Trauma.
People think trauma is the event that breaks you.
They are wrong.
Trauma is the part of you that remains trapped there, long after everyone else has moved on. It is an emotional and psychological wound carved by experiences too painful to forget.
But definitions are incomplete.
Trauma is the reason a child fears the dark long after dawn has come. It is the reason a warrior hesitates before drawing his sword. It is the reason old scars ache when the rain falls.
It is proof that some battles never truly end.
The same could be said for Muhan Lockhart.
2:00 PM — Wysteria High
The book slid from the shelf with a soft thud.
Muhan picked it up and walked toward a nanotable. Its metallic surface shifted and adjusted itself to his height before he sat down. Lex dropped into the seat beside him, stretching lazily as Muhan looked at the cover.
TRAUMA SPELL
By Astral Veil (AVC)
~ Images recovered from Hollow sightings within the Trauma Realm ~
Muhan opened the book.
The first page was filled with a warning.
The Trauma Spell feeds upon trauma.
Should it infect a person, it will consume grief, regret, fear, and every wound hidden within the heart, turning them into weapons against their owner.
Within a Trauma, a Hollow may encounter Trauma Creatures that distort reality itself. True Calamity Bringers. Beings beyond reason. Other things without names.
Yet a Hollow's first Trauma is different.
It is deeply personal.
Your first Trauma can shape the person you become. It may lead to insanity. It may lead to death. If fortune smiles upon you, you may survive your first Trauma... but eventually, every infected Hollow must face the possibility of dying within one.
Muhan turned the page.
A single sentence was written across it.
Congratulations on clearing your first Trauma.
You have awakened a Mythic Anchor...
(... ... Core ... ...)
The next paragraph was shorter.
Anchors are what keep a Hollow human, no matter the Traumas they endure.
The final message was written in uneven ink, as though the author had been shaking while writing it.
Good luck if you've been infected by the Trauma Spell.
And if you haven't...
Just know that something is watching us.
Muhan slowly closed the book.
Beside him, Lex let out a long yawn.
"...I suddenly feel sleepy," he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.
Muhan looked at him.
Then his own eyelids grew heavy.
A sharp beep echoed from his wrist.
The Lockhart bracelet.
Its light flashed crimson.
An alarm erupted throughout the school.
Muhan's eyes widened.
"No way..."
His body was growing numb.
His vision blurred.
The library staff noticed almost immediately. Voices rang out as people rushed toward them. Within moments, Muhan and Lex were placed onto Isolation Hover Beds and hurried through the halls.
The ceiling lights streaked overhead.
They entered the Sleep Center.
The room was dimly lit. Thin nanorods clung to the ceiling, casting a pale blue glow across the chamber. There were no windows.
Only rows of sleeping students.
Some twitched.
Some muttered to themselves.
Some looked as though they were fighting invisible enemies.
Muhan forced his eyes open.
A man stood nearby.
He had broad shoulders and long dark hair. Black leather armour covered his body, while strange nanoconstructs rested against his sides. The countless scars across his hands told stories Muhan didn't have the strength to imagine.
The Hollow looked down at him.
"Listen, kid."
His voice was calm.
"You're about to undergo your first Trauma."
Muhan tried to answer, but his tongue felt heavy.
"In there, you'll fight Trauma Creatures. But don't think it'll be that simple."
The man folded his arms.
"The Trauma feeds on your pain. Your fears. Your regrets."
His gaze hardened.
"So whatever happens in there..."
"...don't die, Lockhart."
His words were already becoming distant.
Muhan could barely hear them.
His eyes drifted shut.
The last thing he saw before darkness claimed him...
...was Lex's sleeping face.
Muhan's eyes closed.
The last thing he saw was Lex's sleeping face.
Then nothing.
---
The beeping reached him first.
Soft. Rhythmic. Familiar.
His eyelids opened to white light and the ceiling of the Sleep Center. He was still on the Isolation Hover Bed. His body felt heavy in the way bodies do after deep sleep — joints slow, thoughts slower — but otherwise intact.
"You're awake."
