Hollowmark
The sigil wakes at midnight. Elara Voss knows the precise moment her life ends and her damnation begins, the instant a burning sigil sears through the thin skin of her wrist, leaving a mark no healer can read and no prayer can erase. In the days that follow, the brand spreads beneath her skin like ink in water, and the dreams begin: a hollow throne, a crowned absence waiting at the edge of her vision, and a child who speaks in a language older than bone. Desperate for answers, Elara seeks out the Apothecary, who trades in poisons and forgotten cures, and the Clerk, a bureaucrat of unspeakable ledgers who knows which names have been sold and to whom. She crosses paths with Cael, a man whose own flesh bears the same sigil, and Maren, whose sister was taken by the mark years before. Together they follow a trail of burned villages and emptied shrines toward Thessaly, a province the maps have stopped naming, where Lord Aldric rules a court of silence and the Hooded Woman waits with a bargain no one survives. The Hollow King is rising. He has always been rising. And the mark on Elara's wrist is not a curse, it is a summons. To break it, she must walk into the hollow place where he waits and choose what remains of her soul, or surrender it entirely.