Chapter Twenty #2
“Make it stop. Please make it stop.” I yell to the Hollow, to the cottage, to anyone that will listen.
Know them. Name them. Claim your fear.
“This fear,” I whisper into the smoke, “it’s Nala’s.”
“She’s terrified of Charlie coming back,” I say as quickly as I can, and finally, Charlie freezes, the match inches away from Nala’s pleading eyes.
The image flickers, stutters, then dissolves into ash. I’d known Charlie had affected her—but I’d never understood how deeply.
A tear slips down my cheek, but I don’t have time to wallow, because the second slit pulls me in with a cold so sudden it feels like teeth sinking into my skin. The very air freezes on my tongue when I inhale.
A body lies before me on the floor.
Twisted. Still.
Their eyes open and glazed.
It’s me. Again.
Ryder kneels over the corpse, his hands drenched in my blood, his face stripped bare of every mask he wears. His expression is a raw, shattering mix of horror and guilt, the kind that doesn’t fade with time.
“I didn’t mean to—” His voice breaks. “Asha, please—please wake up—”
My breath catches painfully, as if my ribs have clenched around my lungs. He sobs into me, my limp body cradled in his arms.
Ryder… this is what’s been haunting you?
This is the reason you have been pushing me away—I managed to save myself last time… but who’s to say I could if it happened again.
You think you’ll destroy me.
The ache in my chest is sharp enough to steal my breath.
“This fear belongs to Ryder,” I manage, though it feels like forcing broken glass through my throat.
“He’s terrified he’ll lose control and hurt me.”
Ryder’s sobbing form fractures like a mirror struck by a stone. It splinters into light, then disintegrates into dust.
The third slit glows faintly, exhaling a soft mist that coils around my ankles as I step through. It’s cooler here, gentler, almost deceptively harmless.
Through the haze, I see myself again, this time alive and unharmed, walking with steady, unshakable confidence. I don’t look back even once.
Behind me stands River.
But not the River who hides behind sarcasm and smirks, who jokes his way through life. This River looks utterly gutted. Stripped of bravado, stripped of the grin he uses as armour.
Desperate.
Small.
Breakable.
He reaches toward the version of me walking away, fingers trembling like the ground beneath him is splitting apart.
“Asha… please. Don’t choose him. Don’t leave me behind,” he begs, his voice breaking, “choose me.” he runs towards the version of me, grabbing onto her hand, but she just slips out of his grip as if made up from air. River drops to his knees with his head in his hands.
Something in my chest clenches so violently that it knocks the breath out of me.
River, you hid this so well I never even saw it.
I thought it was just a crush. Over before it started.
But now I can’t unsee it.
My throat tightens around the heaviness sitting inside it.
“This is River’s fear,” I murmur.
“He’s afraid I’ll never choose him?” The sentence tastes wrong as soon as I say it, like I’ve exposed something private I had no right to touch. Heat prickles at the back of my neck. Yes, I knew he liked me—once. Before our disastrous date, before everything changed, and we agreed to be friends.
Or… I thought we both agreed.
My chest tightens as the weight of it settles.
River standing here, forced to watch this… forced to watch me choose Ryder—his twin—over and over again. No wonder his fear looks like heartbreak.
The mist curls inward and swallows the vision whole.
The illusion dissolves, gentle as a sigh.
Only one opening remains.
My body already knows what waits inside the final slit; every instinct claws at me, urging me to turn back. My pulse thrashes against my ribs, faster than it ever has, louder too—like it’s trying to break free.
Still, I force myself to move.
The moment I cross the threshold, darkness swallows me whole. Not simple darkness—this feels thick enough to touch, to drown in. A living void that holds its breath around me. I can’t see my hands, can’t see the floor, can’t tell if I’m standing or sinking.
Then a single sound slices clean through the black.
Boots.
Sharp. Precise.
Rhythmic in a way burned into my memory.
Cold floods my veins as a shape peels itself from the shadows.
The General steps into view as though the dark itself created him—tall, rigid, his uniform immaculate, his expression carved from stone.
His eyes lock onto mine instantly, with that same predatory calm that hollowed out entire nights of sleep.
“You will watch the world burn, Asha,” he says. His voice is low, controlled, the kind that never needed to yell to terrify. “Knowing you could have stopped it.”
My throat closes. I can barely breathe.
Not here. Not now. Please not him.
“No,” I whisper, though the word barely escapes me. “You’re not real. You’re not—”
He takes a step closer.
“Everything you fear becomes real here.”
The shadows cling to him like armour. When he lifts his gloved hand toward my face, I flinch so hard my teeth clack together. My legs want to run, but the dark tightens around me like tar, holding me still—forcing me to face him.
A whisper curls around my mind again, soft and merciless:
Name your fear.
Claim your truth.