Lex sat on the bed beside him, dragging a hand down his face like sleep was still clinging to him.
"What happened?" Lex asked.
Muhan opened his mouth.
Closed it.
The Hollow. The warning. The alarm. The book. He reached for them and found only distance, like trying to grip fog. The memories were there but wouldn't come forward properly.
A nurse appeared at the bedside. Her smile was the practiced kind — warm without effort, present without attention.
"False alarm," she said. "You two simply overworked yourselves."
Muhan didn't answer.
Something was wrong.
He couldn't name it immediately. The room looked correct. The equipment looked correct. The other students were still lying on their beds in neat rows, chests rising and falling under white sheets.
Nobody had moved.
Not once.
He looked at the clock on the wall.
2:00 PM.
He looked at the clock above the door.
2:00 PM.
He looked at the small display above the nearest monitor station.
2:00 PM.
The tightness started in his chest and moved outward.
"Lex."
"...yeah?"
"What time is it?"
Lex glanced at his wrist, frowning slightly at the question. "Two."
The nurse laughed softly.
Muhan turned to look at her.
Her lips hadn't moved.
The lights flickered.
One second. Two.
The nurse tilted her head at an angle that was almost right. Almost natural. The kind of angle a person makes when they're curious, reproduced by something that had only ever observed curiosity from the outside.
"Muhan?"
The room stretched at the edges. The far wall pulled back by a fraction, then another, the proportions shifting in a way his eyes registered before his mind caught up.
"Muhan?"
A crack ran up the wall beside the window — thin, then wide, then branching, silent, wrong.
"Muhan?"
The smile spread past the edges of her face.
The floor disappeared.
Cold air swallowed him whole and then there was only falling — fast and dark and endless, the Sleep Center gone, Lex gone, every familiar thing stripped away in the span of a single breath — and then the fall stopped the way nightmares stop, without transition, without warning.
Stone.
His palms hit rough ground and scraped hard. He registered the pain distantly, already pushing upright, already taking inventory.
The smell hit him before his eyes adjusted.
Blood. Rot. Rust. Something underneath those three things that had no name but landed in the stomach like a warning.
Torchlight flickered somewhere ahead, carving a weak orange corridor out of the dark. Beyond the light, more darkness. Behind him, more darkness. The architecture — if it could be called that — was stone and iron, walls close enough to feel, ceiling low enough to press down on the mind.
Footsteps.
Heavy. Slow. Deliberate. Coming from the direction of the light.
Muhan didn't move. Didn't breathe more than necessary. His eyes found the shadow first — large, wrong-shaped, moving against the wall with the particular wrongness of something that had too many points of articulation.
It stepped into the torchlight.
His mind tried to process it and produced nothing useful. The body shifted even as he watched — arms appearing and dissolving, a face surfacing from the centre of its chest like something rising through water, another emerging briefly from its shoulder before sinking back. It wasn't that the creature was changing. It was that it had never decided what it was in the first place.
Hands closed around his arms.
He struggled. Hard, instinctive, immediate.
The Daemon didn't react. It didn't tighten its grip or slow its pace. It simply dragged him forward the way a current drags debris — without interest, without effort, as though his resistance registered as something beneath acknowledgment.
Stone corridors passed on either side. Iron doors set into the walls at intervals. Chains hanging from ceiling hooks, some empty, some not. Dark stains across the floor that spread in the direction of the drains. The architecture of a place that had been doing the same thing for a very long time.
A scream reached him from somewhere ahead.
It stopped.
The silence afterward was a different shape than silence usually is.
The Daemons stopped walking. A massive iron door ground open on the left, the sound travelling up through the stone into the soles of his feet, and they threw him through it without ceremony.
He hit the ground hard. Air left his lungs in a single compressed gasp. The door slammed shut behind him before he'd finished sliding.
He lay there for one breath. Two.
Then he pushed himself upright.
The cell was large. That was the first thing. Large enough that the torchlight from the single wall-mounted bracket didn't reach the far corners, large enough that the people inside it — and there were many — could arrange themselves into isolated clusters of private misery without quite touching each other.
