Long before the Hollow knew his name, Malrec had walked the outer realms as a scholar of forbidden flame—a Keeper once, in a life now burned away.
He had not always been a monster.
But knowledge, twisted by grief, can become rot.
It began in the ruins of Aralem, a city swallowed by plague and dust. Malrec had wandered the ghost-strewn halls of its memory vaults, searching not for riches—but souls. The city's Keepers had practiced a dangerous art: the preservation of living memories in crystalline form. One shard could hold a lifetime. A thousand whispers. Every love, regret, lie, or lullaby.
Malrec had wanted to forget. He thought if he could remove his pain—rip it out like a poisoned root—he might find peace.
But when he extracted the memories of his wife's death, he felt nothing. Not sorrow. Not relief. Only emptiness.
And that, he realized, was power.
He began to collect.
One by one, he raided forgotten shrines and broken sanctuaries, harvesting memory shards. Children's dreams. Warriors' courage. A mother's final breath. Each memory he devoured fed a growing void inside him.
But it wasn't enough to forget his pain.
He wanted everyone to forget.
He built a sanctum beneath the mountain of Hollowspire, far from any watchful eye. There, beneath roots twisted by blood-magic and time, he began his creation.
The Beast was not shaped by flesh or bone. It had no heart, no hunger, no name. It was born of absence—a void stitched together by everything others had once cherished.
He placed the memory shards into a basin of dark glass. Whispered incantations in a tongue only he still remembered. The basin pulsed. Shook. Screamed.
The first shape that emerged was little more than smoke. Malrec smiled and fed it more.
A child's laughter. A soldier's oath. A widow's lullaby.
Gone.
The shape grew.
He named it nothing, for it was meant to be without—without thought, without form, without mercy.
The Beast slithered into existence, not as a predator—but as absence given will.
But it needed a purpose.
So Malrec carved a sigil from his own blood—his final connection to the man he once was—and bound it to the creature.
"You will unmake what I cannot," he whispered. "You will make the world forget what it once was, until only I remain."
The Beast turned to him, silent and vast.
And bowed.
From that moment, it became his most loyal servant. Where his corruption could not control, the Beast would unravel. Where minds resisted, it would erase. Villages fell into quiet madness. Brothers forgot sisters. Mothers forgot children. Whole histories were dissolved with nothing left behind but a hush.
But there was one place it could not touch.
The Hollow.
Something there—some root of flame, some remembrance—resisted.
So Malrec waited.
Watched.
He let them believe they were safe.
Until the Sealing.
Until she appeared.
The girl with the fire in her eyes. The voice that remembered deeper than fear. She had anchored them in memory when he had spent years learning how to destroy it.
Chizzy.
She would not be erased.
But everyone else could be.
So he summoned the Beast once more.
This time, he gave it a gift—a shard of his own forgotten childhood. A final fragment to strengthen it. To humanize it. So it could walk like shadow and speak like love. A familiar presence in the dark.
And then, he unleashed it on the Hollow.
To silence fire with stillness.
To bury identity beneath the weight of nothing.
To make the world forget her name.