The One That Knew His Name
The breach wasn't loud.
There was no thunder. No burning sky. Just a flicker—like a memory gone wrong—and suddenly, the lights within the eastern watchtower went dark.
No one screamed.
Not at first.
But when Lira opened the door, blood ran down the stairs like ink spilled in reverse.
---
The creature didn't kill the Dreamers inside.
Not completely.
It had carved them.
Words—glyphs no one had written in centuries—had been burned into their skin. Not with rage, but precision. A message written in flesh.
> "The key is open. The gate is near. The bearer bleeds."
Isabela stood frozen, reading the symbols again and again, her hands shaking. "This isn't a warning," she whispered. "It's… an invocation."
---
Cuco arrived last.
The shadows peeled back when he entered, as if the Hollow sensed him.
The room was cold, but the blade at his side burned.
And then—
Something stepped from the dark.
Not a Hollow One as they'd known them.
Taller. Older. Wrapped in bark that moved like wet silk, with eyes of pitch and mirrored stars. No mouth. But it spoke.
> "Cuco."
It knew his name.
Not just his name. His voice. It echoed back in a cadence only the forest could mimic.
"You're not one of them," it said.
"You were never meant to be."
Cuco raised the blade. "You came for the Tome."
"No," it said, tilting its head. "We came to remember you."
---
The fight didn't start with violence.
It started with recognition.
Cuco moved like instinct. No spells. No chants. Just the blade and the bark rising to meet his skin, covering half his chest now. Each strike he landed sent memories reeling—flashes of past lives, other Circles, other Rootbearers who had fallen… or become.
The Hollow bled lightless sap. It didn't scream.
But it whispered as it fell.
> "We are not your enemy. You are what we lost."
---
When it died, it didn't vanish.
It shattered—like glass in slow motion—into hundreds of moths made of ash and root. They fluttered once around Cuco… and flew into the sky.
Gone.
---
The Circle locked down.
No one spoke to Cuco afterward. No one dared.
But in the dark, when he sat alone near the Archive's edge, the Tome opened again.
This time, it showed him a memory.
Not his.
A child, standing beneath a dead tree. A mark already on his hand. A blade sprouting at his feet.
And far away—
The same Hollow creature, watching from the dark.
> "You were chosen long before you bled," the book whispered.
Cuco closed his eyes.
And for the first time…
He wondered if the gate had always been inside him.