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There’s a place between the worlds, pitted with strange pockets like holes carved into the pith of a fruit. Antari scatter their blood to the winds to do anything at all- perhaps these hollows are what happens when drops of it land between when travelling.
Lila looks up from the old books, crisp as they’d been when their Antari author left them. “Are they all as cheerful as this?” Kell chuckles from across the small room.
“You should see some of the writings from the Red-White hollow. If nothing else, it would convince you not to sleep here.”
Lila glances up at the smooth wood in which some long-gone Antari had carved what they called the Hollows Laws. They’d been added to, rewritten, translated, and amended by later generations until the board was more carving than wood. “You know rules and I don’t exactly get along, Kell.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” he says dryly.
Hollows Laws (c. 1596 1644 1664 1708 1778)
1. Sleep not between the worlds lest the grey consume you
2. Trust not that aught you find here may be used as a token
3. Heed not the winds
4. Heed not the cries
5. When you leave, close your eyes
6. When it is time to pass on, do not turn aside
Lila frowns. “Is there actually weather here?” She can’t feel anything at all beyond these matte grey walls, not with any of her senses.
“I’ve never seen any,” Kell says. “Some of the older journals speak of things beyond the hollow, but there’s no mention of it for the last seventy-five years at least.” His voice turns thoughtful, almost morose. “I wonder if it’s gone away the same way the Antari have.” Lila knocks him on the head ungently.
“We’re right here. Haven’t gone anywhere.” Except now she can go anywhere, and some days she’s still a little high on that freedom. Kell shoves at her.
“Well maybe the voice are still out there, too,” he says far too cheerfully, and she narrows her eyes at him but he doesn’t crack a smile.
Concerning Hollow Gardens
I have brought a number of seeds, saplings, fungi, and other plants into the hollow to see how well they might grow, if indeed any do at all in this lightless place, even the magical strains.
Taelah, please leave them be! Even if they look dry! I need to see how they do!
Update: Six months on, very little has changed. The plants haven’t grown, but neither have they withered- they hardly even dry out. It’s as if… as if only days have passed in months for them. Our worlds keep time with each other, but it’s as if the hollows don’t acknowledge it unless one of us is here.
Fascinating. A resounding failure as a garden, however.
“If you can only find these after another Antari shows you the way, that just begs the question of how the very first one found their way here,” Lila says. She listens to the sound of her voice, grimaces, and pitches it down again. “There has to be more to this place.”
“There may have been, once. Now there’s just… this.” Kell gestures broadly at the room- the grey walls, the grey ceiling, the grey floor, none of it rightly stone or wood or glass. Lila touches a wall, fingers ghosting over the echo of old magic there. Strange that this still lingers when everything else keyed to one world or the next was scrubbed clean in this place. Even Caster is starting to forget where it came from, and they’ve only been here two or three hours.
“Someone went exploring here,” she notes. She may yet be new to this power, but travelling was the very first thing she’d tried to figure out. Certainly spent enough time around Kell to learn the words. “We should take a look at-”
“No.” Kell’s voice goes hard and Lila huffs to herself. It’s the ‘I know so much more about magic than you’ voice. The ‘that’s too dangerous, Lila’ voice. The ‘what in all the worlds are you doing- you’re going to get yourself killed’ voice. She hates that voice- and half the time he’s wrong anyway.
Set a ship on fire one time-
(Magically, that is)
She gives Kell a look- the ‘I’ll try it one of these days and it’ll work- just you wait’ look. He groans.
“We should go to Red-White,” he says.
“To find more ominous almost-poetry?”
“Something like that.”
I went. Sideways. We’re stacked, Arnes and Makt and England and Black, and the hollows are in the tubes between the layers. We slip through like a tunnel when we travel, but we can catch at the walls and dig our way through. Our magic still flows here. As anasae- as orense- as illumae- make the way and light it and do you know what you will see?
Do you know what the insides of the worlds look like? They’re not so different from people-insides, but they’re all the wrong colors, colors we can’t see so our minds and magic put up something for us like silk-screen prints to understand.
I’ll stay here forever. The transit command, as travars, it only works in concert with anchors to the other side, but the tokens I kept have lost their scent and the only place that knows me is the grey and the wrong-colors in between.
I think I’ll go again.
I’ve lost my scent, too.
“So?” Lila asks. This hollow is practically the same as the last, grey-grey-grey and littered with the legacy of generations of blood magicians. “This reads more like ghost stories than history or poetry.”
“The next Antari who came here wrote that she heard his voice from the walls for years after he wrote this. The hollow didn’t seem to change between her visits, so she believed he was lost somewhere beyond it, but…” Kell shrugs. “It’s hard to piece anything together here.” He’s about to say more when he stops. Stares at the narrow shelf across the hollow. Nearly topples the table in his haste to reach it.
