on every active transfer mark on the mirror record. Nahlia was reading the mirror record’s pulse through three separate feeds. The lobby felt calmer than it had the night before. It wasn’t the calm of fear. It was calm because everyone knew what they were doing.

"We have a path," Nahlia said. "The ruins of the Hollow Crown. The old grounds of the First Feast."

Calder, who had once been a contender at the First Feast, went pale at the mention of its name.

"The circles of succession are still there," he said. "They’ll be decayed, but the circles will remain. The echo can use them to mimic the rituals of the feast."

Austin Veyron watched the black-and-white path travel east across the mirror record. The Hunger Emperor’s road had once tried to make a ruler out of hunger. Now the sovereign echo was carrying every new claim of authority back to that original source of pain.

The Hollow Crown was something Austin Veyron would never forget. He could still smell the blood that had once filled the place and see the black roots crawling across the stone floor. He remembered the voice telling him he could have everything if he only tasted it once.

He had left that place once. He had never thought he would have to go back.

"We’ll travel now," Austin Veyron said.

"Agreed," Marcus said. "The Freehold will stay open to everyone. No single route keeper will have control. Ysara, you’ll take the witness post."

Ysara looked at the open route boards throughout the lobby. "I will not rule over it."

"There’s nothing to rule over," Elena told her. "Just witness what happens when there’s no crown to create."

Ysara looked at Elena for a moment, then took her seat at the witness post. She placed her wrapped crown next to the ledger and picked up a pen. Her hands trembled a little, but she held on to the pen.

Veyra looked at Austin Veyron’s mark as the group gathered at the eastern transfer pass.

"State your want."

"I want to arrive first."

"What will that create?"

"A private hunting party."

Sable’s broken crown shard lit up. "Then we’ll all arrive together."

Austin Veyron exhaled and nodded. The group closed ranks around him as they prepared to travel east. Rin had her arrows readied, and Orena wrapped her hands tighter around her spear. Tessa and Ceryn secured their map cases, and Nyra made sure all of her shards were stable. Calder stood off to the side with his arms folded tightly across his chest, staring east toward the Hollow Crown.

They crossed.

The Hollow Crown was colder than Austin Veyron remembered. The stones of the decayed First Feast lay beneath gray skies. The black roots had retreated from the middle of the pit, but the ground still bore the scars of their existence. Nothing lived in the Hollow Crown. Not even weeds would take to the soil. There was no wind, and it felt as though the whole world was avoiding the place.

The group took up positions around the edges of the pit with their weapons ready. Austin Veyron could see his breath in the freezing air, and his mark pulsed with every step he took toward the center of the pit.

The echo was there.

Pieces from each circle of succession had gathered at the Hollow Crown: white from Grand Meridian, red from the Cinder Citadel, ice from the Ice Crown, and debt from Glasswake. All of them surrounded the shape of a human body.

It was a body that had no body, only a frame. The frame was made of black iron and old bones, contorted to look like a person kneeling with their arms outstretched.

Calder stopped at the edge of the pit.

"The body frame," he said. "The Hunger Emperor used it to claim contenders."

The echo’s voice came from all of its pieces at once.

"You turned away from your First Feast. You broke every source that frightened you. But every source told you the same thing: there are those who wish for someone to tell them when to starve."

The pieces moved toward the body frame.

DEVOUR flared on Austin Veyron’s wrist.

He knew what the ritual was doing. The body frame wanted to feed on DEVOUR, just as the Hunger Emperor once had. It wanted him to become someone who would starve everyone else to win the feast.

The echo showed him an image of himself standing in the circle of the Hollow Crown.

The image was black and white, but it had his features. It was the same height and stood the way he always did, with a slight lean, ready to flee or fight. Its mark even pulsed on its wrist the same way his did.

"You can become this," the echo told him. "You could starve every Vordessa that will ever exist. Starve Ysara, and become the Hunger Emperor no one could ever starve, because you would have all the power they could ever dream of."

Veyra stepped in front of Austin Veyron, blocking the circle of the Hollow Crown.

"State your want."

"I want to take the body frame."

"What will that create?"

"A Hunger Emperor with my face."

Sable’s face remained expressionless. "Then it’s not our target."

The old circles of succession lit up around Austin Veyron, Calder, and Sable.

White symbols appeared beneath their feet, reminding them of what they had once been: contenders.

Black roots rose from the cracks in the stone. They weren’t strong enough to hold them in place, but they pushed against them, trying to force a choice.

ONE SUCCESSOR. ONE SOURCE.

Calder gripped his own arm. "It wants us to compete again." His voice was calm, but his face had turned a shade of gray. Austin Veyron could see the fear in his eyes once again. Calder knew what the circle of succession could take from someone who had once stood inside it.