My vision swims. The air feels too thin to pull in, too cold to warm my lungs. This is the fear I never speak aloud. The one that digs into my spine at night. The one that tells me I will never escape his prophecy. That I made a mistake that day, in the mountain.
My hands curl into fists until my nails bite my palms.
“This fear…” My voice fractures. “This is mine.”
The General’s smile spreads, slow and poisonous, but he doesn’t fade like the others.
He lunges.
His hand closes around my throat before I can react, dragging me off balance. The room explodes into motion—my panic, the darkness, his grip—everything colliding at once. I gasp and claw at his wrist, but his hold is like iron.
“You think naming it frees you?” he snarls. “Fear must be beaten.”
He throws me, landing a punch to my jaw.
My back slams into something unseen, and the white-hot pain that flashes takes my breath away. I push off instinctively, dodging just as his boot crashes where my head had been. Splinters of shadowed floor scatter like shards.
I stumble, breath ragged, but Ryder’s training echoes in my muscles whether I want it there or not—how to brace, how to pivot, how to strike. He taught me the shape of violence, no doubt the same violence the General taught him. I use it now.
I duck under his next blow and drive my fist into his ribs. It’s like hitting steel, but he grunts, though only a small sound, it was very real.
He can be hurt.
I move again. Faster and harder. Elbowing his jaw, kneeing his side, and shoving him back with everything I have. He barely staggers, but the darkness stirs behind him, as if reacting to the cracks forming in the image. A sign that it’s working.
“Isn’t it funny that I’m your biggest fear?” he growls, a sick, reverberating laughter, grabbing my arm and wrenching it behind me. Pain tears up my shoulder. His breath is hot against my ear. “Still scared of me even in death.”
Rage ignites through the fear.
“I beat you once,” I hiss. “I’ll beat you again.”
I twist, slamming my heel into his knee and tearing myself free.
He falters. It’s enough.
I seize the advantage, launching at him with a force born from weeks of swallowed nightmares. Blow after blow, I drive him back until he stumbles into the centre of the void.
We collide one final time—his hand reaching for me, mine striking out—
And then he stops.
A jagged crack splits down his face, glowing hot and bright. Another split across his chest. And another. Light pours from him like molten gold.
“No,” he snarls, voice warping, shredding. “This isn’t over.”
“It was over the day I killed you in the mountain,” I say, breath shaking. “Fear isn’t beaten. It’s faced until it breaks.”
The cracks finally erupt, and light floods from his body, bursting outward. He explodes into a cloud of glowing ash that scatters into the darkness, dissolving until there’s nothing left—not a shadow, not a breath, not a whisper of him.
Only silence.
For the first time, it isn’t suffocating. It isn’t watching. It simply… is.
The darkness peels away like wet paint, retreating until the real cottage rushes back around me. The slits seal, and the walls release their breath.
I stand alone in the middle of the room, shaking, lungs burning, heart hammering—but alive.
The cottage shrieks as its walls twist, and floorboards rip apart like the house is being bulldozed. Light floods every crack, bright and blinding.
And then I am thrown backwards, fast and hard, hitting into cold mud.
Arms reach me the moment the world stops spinning.
Ryder’s voice is the first thing that cuts through the ringing in my ears—frantic and scraped raw from shouting my name.
Nala gets to me next, her arms wrapping around me with such force that I feel her shaking, like she isn’t sure I’m solid.
River drops to his knees at my side, breath shuddering, eyes wild and stormy, no longer able to hide whatever he’s been burying all this time.
Ryder’s hands close around my shoulders, firm but trembling as he tilts my face toward his. His eyes race over me, checking, counting, panicking, as if he expects me to vanish the moment he blinks.
“Asha… what did it do to you?” His voice fractures on the last word. “Tell me you’re okay—please—”
I try to answer, but nothing comes. My throat feels scraped clean. My bones feel hollow, like the trial scooped something out of me and left the absence behind.
When my voice finally crawls its way free, it’s thin and frayed at the edges.
“I had to face your fears,” I manage, swallowing against the burn. “And then mine.”
River’s breath stumbles, catching hard in his chest. The truth hits him like a blow he wasn’t braced for.
Ryder goes utterly still beside me, his jaw tightening, a muscle ticking in his cheek as if he already knows what fear of his I saw.
Nala looks between the three of us, her expression shifting, understanding arriving with slow, painful clarity.
I turn toward the clearing where the cottage once stood.
There’s nothing left now—no walls, no door, no glow—just drifting dust carried away by the Hollow’s restless wind.
It feels almost as if the house was never real at all, only a mouth that opened to devour our secrets and spit us back out changed.
The Hollow didn’t want to kill me.
It wanted to expose us.
Expose everything.
The truth now stretches between us like a live wire—dangerous to touch but impossible to ignore. And as the silence settles around us, heavy and electric, I know with a certainty that sinks straight into my bones that nothing about us—
not friendship, not loyalty, not love—will ever be the same.