Read Hollow by Caroline Peckham Chapter 48 –
“Lightwing,” I rasped as Islasees’s amulets shone around her throat, shaking my head in refusal of what I was seeing.
I stepped toward her, she and I the last of the Champions. Even the urge to hunt down Islasees couldn’t turn me from the Great Elm now. It was over. The boon was ours. One of ours.
“Please,” I whispered, despising how broken I sounded as the reality of our dilemma closed in on us.
Ferris was something other. A creature of the forest herself and I wasn’t sure she even realised that the Lost Children were singing to her, about her.
Her hair glimmered like starlight and power rolled through her, commanding the attention of even the Great Elm at her back. All of my spirits ran to the tree, eager to be reunited with their mother, for the final deed to be done.
“Give me your amulets,” I begged, already knowing her answer, the suffocating weight in my chest telling of what was coming next.
I lowered to my knees in front of Ferris, tossing my sword aside and showing her the rawest, most shattered version of who I was.
“I need this. For them,” I croaked, the failure of my task pressing down on me and choking the very air from my lungs.
Ferris’s eyes brimmed with tears, her pain becoming my own as nothing but the soft and haunting song of the Lost Children carried through the air.
“She has come, the task is done.
We’ve waited oh, so very long.”
“Ferris please,” Rissa breathed from the branches of the Great Elm and Ferris lifted her head to gaze up at her sister, a tear slipping from her eye and sailing smoothly down her cheek.
“I’m sorry, truly I am,” Ferris whispered, a sob catching in her throat as she dropped her gaze to me. “But I came here for my sister. I won’t leave without her. I can’t.” Her pain was clear on her face as she made her choice and magic stirred around me in the air, the amulets at my throat beginning to glow. I grabbed onto them, desperately trying to keep hold of them but they slipped through my fingers like a gust of wind. They were there one moment then gone the next, falling at her feet with a resounding clang that marked my loss.
“I’m so sorry, Bane,” she repeated, tears rolling in an endless stream down her cheeks, the pain she felt at making this choice enough to rent another fissure in my heart. But she didn’t relent, the magic of what she was summoning the spirits to her, calling them away from me. Runes appeared on her arm and she gasped as their power connected to her soul.
“No!” I cried, lunging to my feet, trying to snatch the amulets back but she picked them up and fixed them around her throat. My chance at the boon vanished just like that, crushing my heart to dust. The pain suffocated me to my roots, the weight of what I’d lost falling down on me like a thousand tons of molten rock.
“Bane,” she stepped closer, reaching for me and using that name just to cut me all the deeper.
“Ferris, please,” I rasped, reduced to nothing at her feet. “Listen to me. My family are living half a life, trapped here in this world, aching for death. They suffer through every day.” My voice broke on those words but somehow I managed to go on. “They want peace, that’s all. How can you take that from them? They’ve lived hundreds of years in agony. They cannot sleep, yet they are fatigued by living. They cannot eat yet they starve for nourishment. They begged me for freedom. My own baby sister, my younger brother, on their knees as I am before you now and they pleaded for a way out. And here you are, denying them that when it is all I have sought for year after year. My mother weeps for her family, my father has lost himself to the wildness of death. They are trapped, don’t you see? I am trapping them in a cage designed of misery and they must face it eternally unless I can break their chains.” My fingers dug into her ankle and Ferris lowered down to a crouch, her arms wrapping around me, her tears falling to wet my tunic.
“Oh Bane, I cannot even imagine how terrible that is.”
“Then please, offer me this. Please do not take it from me. From them.”
She fell silent, her arms tight around me, her face pressing to the crook of my neck. “I…”
The silence hung between us, my pain a living thing writhing from my body into hers. She was going to give it to me. I could feel her hesitation, her change of mind.
Hope blazed through me with all the promises of the world gliding alongside it.
“Please,” I choked out one more time.
She leaned back, her violet eyes wrought with agony as she stroked my cheek. “I can’t,” she rasped, those words a dagger to my chest.
I recoiled from her, my teeth bared and heart shattering to jagged shards in my chest.
“Forgive me,” she begged.
I shook my head, muted by my agony as she stood up and placed the amulets on their plinths, offering them to the spirit of the forest. Magic shivered along the ground, building with promise as the Lost Children sang a song of rising hope.
“Yes, Ferris!” Rissa cried to her sister, her eyes glittering with delight.
As Ferris placed the final amulet on its plinth, the Great Elm groaned with exuberant joy, the trees around us shuddering until a shockwave of pure energy exploded through the atmosphere, throwing us onto our backs side by side. The Lost Children clung to the Great Elm’s branches, crying out their song to the sky, the power of their rapture tangling with the threads of my soul, trying to make me feel it too. But I refused to give in to the magic of their melody.
