Chapter 15: Beneath the Hollow Earth
Elias didn’t remember falling.
One moment, the floor cracked beneath him. The next, he was weightless—swallowed whole by darkness. The scream died in his throat as gravity seized him, and the world became a blur of shadows and cold.
Then—
Impact.
He landed hard on something not quite solid, like sinking into a dense fog made of ice and sorrow. His head spun. He gasped for air that stank of wet stone and rot.
“Grayson!” he choked out.
No answer.
He struggled to his feet, every muscle aching. Around him, a cavern stretched into impossible darkness. The walls glistened with moisture, etched with more of those eerie symbols from the Book of Shadows. A faint humming filled the air, like distant chanting underwater.
A shuffle behind him.
He turned quickly—too quickly—and pain shot through his shoulder. He winced, blinking in the gloom, and then saw it.
Grayson.
Or… what remained of him.
He wasn’t dead. But something had changed.
Grayson stood unnaturally still, his eyes wide and unfocused. His skin was pale, veins black and webbed across his arms like roots. He didn’t speak. Didn’t blink.
“Grayson,” Elias whispered, approaching cautiously. “It’s me. You’re okay, we just—we fell. Do you remember?”
A long pause.
Then, Grayson’s lips parted. Not in a smile. Not in a word.
In a whisper.
“The Earth remembers what man forgets.”
Elias froze.
The voice wasn’t Grayson’s. It was layered—dozens of tones at once, like a chorus of the damned.
Grayson’s body convulsed, and he dropped to his knees, clutching his head as if trying to silence something inside.
And then—
The ground shook violently.
The walls of the cavern peeled open like a wound, revealing a corridor beyond that pulsed with a sickly green glow. Bones lined the walls. Not arranged, but grown—twisted into the stone like roots.
Elias stared, horrified.
This isn’t just underground... it’s alive.
He didn’t want to go forward. But he couldn’t stay.
Dragging Grayson behind him, he entered the corridor, each step echoing with an unnatural rhythm. The whispers grew louder, clearer.
Names.
Hundreds of them.
Some he recognized. People from town. People who had vanished. People long thought dead.
And among them—
His own name.
Scratched into the living wall, still wet with blood.
Elias Thorne – To Be Claimed.
He stumbled back, heart pounding. “No. No, this isn’t real.”
But the wall pulsed like a heartbeat, as if laughing.
Ahead, the corridor widened into a vast chamber filled with stone pillars and ancient altars. At its center was a pool of black water, still as glass.
And floating just above it—
A child.
No older than ten, dressed in funeral white, her eyes completely black.
She turned her head toward him slowly.
“You’re late,” she said.
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