Page 38 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

I speak first when he takes my hand. "You do not get to use the name my dead father gave me as a weapon."

The king stills, all but his black hair at least, stirring in the still room.

I have the strangest sense that his hair moves exactly the way it would on horseback.

He stares into my eyes, searching. I don’t flinch. I don’t back down.

"Watch your tone, girl. I’ve excavated minds for less."

"Yes, but that’s where you’ve all made your mistake. You can’t take anything from me that I haven’t already lived without. And you can’t kill me, because too many of you have too much riding on me. Money, power, whatever your kind thinks the Maiden will do…

"So I ask you, Void King. Who among us should watch their tone?"

He laughs, a dry sort of coughing thing, as if he hasn’t done it for quite some time. "You were right to choose her so early on, Tyr."

I say nothing as he continues staring at me.

After a moment, he returns to the rest of them.

The Shrouded King approaches, shroud covering his face. He’s the king who first called Lorien the False Light.

He’s also the one who suffocated the ballroom with his presence.

I sense his gaze on me, though how I’m not sure. But I don’t feel that same overwhelming power he leaked at the ball.

And that’s the difference between this "greeting" and the first. I’m not overwhelmed by their power, or them.

Whether that’s because they aren’t flaunting it?—

Or something else…

"Would you like some advice, potential?" he asks, taking my hand.

I don’t expect the earnestness in his voice. "By all means."

"You must not give them what they want."

The king places a chaste kiss on the back of my hand and settles back with the rest.

Exactly the kind of advice I don’t need. Vagueness without discernible meaning.

Only one king left.

"Tyr," I say as he comes closer.

"Amara." He whispers my name, and it settles under my skin in exactly the way I hate.

"You know," I say as he lifts the veil from my face. "Perhaps think about a different costume for the next season. Eye contact with none of the veil lifting."

He stands there, too close, too still, just staring into my eyes. "There won’t be a next season," he murmurs and brushes a kiss on the top of my head.

Tyr returns to the line of other kings, and they vanish in a cloud of red mist and embers. I shake my head at the performance and take in the room.

Black stone, benches along the walls. Really, the only thing different between this room and the Gloaming Room is there’s no sigilweave on the ground.

I’m not there long before Shoreena enters, blue hood drawn low over her face. Before she gets out a single word or direction, I ask. "What are my odds?"

I can’t see her eyes in the shadow of the hood, but she freezes in place a moment before answering. "This Trial is perhaps the most difficult of all. Prepare yourself."

More advice dressed in solemn decorum. But it’s all just meaningless words.

"When the others have greeted the kings, that door will open." She nods to the door opposite where I entered. "That’s the start of the third Trial."

She leaves, and not long after, the other door opens. I walk out into an open space…

The Woundspire .

I know its name, though I never learned it.

I stand at the top of a tiered stone structure, half-eaten by rot and flora. It rises all around a central depression carved into the bones of the land. It doesn’t seem built. It feels like something was pulled out of the world here. Something vast and unwilling.

The steps glisten with bloomrot—crystal-veined vines wrapped around slabs of obsidian that drip like melted wax never allowed to cool. Demonic flora unfurl in silence, petals black as oil, trembling not with breeze—the air is still—but with breath.

Dotted on every step, between the vines and strange flowers, sits an audience—demons and humans alike.

Tyr was right. It’s more people than I’ve ever seen.

At the center depression, a pit gapes wide.

No soil.

No floor.

Just a dark so deep it hums.

I don’t move. Not yet.

The sky above it curves slightly inward, like it’s being pulled into the gorge. The clouds streak in unnatural formations, tinted with strange green and pink shades. They, too, pool inward.

I descend the steps one by one.

Each stone breathes beneath my feet, cracks glowing the moment I set a slippered toe down.

No one speaks. No one dares.

The kings stand at the opposite end of the pit, cloaked in their respective monstrosities—death, void, war… All except Lorien. He wears his mask today.

But it’s not them the Hollow Ring answers to.

It’s the Trial.

It’s the memory in the stone.

And when the shadows rise around my feet—slow and reverent, no longer slinking—I don’t flinch.

I don’t ignore them.

This time, I let them crown me.

