Hollow Core

by Gage Lee

  “I see.” Hahen examined my wound again. “You’re lucky to be alive, Jace. Are you sure this is the right place for you?”

  “Of course it is.” I tried to stiffen my shoulders to show my disdain for his question, and my injuries fussed at my efforts. “I have to do this, Hahen. If I let them chase me out, everything I’ve suffered will be for nothing.”

  “If they kill you, it will be for nothing, as well.”

  That seemed to be a worry for everyone but me.

  “I’m too stubborn to die,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  That went on for weeks. Hahen fussed over me like a cat after a wayward kitten. Even when I told him I was feeling better, he didn’t push my lessons. The spirit assured me that I’d kept up with all of my classmates, though it was hard to believe that when my scrivenings still looked like a kindergartner’s scribbles.

  Maybe I should have worked harder on my academics, but I was just so tired and I’d become obsessed with finishing the library. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something hidden in the puzzle of books, some mysterious pattern waiting for me to unlock its secrets.

  And then I found it.

  My shadow serpents had just removed a particularly intricate pyramid of books from the center of the stacks when I saw something on the floor. It was small, not much larger than my outstretched hand, but it was deeply etched into the stones. I blew the dust out of it and kneeled down for a closer look.

  I’d uncovered a simple black circle surrounded by a deep trench in the floor. The black coloring was thicker and more durable than simple paint. When I rapped my knuckles against the dark spot, it rang like a metal gong.

  “That’s different,” I said to the rats who’d surrounded me.

  There was no handle or other obvious mechanism to open or move the spot. I borrowed jinsei from my rodent companions, but it flowed around the ring and then vanished in a puff of opalescent haze after a few moments. I couldn’t push it, I couldn’t twist it, and there was no way to pull it. My shadow serpents couldn’t budge it, either, and after an hour or so I shambled back to my cot and lay down. Every inch of my body ached. I needed sleep.

  The mystery of the black spot had other ideas. Every time I closed my eyes, it swam up through my thoughts and demanded I decode its secrets.

  With sleep out of my reach, I activated the Army of Unseen Eyes technique and dispatched a few dozen rats to search the rest of the stacks. The black spot had no aura, which was unfortunate, but the black dot seemed easy enough for the rats to identify. The rodent army scrambled to the books, nosed in every shadowed corner, and creeped through the darkness in search of our quarry.

  They found nothing that night, or the next. Two more weeks passed, then three.

  And then, with one week left in the semester, the Army of Unseen Eyes made a discovery in the dead of night.

  There were three more black spots hidden around the perimeter of the stacks. Each of them was hidden in intricate engravings that had been completely hidden by cobwebs and years of dust. Those spots formed a perfect triangle around the central spot in the center of the room.

  It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  I hauled my exhausted carcass to the central spot and squatted down next to it. I mobilized the rats so three of the largest were stationed near each of the the other spots. My rodents balanced themselves on the grooves of the engravings and waited for my command.

  “Push,” I ordered them.

  They threw their weight against the black circles and all three depressed with simultaneous clicks. The circle in front of me twisted left, right, then sank down into the floor with a faint, gritty rasp. The hole it left behind was nearly as dark as the circle itself had been, but there was enough light from my jinsei sphere to see the faint outline of a spiral engraved around the perimeter of the hole.

  My heart’s rhythm became slow and ponderous, and it pounded out the slow measures of my breath as I considered my options. The hole was large enough for me to put my hand into it, and deep enough to accommodate my entire arm without my fingers touching the bottom.

  I reached into the opening and traced the spiral groove with the tip of my finger. Its edges were sharp enough to cut if I wasn’t careful, though the groove itself was shallow. I funneled some jinsei from the rodents and purified it before pushing it through my channels and out the tip of my finger. The process was difficult and left my arm feeling bruised. It also didn’t appear to do anything. The droplet of sacred energy slid a few feet down the groove and then evaporated.

