The Hollow Court did not announce itself with gates or fanfare. It bled into the world — a hush that spread through the trees like rot. Serelith entered the glade beneath a sky the color of drowned violets. The trees here grew backward, their roots tangled in clouds, their branches digging into the ground. A thousand silver lanterns hovered in the air, casting light without warmth.
They were watching her. She felt it with every step.
The Court was a spiral of glass thrones, each occupied by a fae lord or lady more unreal than the last. Skin of bark, eyes of fireflies, laughter like wind over bone. They were beautiful, terrible, ancient — and hungry.
A throne of thorns stood empty at the center.
"The Codex burns in you," said one — a woman with wings of woven flame and voice like shattered bells. "You are marked."
Serelith didn't flinch. "I didn't come to beg. I came for answers."
A second fae — faceless, robed in mirrors — rose. "Then you have already failed. The Court does not answer. The Court remembers. Or forgets."
The fae laughed — dozens of voices, echoing wrong.
Then the thorn-throned Queen arrived. She did not walk. She unfolded. Her presence pressed against reality like a hand on silk. Her face was veiled in light, her crown made of live serpents that whispered in unknown tongues.
"Child of the First Tongue," she said, "why do you dance into our dream uninvited?"
"I carry the Codex. I want to know what the gods are hiding. What the Unmaker is. Why I see myself in it."
A ripple of unease passed through the Court.
The Queen's serpents hissed.
"You are a splinter," the Queen said. "A fracture of something once whole. You are not the only you."
Serelith stepped forward. "What do you mean?"
The Queen's veil parted — and Serelith saw herself. Older. Colder. Wearing a crown of shadows. Leading armies of glass-eyed soldiers across a ruined sky.
"This is you in another Thread. A path you may yet walk. The Unmaker is not a god. It is a truth — one you are becoming."
Serelith staggered.
"No. That's not me."
The Queen's smile was sorrowful. "Not yet."
She turned, and the Court began to sing — not words, but a memory: the Song of the Veil. A song meant to keep the worlds apart. A song the Codex was unraveling.
Serelith fled before the song could finish.
But a single word followed her, branded into the hollows of her mind:
"Choose."
Because even gods, it seemed, were only prisoners of the choices they had once made.