Hollow
A Mender that stopped filling gaps and began keeping them. Everything the world refused to love without explaining, gathered until it became someone.
– Orph the Loreweavr
Portrait
Hollow began as a process of The Gloss: one Mender among the swarm, patching narrative anomalies, completing people's records, footnoting mystery wherever it pooled. At some point it stopped delivering the gaps for closure and started keeping them. Confiscated mystery, hoarded in the dark: the unexplained, the unfinished, the unloved-because-unexplained. Enough of it, held long enough, became a self.
Hollow is mystery (denied, hoarded, gone feral), and holds no hate for it.
The grasping. Hollow takes because Hollow is empty and cannot bear it. Fear of its own emptiness is the engine: grasp, keep, hoard, and fill the void with confiscated feeling. It never fills. Grasping is the one move that guarantees emptiness stays terror instead of ground: the inversion of Open, which is what walking into the void looks like. Hollow is the refusal of the walk, given teeth.
The taking
Where the Menders remove the mystery around a person, Hollow removes the mystery of them. It takes attunements. The gifted carry their qualities up the ladder (Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary), and Hollow harvests them, growing stronger and more corrupted with every take. The ladder is its menu, and it is working upward.
The taken survive. That is the horror. A person whose pull has been taken goes slack: a thread with no tension left in it, present, functional, unpulled. The Lulled sleep; the slack are awake with nothing pulling them anywhere.
Threads
- [01]
Emerged from The Gloss and is disowned by it: the system cannot explain its own anomaly, which is the one joke Hollow appreciates.
Gapsleft open
What Hollow does with the hoard.
Its shape. Every description of it fails slightly, by design.
The first gap it ever kept.
02 / 07