  While the jinsei hadn’t accomplished anything, it did show me that the groove could carry something. The odd thing was I didn’t see any way to pour fluids into the groove, and it seemed too shallow to accommodate a solid. Whatever the slot was meant to transport would have to be placed directly into it.

  On a hunch, I pressed my finger against the edge of the groove and cut a narrow slice through its ball. A drop of my blood fell into the groove and slithered down its length. Unlike the jinsei, the blood flowed quickly and smoothly.

  It also glowed brighter as it descended. The blood spiraled down and down, farther than I would’ve imagined possible. Its fiery light grew more intense with every passing moment. The floor groaned beneath me, and stones in the walls shifted. Dust trickled from the ceiling, and my rats chittered with concern.

  Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea.

  My blood finally reached the bottom of the spiral, which had to be at least fifty feet below the floor. The drop glowed like a furnace, and its radiance illuminated the spiral in a fiery trail. The sound of grinding gears echoed up through the hole, and the floor’s shuddering grew more intense. Dust shook loose from the walls of the stacks and cobwebs drifted down from the domed ceiling like ancient streamers. The rats shivered and hunkered down around me, their noses twitching and their tails thrashing against the floor. Insects and spiders fled the vibrations in the walls and sought refuge in the stacks of books in a chattering tide.

  A sharp crack echoed through my cell and a pair of curved lines radiated out from the hole. The edges of the floor twisted and drifted apart.

  I scrambled back from the edge of the dilating hole and held my breath as the vibrations toppled several of my carefully arranged towers of books. One of the tomes slid past the edge of the opening and tumbled into the darkness, vanishing with a flutter of ancient parchment wings.

  Then, as suddenly as it had started, the commotion stopped.

  The opening in the floor was now twenty feet wide. The spiral groove had become an elaborate staircase that wound down the perimeter of the opening to the tunnel’s opening. My glowing blood called to me like a lighthouse beacon.

  I hesitated with my foot on the first step. A strange premonition unfolded in my mind like an origami design in reverse. In that moment, I could turn back. I could tell Hahen what I’d found and ask his opinion about what I should do. He’d likely tell me to ignore it and figure out some way to seal the mysterious hole forever. If I did that, I’d continue traveling the path I was on now.

  But if I took another step, and then another, and another, I’d head deeper and deeper into a mystery that would change me forever. Someone had hidden something down there. Maybe they’d never meant for it to be found. Maybe it was a horrible evil they’d bottled up for the safety of Empyreal society.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it was meant for me.

  It seemed impossible that someone could’ve crafted this chamber here, far below the rest of the School of Swords and Serpents in a place that had been abandoned for decades, on the off chance that someone like me would discover it.

  It also seemed impossible that a little camper boy with a hollow core could’ve risen to the top of his class, could’ve defeated much more powerful jinsei artists in single combat, and survived the theft of millions of oboli worth of jinsei from one of the five sacred sages.

  I descended the stairs in a rush.

  The soles of my soft sh
oes slapped against the stone steps. Around and around, down and down, I went. I felt like Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole toward some strange and alien place that would leave its mark on her forever more.

  The steps moved beneath me as I descended. The silo and the basin that held my blood grew wider. Something dark and slender rose through that fiery light and then opened like a black rose to reveal a glossy jewel at its core.

  The last step deposited me in front of this mysterious treasure. What I’d taken for a jewel was a metal-bound book. It was roughly the size of my open hand and a little more than an inch thick. The black metal was emblazoned with an obsidian circle, and a series of ornate letters wrapped around it.

  “The Manual of the New Moon.” A strange chill shot through my core at the sound of the words. The cover of the book opened with a subdued clang, revealing the first glossy black page to my greedy eyes.

  The strange material was covered in silver letters that shifted and twisted away from me when I tried to read them. I caught snatches and snippets of text, and they tumbled through my thoughts in short bursts.

