“I will end myself before I ever let myself even get close.”
The first Ryder’s voice breaks like something imploding inward, his eyes shimmering with tears he refuses to blink away.
But the other one doesn’t argue and fails to meet my gaze at all. His breath catches in a way that sounds all too familiar.
And in that single, trembling moment… I know.
My fingers tighten around the hilt of my sword, and the Hollow responds instantly. An invisible force slams both Ryder’s to their knees—their bodies hitting the ground in one unified thud that echoes through the clearing like a warning bell. My heart thunders against my ribs, but I force my legs to move, one careful step after another, closing the distance between me and the one whose emotions have just condemned him.
As I approach, his forehead beads with sweat. His eyes cling to mine with an intensity too sharp, too focused, like a predator trying desperately to mimic fear.
“No, Asha—you’re wrong,” he insists, voice cracking in all the wrong places. “He’s not real. I am. I’m him.”
But the tattoos burn faintly against my palm, warm and certain, and my own intuition surges up from somewhere deep inside me—clear, steady, and impossible to ignore. Because Ryder…
Ryder doesn’t hold my gaze when he breaks.
He never has.
When guilt eats at him, when he believes he is undeserving, when he convinces himself he is the monster in his own story, his eyes always fall. It’s the one vulnerability he cannot mask, the one truth he cannot swallow back down. It is not weakness; it is proof that he feels too much, loves too much, carries too much.
And the one who stands before me now with tears trembling in his eyes—hemetmy gaze. He held it. He shattered whilestaring directly into me, as if begging me to see him and forgive him all in the same breath.
That isn’tmyRyder.
My Ryder would shatter entirely before he ever looked at me with those eyes.
The truth settles into me like a falling star—bright, burning, devastatingly certain.
And before doubt can claw its way in—before the Hollow can whisper second thoughts into the cracks of my resolve—I lift the blade and drive the sword straight through his heart.
The impact is jarring, not because it’s difficult but because it’stooeasy.
The steel slides in with a sickening, yielding slack—through flesh, through bone—like hot metal sinking into softened wax. My hands tremble around the hilt as the false Ryder’s body bows around the blade.
For a heartbeat—one agonising, suspended heartbeat—my own stops altogether.
What if I chose wrong?
What if that tremor, that plea, that guilt—what if it was him?
What if I just killed the real Ryder?
The thought splinters through me, cold and violent. My vision blurs. I almost choke on it.
But then the body before me stutters—once, sharply—
And instead of blood spilling warm against my hands,
the wound remains hollow.
Empty.
Dry.
The skin cracks. The shape buckles.
And with a long, hollow exhale—like a sigh escaping something that was never alive—