One step at a time, I descend into the crowd—the eventual pit. The wind catches my hood, and I let it slide off and tangle in my hair.

I let everyone see my face as the shadows billow behind me like a living cape. Tendrils whip outward into the crowd—and the crowd is not pleased.

They scream. Clawing, shoving, scrambling over each other just to escape the tendrils chasing them up the tiers.

Everyone in my section finds their way to other sections, and that’s when I see the other potentials walking down the steps between the seating.

My heart stalls a moment.

Just three others?

Selke, Ashera, and a potential I don’t know .

No—

I do know her.

I saw her in the courtyard from the balcony.

Crying.

Where have the others gone? The potentials from the silver vestige?

"Where are the others!?" I bellow as I reach the last step.

My voice echos in the ruins, as if it were built to amplify sounds. But as soon as the first echo reaches me, the cloak of shadows vanishes.

The kings, gathered at one side of the pit, do not answer. They don’t even acknowledge that I’ve spoken.

"Allow me to repeat myself. Where are the other potentials? If they weren’t eliminated during the last Trial, then they should be here."

Lorien steps forward, and the other potentials freeze, even Ashera.

Waiting.

"The other potentials have been disqualified for various reasons, Amara, and that’s all you need to concern yourself with."

I nod and descend the final step into the ground. "Slip the nooses into their chambers yourself, then?"

The Withered King stifles a rasping laugh as a cough. I continue staring at Lorien, who just keeps smiling at me with that beaming grin of his.

"Right, if you two are done, I’d like to continue with the Trial, then," Ashera says and marches forward. The other potentials take her lead.

Lorien steps back with the kings, and I flick a glance to Tyr. His face is entirely unreadable as I approach the giant wound in the world, picking through the vines and strange stones and poison flowers.

The slippers aren’t meant for this ground. Wet soil claims me on the first step—soaking straight to the bone, like the rot threaded through this land.

Shoreena appears, hovering by some magical or technological means, directly over the gaping maw of the world.

"Gentlefolk," Shoreena says with her magically enhanced voice. The crowd instantly hushes. "It is my great honor to welcome you to the season’s Maiden Trial. We’ve brought you the four best contenders and will be taking your markers momentarily."

Blue-robed women appear in each section of the crowd, large silver offering plates in each hand.

“Please be sure your marker has your sigil or seal and the amount of your wager.”

I grit my teeth but stay focused, ignoring the jangle of coin purses, the hollow thunk of markers falling into offering plates.

"This season, the Maiden Council has something special in store for you."

"Does it?" I murmur under my breath.

"The world does not belong to us anymore," she says, not to the crowd but us, the potentials. Shoreena nods toward the strange flora, the sky smeared with all the wrong colors. "But truthfully, it never did."

She pauses, waiting for the audience to finish passing the plates. When they have, the blue-robed councilwomen vanish in puffs of indigo smoke.

"As a guardian of the sacred tradition, it falls to me to lay out the path ahead, ladies."

She’s speaking to us, but she’s not. Her flowery words are for the audience. They’re for the theatrics. The spectacle.

"The path before you is not one of blood and blade. It is the quieter death. The death that sings your name sweetly while it strangles you."

The woman from the courtyard breaks down in quiet sobs. Like she already knows.

Like Sev knew.

My hands burn. Itch to do something. To end this charade, the theatre of cruelty and death.

Shoreena raises her arms to her sides, wide, her blue robe falls open so the whole arena can see what lies beneath.

She’s nude…

But her skin is marked in scars.

Carved sigils and symbols I don’t know or recognize. Some are old, raised scars. Some are fresh, oozing, bleeding.

The audience roars with applause and cheering at the sight of her sacrificial flesh.

"You shall not fight," she says, voice distant, floaty. "But you shall be weighed."

The crowd stomps their feet in unison.

"You shall not flee, but you shall be measured."

Hooting calls and shouts now.

Shoreena lets the moment build to a crescendo before dropping her arms dramatically. Her robes fall closed once more, and instantly, a hush falls over the audience.

"Step forward, Maiden. Cast your soul upon the dark and be known."

Shoreena disappears in a puff of indigo smoke and then…

The third Trial begins.