Page 13 of Hollowed

But I had never felt more claimed.

I don't know how long I lay there. Time had become something else. Sacred. Suspended. Each breath stretched like a prayer I didn't know the words to.

The basin had gone still. The water quieted like it had never been moved. The fire had faded from the edges of the chapel, retreated to its shadows, licking only the walls it meant to leave blackened, not broken. And he?—

He had gone quiet too. But not away. His silence pressed against my skin like a second washing. Like he was letting what he'd done to me settle. Letting his claim sink past flesh, past bone, into whatever part of me would remember this forever.

I could feel him.

Somewhere close. The weight of him without the weight. His presence throbbed in the air around me like a held breath, like a warning that didn’t need a voice.

My skin was clean, but I didn’t feel new. I felt exposed. As if the ash and silk had been my last defense, and now I lay beneath the weight of my own name, stripped of context.

Except I didn’t know my name anymore.

Only the sound of his voice when he saidmine.

My hands lay on my chest, folded like prayer. My thighs ached. My throat pulsed. My body was still.

Not from fear.

From understanding.

He returned with something in his hands.

I didn’t look at first. I only heard the soft scratch of it against the stone. A brush of linen. A soft crackle.

Then the sound of a book opening.

Not a modern book.

One that breathed with every turned page.

A ledger.

Bound in cracked leather, dark as dried blood. The spine worn smooth from centuries of hands that had no right to touch it. When he opened it, the pages exhaled—a breath of ash and iron, of vows written in fluids thicker than ink.

Heavy enough to carry what it did. Heavy enough to carry me.

I turned my head.

He sat beside the slab, not touching me. Cross-legged, robes pooled around him like ash made solid. The book rested on his knees. His fingers brushed the pages like he was afraid of waking something.

“This is the record,” he said. Low. Gravel rubbed through scripture.

“Not of sin. Not of blood. Of vows.”

He turned another page.

The script was sharp. Black ink, carved in strokes too precise to be careless. No titles. No headings.

Just names.

Some were crossed out.

Some circled.

All final.

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