“What?” Lila demands, digging her chin into his shoulder to peer over it. Something silver glints in his hands, its shape vaguely familiar. Her mouth is open to ask when the scent hits her, faint and swiftly fading but acrid and metallic like the Danes’ pale palace. “Holland?” she hisses, pulling away. “He’s alive? He was here?” Recently? Well, no way to know that if this place only sort of existed between his departure and their arrival.
“So it seems,” Kell says very softly, still holding the metal ring.
“Kell.”
“What?”
“You’re thinking of doing something stupid.”
“So were you an hour ago.”
“Yeah, and you immediately tried to talk me out of it.” Kell’s eyes slide sideways to her.
“Are you going to try to talk me out of this one?”
Lila grins, all teeth and no smile. “You picked the wrong man if you wanted someone to do that. You want to track Holland down.”
“Yes.” Kell hesitates. When he speaks again, there’s something tight and wanting in his voice. It’s like the way he talks about the worlds beyond the bounds of London. “I remember how he was before the Danes. He’s the one who showed me the way to the hollows. Now that Astrid and Athos are gone, maybe…”
“Maybe?” Lila prompts.
“I don’t know.”
Sure he does. Lila shrugs, and makes it look like she does so easily. “Feel however you want about the man, Kell. I knew him for about two days and he spent most of it trying to kill us for your stupid rock.” She produces a knife, twirls it, and vanishes it again. It slides home with a satisfying click. “I’ve got no such complications, and business of my own to finish with him.” And she certainly doesn’t intend to give the older Antari another opportunity to kill her- or Kell.
Kell looks aside unhappily and sets the ring back on the shelf some ancient Antari must have dragged in here to hold all the trinkets and logbooks and notes that piled up.
“Which way?” Lila asks. “Forward or back?” Forward to White is more dangerous; back to Red will bring them too close to home. It will slow them down too much to catch up to Holland.
Kell shakes his head. “It’s a blind guess at this point.” Lila grins- better, this time.
“I’ll pick, then.” She leans around Kell and presses her lips to his, and grins wider because he still makes that face, and says: “For luck.”
“Not that you need it,” he says automatically. His face twists sourly in a way that doesn’t quite hide an answering smile.
Lila steps into the middle of the room, closes her eyes, and spins about until she can’t tell which way is which. When she finally stops, she’s pointing at the wall through which they’d come. “Back it is.”
Kell. Lila.
Stop following me. My business isn’t with you.
-H
-
Tough, buddy. Our business is with you.
See you soon.
Lila
They can dodge the watchful eyes of Arnes more easily these days, now that things have calmed since Lila’s first awful night in the city. They have Rhy to stare at again, and it’s easier than ever for Kell to follow her into the shadows in pursuit of Holland. He doesn’t want her to attack Holland, though she can’t tell if it’s more of his own affection for Holland or if he just thinks she doesn’t stand a chance. If it’s a battle of magic, well… she probably doesn’t. She can’t even beat Kell half the time, not without resorting to all sorts of clever not-magic tricks.
“Is there a hollow between White and Black?” she asks curiously as they slip through the alleys.
“I wouldn’t know,” Kell says. “Probably; they predate the fall of Black London.”
That’s the other thing, the great unknown that neither of them know how to account for. Who knows how long Holland was in Black London. Lila’s not even sure they can be certain that that’s where he went in the first place, even if Kell thinks so. Assuming he did make it… what did he find? They are blind to what Black London might contain, what might have come out of it. The longer they debate that, the less loudly Kell tries to talk her out of a fight- and the less eager she is to pick one, no matter what she says. She still intends to, though, don’t get her wrong.
She’s just planning a little further ahead.
My business is no business of yours, and it does not concern Arnes.
The ambush in the hollow won’t work, by the way.
-H
-
That’s not what I want to talk to you about, Holland. Do you remember when you first showed me the hollows? The carvings we found on the back of the message boards? It's about that, more or less. Can we meet?
I promise Lila won't try to kill you this time.
(Well I don't promise!)
Kell (and Lila)
“How does he know about the ambush?” Lila grumbles, glaring at the note left on the table in the Red-White hollow, some pale, study stone carved from a quarry in Makt. “Yours is vague; will the bit about carvings mean anything to him?” Kell offers her a thin, strained smile.
“He’ll know what it means.” Lila raises an eyebrow at the heavy note in his voice, but he doesn't elaborate.
“Will he come?”
“...I think so.”
And then what? she nearly asks, wondering more than ever what exactly Holland Vosijk is to Kell- was, before the Danes. She couldn't answer if the question were turned back on her, though, even if she still knows what it is she wants to do. What she will do, though? Well, she supposes that depends on what happens when they get there.
Hollows Laws (c.1822)
1. No, really, don’t sleep here
2. You have less than six hours before your tokens will forget what world they came from
3. Don’t try to go anywhere but the world you came from or the world you’re going to
This is both one of the safest and most dangerous places for an Antari. Mind yourself.