Children. Teenagers. Adults. Dozens of Hollows, all shapes, all conditions, none of them wearing the same expression except in the broadest sense. Afraid. In varying degrees and varieties, afraid.
Nobody spoke when he entered.
A small girl in the nearest corner pulled her knees tighter against her chest and looked at him the way people look at new arrivals in places like this — measuring whether he represented more danger, finding the answer to be no, and returning to whatever private calculation she'd been running before he appeared.
"...another one."
Nobody responded to that either.
"...do you think they'll let us go?"
Silence.
Across the room a young man rose to his feet. He was maybe nineteen. His hands were shaking. His voice, when it came, carried the particular pitch of someone who had spent the last several hours cycling between composure and the edges of something worse.
"There has to be a way out." He looked at the door. At the bars. At the walls. "There has to be."
He crossed to the bars and grabbed them. His knuckles whitened.
"They can't keep us here. They can't just —"
"Sit down." An old woman near the back wall didn't open her eyes when she said it.
"No." He pulled at the bars. They didn't move. He pulled harder. "I don't want to die. There has to be another exit. There has to be a —"
"They'll hear you."
"I DON'T CARE."
The corridor outside went quiet.
The young man felt it. Muhan watched him feel it — watched the sound leave the room and watched the young man's body understand what that meant before his mind caught up with it. His hands went still on the bars. His breathing came in shallow pulls.
Footsteps.
Slow. Measured.
Growing closer.
The shape that appeared outside the bars didn't rush. It didn't need to. It stopped in front of the cell and its gaze — if it could be called that — moved across the room with something that wasn't patience exactly but functioned the same way.
It pointed.
The young man stepped back from the bars.
"No."
It pointed again.
"No —" His voice broke on the word. "Please." His eyes moved across the room in the rapid unfocused way of someone looking for anything that might help, finding faces that couldn't meet his, finding children who had pressed themselves into corners, finding Muhan. "Please."
The Daemon entered.
"I DON'T WANT TO DIE."
It took hold of him.
"PLEASE —"
His fingers found the stone floor as he was dragged and left shallow marks going toward the door.
"PLEASE —"
The door shut.
His voice continued for a while after that, growing smaller with distance, and then it didn't.
The child who had been crying before was crying again, quietly, in a register that suggested she had forgotten she was doing it.
"...I don't want to die either."
Muhan looked at the door.
Then the walls. The ceiling. The bar spacing. The hinge placement on the iron door. The rotation pattern of the Daemons he could see through the bars, the intervals between their passes, the way their attention distributed itself across the corridor.
He started counting their footsteps.
One. Two. Three.
He told himself it was tactical. That he was building a picture. That information was the only currency that mattered in a place like this and he was collecting it.
He didn't examine whether that was entirely true.
Time moved in the shapeless way it does when there is nothing to mark it by. Minutes, maybe. Hours. The torchlight didn't change. The cold didn't change. People shifted positions and settled again. Someone prayed in a language Muhan didn't recognize. Someone else had stopped crying and started staring at the middle distance with the empty focus of a person who had arrived somewhere beyond immediate fear.
A presence settled beside him.
He hadn't heard the approach.
He looked.
The Hollow was older — late thirties, lean in the specific way of someone who had been lean for a long time rather than someone who had recently lost weight. His eyes were calm. Not the calm of someone who wasn't afraid, but the calm of someone who had looked at their fear squarely enough times that it had stopped surprising them.
He didn't look at Muhan immediately. He looked at the room.
"I've been watching you," he said, quietly enough that it didn't carry.
Muhan waited.
"Everyone else cries." He said it without judgment, as observation. "They panic. They argue. They make noise and then they get taken and the rest cry harder." His eyes moved to Muhan. Something in them sharpened. "But you count their footsteps."
A silence stretched between them.
The corner of the man's mouth moved.
"I think we should plan our escape."
Muhan looked at him for a long moment. Looked at the door. Looked back.
From somewhere in the corridor outside, something laughed.