  “And so it came to pass in the waning years of the Utter War against the Locust Court that the spirits of the void grew too numerous for our defenders to combat. Faced with certain destruction, it was agreed that Empyreal society would enact the Dread Fusion.”

  A bizarre flash of images cascaded through my skull. Warriors bearing the red-and-white arms of the Resplendent Suns and the gray robes of the Thunder’s Children clans walked side by side into an enormous black gate. Pale, thin humanoids emerged from the far side of the gate, their bodies surrounded by empty auras that cracked and groaned with an unearthly hunger.

  “The get of this dark union were the Empyrean Flame’s last, darkest hope. They were the sons and daughters of the New Moon, hollow, desperate creatures who stood against the hungry spirits of the Locust Court.”

  A small force of the New Moon warriors assaulted insect spirits armed with chitinous blades and snapping mandibles. I expected these fierce new creations to unleash horrific techniques that would shred the spirits, blasts of jinsei that would leave craters where humanity’s enemies had once stood.

  Instead, the clanmates of the New Moon stopped, closed their eyes, and drew in a great breath.

  Jinsei flowed out of the hungry spirits and into the Empyrean Flame’s secret weapon. The insect creatures fell to their knees and clutched their heads. Strange clotted jinsei the color of old milk splashed from between their sharpened jaws, their weapons turned as brittle as old ice and cracked into shards, and patches of rust-like decay spread across their armored carapaces.

  My head throbbed, and my mind reeled. The silver letters leaped from the black page and surrounded me in a whirling storm that threatened to push my mind over the edge into insanity. I couldn’t absorb any more of the information, it was too much. I slammed the book closed, snatched it off its pedestal, and dragged myself back up the stairs.

  As I climbed, my mind picked at the history the book had thrust into my mind. The technique the warriors of the New Moon clan had used was too close to the Pauper’s Dagger path for it to be a coincidence. They had ripped the jinsei out of their enemies in much the same way I stole it from the rats. They were stronger, certainly, but only because they knew what they were.

  My wounds had almost healed, but lack of sleep, the steep down then up climb, and the blast of knowledge I’d absorbed left me as limp as an overcooked ramen noodle by the time I reached the stacks. It was all I could do to carry my treasure back to my cot.

  Where Hahen waited for me.

  He watched me approach with red, sad eyes. He crouched next to my cot, leaning heavily on the bed Tycho had made for me.

  “My boy,” he whispered when I was a few feet away, “you have walked so far along this new path I can only just see you from here.”

  His words rang ominously in my ears. This wasn’t the first time he’d spoken of my path and how I’d progressed along it.

  “You can come with me.” I showed him the book. “You can help me figure out what I’m supposed to do. What I’m meant to be.”

  I no longer had any doubt that the New Moon clan was always meant to be mine. It seemed so right, and I wanted Hahen’s help to unravel the rest of this mystery. He knew so much more than I did. His help would be invaluable.

  “Where you go now, I cannot follow.” Hahen patted the cot. “Come, sit with me this last time.”

  “You don’t mean that.” The idea of losing Hahen’s guidance chilled me. I sat on the bed next to my harsh taskmaster, and my eyes burned with powerful sorrow.

  “I wish I didn’t.” Hahen sighed. He tapped the black book in my lap. “The New Moon were not what you think.”

  “They saved us from the monsters of the void.”

  “They were the monsters.” Hahen stroked the book’s cover, then pulled his hand away as if it had singed his fingers.

  “They were the only ones who could fight the Locust Court.”

  Hahen looked up at me and showed me a bone-deep sorrow.

  “Have you ever known the Empyreals to throw away a useful tool?” Hahen gestured toward the books stacked around us. “They won’t even let go of their garbage.”

  “You told me these books could be useful to me.”

  “I lied.” Hahen patted my leg. “I never wanted this for you, Jace. Please believe me.”

  “Honored spirit, what do you mean?” My thoughts were an emotional jumble. The mixture of excitement and fear had left my brain scrambled.