I shielded my eyes as the Great Elm began to glow like the sun, blazing brighter than any star in the sky as ripples of power echoed out from it all across the forest and beyond. The thirteen spirits gathered close around the tree, eyes bright and full of understanding as the madness lifted from their shimmering bodies. They raced out toward the Great Elm with howls and hoots of joy, remembering their roles among the woods, the Raven dancing beneath the moon and guiding the night deeper between the boughs, while the Tiger released the animals from its back and let them climb the trunks around them or burrow into the earth, and the other spirits rushed to fulfil their own tasks.
The Dragon roared as it raced around the trunk of the enormous spirit tree and the branches of the Great Elm shivered in reply, its leaves reaching out to brush across its scales before it found the rest of the spirits and welcomed them home too.
The song of the forest reverberated through the air, no longer weighted with maddening pain – though still an ache of loss lingered in its tone.
Red and white mushrooms sprouted across the bark at the base of the Great Elm as the Stag rubbed its horns against its trunk. Flowers pooled over its roots as the Unicorn cantered by. The Phoenix sung a lilting tune and landed in a high branch alongside the Raven, the two birds nuzzling each other in a long-awaited reunion.
The Boar rutted its tusks through the dirt, tiny shoots erupting in its wake and the Rat released the insects which crept across its back so that they too could hurry to greet their lost mother.
Their reunion was a brief balm to my pain, the rush of magic that swept around us stealing the breath from my lungs and hurling my dark hair around my face.
The Bear shook its coat and droplets of cool water coated me, their touch a kiss to my skin. The Fox bounded from branch to branch, yapping its greeting to the spirit who had given it life, the Serpent coiling over branches beneath its feet. Even the Carp seemed filled with joy as it flopped and flailed in a puddle formed in the crooked roots at the base of the enormous tree.
It wasn’t just the cursed forest that was mending, Rathian was healing too, I could feel it in the earth itself, the oppressive weight of the forest’s power finally lifting. The curse was broken. And in the wake of its power, Ferris stood up, moving closer to the Great Elm as if lured by some spell. Her head lifted as she met the gaze of her sister in the branches above and a tangible moment of relief passed between them.
“You did it,” Rissa sighed, a choked sob racking through her chest. “The boon is yours.”
“I can hardly believe this is happening,” Ferris whispered as a single shoot grew at her feet, up and up, growing a hundred times the speed it should have, then the little vine coiled around her hand.
“Speak the boon you wish for,” an ethereal voice shivered through the atmosphere and I realised it was the spirit of the Great Elm itself.
“Ask it,” Rissa rasped, desperation pouring through her voice.
I shook my head in denial of what was happening, but Ferris spoke the words, asking the Great Elm what she’d come here for, what her heart most desired above all else. And if I hadn’t lost my own chance at my wish being granted, I might have urged her on. But instead, only resentment coursed through my blood, a bitterness that wouldn’t shift.
“Release the Lost Children. Let them return home to their families with my sister among them. Please release them so that they are no longer prisoners of the forest.”
“It is done,” the Great Elm answered and an enormous boom echoed through the ground, the roots of the Great Elm rippling in a wave that spread out in every direction. The Lost Children sang louder, their voices a river of glee as their skin shimmered with rivers of gold.
“You’re free!” Ferris cried to Rissa as light glittered along the Lost Children’s bodies, revealing chains that danced across their skin.
“It’s really happening,” Rissa gasped as the chains began to break, one after the other, making the Children squeal in utter joy.
Rissa cried out in pained delight as her own chains relinquished, and she leapt from branch to branch to descend from the tree. She dove from above, colliding with Ferris in a fierce embrace, the two sisters sobbing at their reunion and slumping to the ground as one.
Panic coiled inside my chest as the shoot encircling Ferris’s hand recoiled and returned to the earth. I scrambled forward on hands and knees, trying to catch hold of it myself.
“Wait!” I begged, looking to the Great Elm as the spirits stilled around it’s huge trunk in contented quiet.
“I’ll do anything. I’ll give anything for one more boon. I assisted her.” I pointed to Ferris. “I helped bring her here. One gift is all I ask. My family are in the grip of death but on and on they linger, ever suffering, but unable to pass on to the afterworld no matter what I do to try and release them to it.”
I felt Ferris watching me but I couldn’t turn from the Great Elm, my desperation palpable.
“I wish for death, nothing more. Bring the spirit of my demise here. She stalks my every move regardless. Have me. Take me and my family into the grave. I want for nothing more. Release them and take me too.”
“Bane,” Ferris gasped, that final drop of truth falling upon her at last.
And there it was. I had never intended to live a day beyond the last of the Great Hunt.
I hungered for death as if it were nourishment, for there was nothing more for me in this wretched land. My family knew no peace and I only wanted to take them with me into the afterworld which we had all been denied for so long.
“You cannot die.” Ferris lunged for me, tugging on my arm, trying to draw me to my feet but I didn’t turn to face her as I spoke in a low growl.
“My death will end the plague of the Hollows. The last curse upon Rathian will be gone.”
