Before my Demonology became registered, I was able to know the names of the demons I was killing and portions of their abilities, due to the cold thoughts of the Hollow Avatar.
I had been ignoring the thing in the back of my head for multiple loops, and now there was a tentacle the size of a mountain rising into the sky three miles south, and I had finally run out of room to be polite, and I had stopped being afraid of the answers I was going to get.
Cor Telluris was working overtime in my chest, eating the essence of the Narghul Sorcerers one molecule at a time, and changing me from the roots, while the pyramid was naming its prisoner.
I sat down. Right there, in the middle of a battlefield, among the bodies of my dead, with the world ending in slow motion all around me since Lightning Incanrate had been kept active for a single second, and this gave me enough time to think.
I crossed my legs in a meditation posture, I closed my eyes, and I went looking for the cold space behind my soul, and I found it where it always was. I will never not be amazed at this change inside my body.
"Hollow," I said. "You are not just a skill. You are not just a broken fragment of something greater. You are a part of this, and so am I. You know what the pyramid is. You know what the demons are. You know what the Conclave is trying to do."
There was a pause. Not a long one, and the hollow place behind my soul stirred. It had been stirring for loops, pressing against the edges of my consciousness, waiting. But I had always pushed it back.
I had pushed it back for good reasons, because while it gave me power, the hollow would consume everything if given a chance, my soul and everything that I had been.
I had also been afraid of what it would tell me, afraid that once I knew the truth, I would not be able to bear it.
All of these thoughts were unconscious; it was the same way that you did not push your hand into fire, even though there may be gold within the flames.
But everyone I knew would die, and I could taste the ash of the camp on my tongue; the demons were endless, and I feared that no matter how strong I became in this loop, there would be nothing I could do to prevent the eruption of this pyramid and the deaths of everyone I knew.
Now, there was nothing left to be afraid of.
"Tell me," I said. "Tell me everything."
The hollow place yawned open.
My soul had become melded with the Hollow Avatar, but there was a wall between us, and that wall came down, not everything, but enough that I could feel a pressure fill my mind, and I realized that this pressure was the voice of the Hollow Avatar, and it directly arrived in my chest.
I want to be honest about the voice, because the first time I heard it clearly, I half-expected to be afraid. I had always been dealing with the Hollow Avatar in a state of combat, and I had never tried to directly communicate with it.
So, the voice of the Avatar was not as cold as I expected; rather, I would call it the voice of a recording.
It was like something precise that had been said a long time ago by someone who is no longer present, and that the recording could only repeat with as much care as the technology allowed.
Imagine your father’s voice, twenty years after he died, played back from a wax cylinder. That clarity... that was the Hollow.
I had wondered when you would call for me."
∞
"Begin," the Avatar said. "I will answer what I can answer."
I paused at those words, a bit uncomfortable with the pressure on my soul, then I asked, "Why ’what you can?’"
"Because I am a constructed instrument, and my charter has limits. I will tell you what is fit to be told to a wielder of your tier. I will also tell you when I am withholding, and why. I will not lie. I have not lied to you in any loop."
I noticed it had not said I will not withhold useful things. I noticed the omission, and I noticed it had wanted me to notice. That was the kind of answer it was going to give me. Specific, brutally honest, but ultimately limited.
I started with the easy one.
"The pyramid is a prison?"
"Confirmed. Caelith Mourne is one of thirty-one prisons on this planet. Its prisoner is Silithra, called among her own kind the Pale Matron, and among the swarm she commands, Khazarahn, Queen of the Swarm. Both names are correct in their registers."
I swallowed, not expecting that I would be given so much information at the drop of a hat, but I pushed aside my distractions and focused on the important information, "Built by whom?"
"By the Architects, you would call Achon in the Era of the Expansion War. The Caelith class structures were meant to hold Apocalypse or Celestial Grade Threats. Mourne is a Class Six Caelith Structure."
"Class Six?"
"This is information above Transcedence and is not available to you."
I nodded, even though I think the Hollow Avatar had given me enough information to guess what transcendence and class six meant.
"You say there are thirty-one Caeliths on this world, but I think there is a thirty-second, behind my home."
"I cannot validate that information as I am no longer connected to the Stone Oracle. However, the loop and the presence of Caeliths on a planet are sufficient reasons to accept the fact that there has been a breakdown in the Order of the Heavens."
"What do you mean by that, Hollow?"
"Caeliths were built to roam the darkness of the void for all eternity, and they were not supposed to be found on a planet, especially one with life. A single Caelith on a planet is enough to call attention to an Achon, thirty-one Caeliths on a single planet... is unprecedented."