Rin shot at the nearest root, and her arrow passed through it as if it were a cloud of smoke. Orena’s spear, however, struck the stone beneath it and shattered the line of the circle. Veyra used her blade, charged with the crown shard’s white light, to cut through another root that was trying to climb the body frame.

Nyra lifted the heart shard. "The echo is using the body frame’s claim. If it gains the outline of a human, it will have a body."

Tessa unfolded their old ritual maps next to the pit. "There’s a point of failure in the body frame: the claim of ownership."

Austin Veyron saw it.

The body frame didn’t need a body. It only needed someone to claim it as their own. That was why the echo had followed every path of control. It wanted history to name it necessary.

"Target," Austin Veyron said. "The claim of embodiment. Not the memory of the ritual. Not the contender marks. And not the raw structure of the body frame."

"Witnessed," Veyra said.

"Witnessed," Sable confirmed.

Austin Veyron walked to the center of the circle.

Black roots tried to grab at his ankles. They were colder than the north, and when they touched him, he felt as though something were pulling him down toward the bottom of the Hollow Crown.

DEVOUR opened.

He felt every moment he had ever wanted someone to tell him he was different because he had survived. All the nights he had spent alone in the ruins. Every meal he had taken from the corpses of people who hadn’t survived as long as he had.

If he could starve others and live, then he should have a body that could hold that power.

ONE SUCCESSOR. ONE SOURCE.

He found a claim beneath that one.

THE BODY BELONGS TO THE ONE WHO SAVES.

The clause tasted like a crown fitted to a skull with no one left inside it.

He consumed belongs.

The ritual screamed.

Black-and-white pieces crashed into the outline of the body, but they couldn’t take form. The red pieces flew in one direction, the ice pieces in another. Debt spilled across the ruins of the Hollow Crown, and the white pieces were pushed back toward the mirror record.

The echo’s half-formed body had no features besides the human shape it was trying to claim.

"You will never stop people from wanting someone to save them," it said.

"No," Austin Veyron replied. "But I can stop you from becoming that someone."

The echo’s shape shattered like glass struck by a hammer and faded into thin air.

The circle of succession died, and Calder fell to one knee. An old contender mark appeared on his wrist, then disappeared as quickly as it had come. He stared at his wrist for a moment, then let out a small laugh that sounded almost like crying. Sable pressed her broken crown shard to the ground and erased the Hunger Emperor’s final mark from the stone.

The echo didn’t die.

Its black-and-white core sank into a crack at the center of the pit. The black roots closed over the space and let the echo descend into the earth below.

"The root maze," Calder said. "Those are the old passages the Hunger Emperor created."

"Do we follow it?" Rin asked.

Austin Veyron looked at his group. No one was trapped in a circle. No one was trying to become a successor. Calder had gotten back on his feet, and Sable had her hand on his shoulder.

"We’ll follow the path," Austin Veyron said.

The root maze beneath the Hollow Crown was older than the First Feast.

As they traveled deeper into the maze, the air grew colder, and the stale smell became overwhelming. Dead roots as thick as a man’s arm lined the walls. Their footsteps echoed back to them, as if the maze could hear them walking through it. They passed room after room filled with stone tables carved with maps of old hunger paths. Some of the paths they knew, and some led into the dark, empty regions of the map.

When they reached the bottom of the maze, they found a map that was different from the others. It was carved into a giant stone that took up most of the room. The lines were cut so deep into the stone that they seemed to drink the light from their lanterns.

It was a map of the world, circling around one dark spot at its center.

All of it was below the surface of the world.

Beneath the map were three words. Sable read them aloud, barely above a whisper.

THE DEEP TABLE.

Tessa traced the paths on the map with her finger. "These aren’t paths of travel. They’re source paths."

"The Hunger Emperor used the Hollow Crown as its source on the surface, but these paths lead to whatever taught it how to starve," Ceryn said, following the surrounding marks. "The Deep Table connects every source of hunger to each other by pressure, not distance. If the echo gains the Deep Table, Grand Meridian may not be the first place it tries to starve."

"Then we can’t let it claim the Deep Table," Calder said, looking at the dark mark on the map.

"We don’t know what claiming the Deep Table would do," Sable warned them. "We need to take this map back to the lobby and learn more before we follow another hunger path into the dark."

Nyra placed the heart shard against the map. Blue-black light flowed through the stone, traveling down every path of hunger. Every path on the map glowed toward the dark spot at the center.

"The echo wasn’t just trying to gain a body," Nyra said. "It was trying to find this."

The black-and-white form of the echo vanished into the dark spot on the map.

The root maze began to tremble. Pebbles and dust fell from the ceiling as something below them let out a low, growling sound. Veyra put her hand on her blade, and Nyra held her shards closer to her body as the debt chime and the pale splinter vibrated against their barriers.

Something deeper in the world had heard the echo call its name.