  “It’s not my place to tell you the rest of the story, my boy.” Hahen glanced at the book and shuddered. “It’s all in there. If you can understand it. I started you on this path to help you. But I shouldn’t have done that to you. It wasn’t fair.”

  Hahen stood with a groan and wrapped his arms around my neck. His body was surprisingly firm and resilient for a spirit, and his core warmed me like a bowl of hot soup.

  “Now, for once, listen to me.” Hahen whispered the words in my ear and hugged me tighter. “You do not have to follow this path. You can turn back. It will not be easy, but you can do it.”

  “And if I don’t?” Now that I was so close to discovering the truth about my core, the idea of turning back seemed insane.

  “Then I won’t be able to help you.” Hahen struggled to keep his voice level as he said the words. “No one will.”

  The Dragon

  AFTER HAHEN LEFT, I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning in my cot. The pain from my injuries faded day after day, but there was no cure for my growing restlessness and frustration. I swore to myself that I’d badger the rat spirit until he gave me answers the next day. I needed to know why he was so afraid of the New Moon clan and what they’d become. From what I could tell, they’d been the most powerful Empyreals who ever existed.

  They were humanity’s greatest heroes.

  And now they were gone.

  I had to know why.

  But Hahen had changed when he returned to the stacks. He delivered a bowl of plain oatmeal for breakfast and waited patiently for me to shovel it down my gullet. The instant I finished, he took the bowl out of my hands and took a seat in front of me.

  “Let us begin breathing exercises.” He closed his eyes and fell into a light cycling trance.

  “I have a question for you,” I said.

  “You are not cycling.”

  “It’s important.”

  “I am here to teach you.” Hahen let out a long sigh. “I will happily answer any questions you have about breath cycling. Otherwise, please silence yourself and focus on your breathing technique.”

  “Tell me why you’re so afraid of the New Moon clan.”

  Hahen’s eyes remained firmly shut, and his breath flowed through him like a cool mountain stream.

  “How can I decide which path to choose if you won’t give me the information I need to make a choice?” I pleaded with the rat spirt. “This is my chance to h
eal my core, to become a true Empyreal. You can’t expect me to throw that away.”

  “I will see you in the morning, Jace.” Hahen stood and turned to face the depths of the stacks. “I am very tired.”

  After three days of that routine, I gave up on getting information out of the rat spirit. He was the closest thing I had to a friend while I was imprisoned, and I didn’t want to drive a deeper wedge through our relationship. If he stopped showing up for my lessons, I’d be truly alone.

  But that didn’t mean I had to stop asking questions.

  There was someone else who might know what I needed.

  And I needed to know, soon. My time was running out. There couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks left in the year. Then it would be time for the final challenge, our rankings would be tallied, and ten percent of us would be tossed out with the garbage. I had no way to see where I stood against the other initiates, but I couldn’t imagine I was anywhere near the top of the rankings. I’d been in the hole for going on six months, and that was plenty of time for the professors and Grayson to feed easy challenges to my classmates and push me down to the bottom of the class.

  But maybe, just maybe, I could pass the final challenge with enough rankings to claw my way out of the dumpster. It was my only hope.

  Most of the library had been organized into neat stacks, by then. There were some piles around the borders of the room that were still in need of attention, but I’d have those wrapped up in the next day or two. I’d earned a little time to experiment and see if I couldn’t get some answers.

  I lay down on the cot and let my spirit senses drift away from my body. I extended my awareness out beyond the stacks, past the ancient passages that connected it to the rest of the building, until I felt the heart of the School. The spiritual exploration was a grueling effort, and beads of sweat dotted my body by the time I’d reached my goal.

  With my supernatural awareness stretched as far as I could manage, I searched for a suitable rat. I found dozens of them hiding beneath the floor in the dining room, even more hidden in the attic, and too many to count scuttling under the floorboards. What I needed, though, was something closer to the students’ rooms.