The boy's words hung in the air like smoke.
"She's not the Hollow's only heir."
Silence fell across the room, sharp as broken glass.
Lena stood frozen, eyes wide, hands trembling as she clutched the Voidglass blade to her chest. Caleb instinctively stepped between her and the boy, his stance shifting subtly into defense.
"Who are you?" he demanded, voice low and dangerous.
The boy tilted his head, unbothered. "I don't remember."
Bex narrowed her eyes. "Convenient."
"I woke up in the mountains two nights ago," the boy said. "Naked. Cold. With marks on my skin and a name in my head."
"What name?" Elias asked from the doorway, his voice sharper than usual.
The boy looked directly at Lena.
"Thorn."
The mark on the boy's chest wasn't just decorative.
Caleb examined it as the pack assembled in the war room again — the runes traced across his skin in the same pattern that surrounded the Hollow's seal. They weren't recent. They were branded, deep in the flesh, pulsing with residual power.
"It's the same as the Hollow's sigil," Elias muttered, tracing the marks with gloved fingers. "But there's something… off. The lines are reversed. Like a mirror."
"A counterbalance," Marla whispered. "If Lena is the vessel of the Hollow's rage… he might be its memory."
Ronan snorted. "Now it's making kids to store its personality? We're dealing with a damn supernatural puzzle box."
The boy didn't flinch under the attention. He sat calmly, fingers curled around a cup of tea that Lena had quietly given him. He hadn't told them his name because he didn't have one. Just fragments.
"I dream of a place made of bones," he said. "And a tree growing upside down."
The room fell silent.
Caleb's stomach dropped.
"That tree…" he said slowly, "That was in the journal. The one from my great-grandfather."
After the war meeting broke, Caleb led Elias into the old library — a private wing of the Pack House rarely touched anymore. Dust coated every shelf. The air smelled of cedar, smoke, and forgotten things.
Caleb pulled the journal from behind a loose brick in the wall.
Leather-bound. Fragile with age.
He flipped through the pages until he found the illustration.
A tree — its roots above, branches below — growing from the ceiling of a cave made of skulls.
Scrawled beneath it in faded ink:
"Here the Hollow was born. And from it, the Alpha broke the sky."
Elias stared. "I thought this was just poetic nonsense."
"It isn't," Caleb said. "It's a location."
"You think that boy came from there?"
"I think…" Caleb paused, voice tightening, "He may be older than he looks."
That night, Lena sat with the boy in the greenhouse — the one Marla had rebuilt after the last fire.
She watched him gently water a dying violet, his small hands working with precision.
"You don't talk much," she said.
He shrugged. "Neither do you."
She smiled faintly. "That's fair."
"Do you ever hear the Hollow when you sleep?"
Lena stiffened.
"Yes," she whispered. "But it's different now. Quieter. Less… cruel."
The boy nodded slowly. "That's because it's not in you anymore."
Her heart skipped. "What do you mean?"
He looked at her with those shimmering silver eyes.
"It passed into both of us."
The revelation hit Caleb like a hammer when Lena told him.
"She said what?" he demanded, gripping the back of a chair until the wood cracked.
"That it passed into both of us," Lena repeated, standing firm. "I think the Hollow left something behind in me. But the rest of it? It's in him now."
Elias confirmed it.
After a ritual involving moonlight, silver powder, and a drop of blood from both children, the results were undeniable.
"His aura reads as older," Elias said. "Much older. As if his soul… isn't entirely human anymore."
Ronan looked uncomfortable. "So we're harboring a Hollow-in-training?"
"Not quite," Elias said. "It's fractured. Half in each of them. Which may be why it hasn't reformed. But also why it's more dangerous than ever."
And then the twist came.
Marla entered the war room holding a letter.
It was sealed in red wax, marked with the crest of an ancient northern pack — the Crestmoore wolves. Long believed extinct.
"It came through a courier with no scent," she said, handing it to Caleb.
He opened it and read aloud:
To the Alpha of Blackridge,
You have taken what belongs to us. The second vessel was bound to Crestmoore blood, and you have disrupted the Balance.
Return him to the Hollow's grove, or we will come and claim him.
— Lord Raith Crestmoore
Elias blanched. "Crestmoore… They were the first to fight the Hollow."
"They also fell first," Caleb growled. "You're saying this boy… might be theirs?"
Ronan looked at the boy, now dozing in the sunlight beside Lena.
"He doesn't even know what he is."
Bex's voice cut the silence. Cold. Clear.
"Then it won't stop until it gets both of them back."