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I look across the letters. The word has existed in my mind since Professor Aldren's lecture. I have refused to give it shape. Because saying it feels like choosing the most dramatic explanation. Because the Hollowborn belong to history. Because accepted scholarship says they disappeared. Because forests without birdsong and blood without memory could have other causes.

"How similar are these reports to the Silent War?"

Professor Neris looks at me. Rhyven becomes still beside me. Cassian's attention sharpens. Aldric does not seem to recognize the term.

Professor Neris walks toward the chained shelf. She removes a thin, ancient book. The chain releases only after she presses her thumb against the lock. She returns to the desk and opens it carefully. The pages are darkened around the edges. The script is older than modern Varethian. Still readable. She turns to a marked passage. "Read." I lean closer. In the months preceding the disappearances, witnesses described no advancing army and no visible corruption. The first sign was interruption. My breath stops. Professor Neris turns the page. Where the Hollowborn passed, life did not always end. At first, it merely became unreachable.

Aldric looks at me. His face has lost all color. "That's what happened to me?"

Professor Neris closes the book. "We do not know." She answers.

"But you think it is." He adds.

"I think the resemblance is no longer dismissible."

Rhyven's voice is quiet. "Do you believe they're returning?"

Professor Neris answers immediately. "No." The certainty surprises all of us. Then she continues. "I believe something wants us to remember them." The room becomes completely silent.

Rhyven's eyes narrow. "Meaning?"

"It means similarity is not identity." She gestures toward the old book. "We possess fragments. Survivor testimony. Political copies made centuries after the events. The Hollowborn may have caused the Silent War. They may have been named because of it. They may have been creatures, a magical phenomenon or a term applied to several unrelated disasters."

"What do you believe?" I ask.

Professor Neris looks at the letters. "I believe these incidents are connected." Her answer catches me off guard.

"That is all?"

"That is enough."

Cassian lifts the report from the siren coast. "What would make something imitate the old accounts?"

"Fear," Rhyven says.

Professor Neris nods once. "Possibly." She says. "Political destabilization," I add.

"Yes."

"Someone could be testing wards," Rhyven says. "Measuring response times."

"Could it be natural?" Aldric asks.

Professor Neris looks toward him. "Magic is natural. That does not make it harmless." She begins gathering the letters into smaller groups. "Your blood changes the investigation."

My stomach tightens. "Why?"

"Because the Council has records of magical silence." She touches the ward reports. "Structural interruption." The Medusa letters. "Emotional and conscious absence." The siren reports. "Bond disruption." The dragon accounts. "What it did not have was proof that the effect can alter the emotional history carried by living blood."

I look toward Aldric. He appears suddenly less like a person in the room and more like evidence. I hate it.

"He isn't proof," I say. Professor Neris' eyes return to me. "He's a student."

"Yes." The answer is quiet. A correction accepted. She looks toward Aldric. "You are not an object of study. You will not be touched, tested or questioned without consent. Understood?"

He nods. "Good."

Then she turns back to me. "Your manifestation perceived what conventional healing and magical examination did not. That makes you useful." The word sits badly. Professor Neris notices. "It also makes you vulnerable." That is worse.