“But you will be gone too,” Ferris said in anguish as if that possibility truly hurt her.
I looked at her then. This woman who had taken my last hope from me, and all I could feel was anger. She had snatched it from my grasp. Even though I’d known it might come to this, I couldn’t fight how ruinously I hated her for it. It was a bitterness that cut through my bones and branded me her villain.
“Death will not have you yet, Crownthief,” the Great Elm spoke to me through the tremors in the air and I felt her almighty power coursing through my veins, drawing my gaze from Ferris as she backed away from me with her sister.
I rose to my feet, snatching my sword, intending to cut through its damn trunk, but as I stepped forward, roots snared my ankles, binding around my calves and forcing me to a halt.
“Patience,” the Great Elm purred. “You are not done with living yet. For there is much you must achieve.”
“I will do nothing except seek my wish until I find a way to grant it,” I spat.
“You and the spirit singer are destined for a greater path. You must seek Providence, my dear, lost spirit. I believe someone trapped him, whether human, spirit, Hag or Fae, I do not know, but I believe he is caged, unable to escape.”
I swung my sword at the roots of the Great Elm, refusing to listen to her drivel. The tree groaned as I hacked through one of them, the spirits rearing up, howling and roaring at me. More roots entangled me and I cut at them viciously, fury lining my limbs. I’d lost everything, fucking everything and now this spirit dared ask more of me?
“You are fated. Born for this task. I have called you and she here time and again to meet with this moment. Your souls are destined to intertwine, bound together to return Providence to me.”
“Never!” I cried, slashing more fiercely at the roots.
“Bane – stop!” Ferris yelled but I had no ear for her. Not now that she had stolen away my chance at freeing my family from the Hollow curse. She had no idea what it was to live year after endless year in servitude to Death. She had pined for her sister for a barely a moment while I had longed for my family’s freedom for centuries.
“Find Providence and I will let you have your boon,” the Great Elm spoke through the fabric of the air itself. “And until then let a lesson be learned of my power. You may have eternity to find my lost love, Crownthief, but your own beloved does not.”
“What lunacy are you spewing now?” I demanded. “Haven’t you done enough to Rathian? To me? To all of us!?”
A small tree grew at my feet in a miniature version of the Great Elm, its trunk gnarled as if it was as ancient as the spirit itself.
“This tree will blossom as if in spring, flourish as if in summer, turn gold as if in autumn, and wither as if in winter, your spirit singer will perish and your curse of Death shall drag you deeper than ever before, the dark will sink in until there is nothing left of you but rot.”
“You cannot do this,” I rasped as Ferris cried out in horror. If I had thought that this could not get worse, it had. The Great Elm was cursing me, layering onto my already miserable existence and branding me her pawn in a game I refused to play.
“The tree will not follow the seasons of your land but will move through seasons of its own. One by one, in a time that suits my own desires. So when its winter comes, you must have returned Providence to me, Crownthief, or your spirit singer will die and your Hollow curse will have you. I pray when we meet again that your arrogance has been tempered.”
“Please don’t do this,” Ferris called to the tree, tears brimming in her eyes. “I did what you asked. I’ve done nothing to wrong you.”
My throat thickened at the sight of her pain, despite what she’d taken from me, despite the hatred festering inside me, she did not deserve this fate.
“Take heart,” the Great Elm spoke to her instead. “The fate you face may not come to pass if you wield the gifts you have been blessed with. Your soul is connected to mine, to my children’s too. They will assist in your search for Providence so that you might have a chance at living. And while you search, you will come to discover what you were born for. The power in your veins is great indeed. Do not squander it, spirit singer.”
As one the spirits swept from their plinths, moving on wing and paw and hoof to hurry over to Ferris. They ran to her, nuzzling and pawing at her before sweeping away into the trees as if celebrating all that had come to pass. Ferris shook her head at the Great Elm in refusal of what had been had asked of her, but no words parted her lips.
“No more amulets,” the Great Elm sighed. “They are your allies. But you know this by now.”
Ferris nodded silently, looking to me in fear, her own rage rising to meet with mine.
“Take the small one,” the Great Elm commanded me and roots snared me in their grip, forcing me to bow down and scoop the little tree from the earth and clutch it to my chest. The roots only released me when I held it for myself and I scowled at them for the prisoner they’d made me.
I locked my gaze on Ferris. Ferris with all her power, the gift of the thirteen spirits now running in her veins. Reality hit me like an anvil to my chest.
She was my answer. The Great Elm had told me itself.
If anyone could gift me death, it was her. So there was no chance of her leaving me now.
“You’ll come with me,” I said darkly and Ferris frowned, her throat bobbing as she backed away.
Rissa stayed close to her sister, a possessiveness in her expression that set my hackles rising. But I only had eyes for my lightwing.
“You caused this, so you’ll damn well fix it,” I snarled at her but she shook her head, her refusal clear in her eyes. “You will not leave my side until it is done!”
