“The Hollow Empress”

Part I

I was never supposed to lead the Aravik survey. Officially, the initiative belonged to the Oceanographic Institute of Bergen, a multi-year study into the tectonic properties of a glacial rift beneath an inland body of water. On paper, it was meant to be geology, not history or myth. And certainly not what we found resting beneath the lake.

Lake Aravik sits cradled within a steep basin of weather-beaten granite in the northernmost region of Norway. It is, by surface area, unremarkable—an icy sheet that stretches just shy of twenty kilometers across at its widest point, surrounded by moss-thick pine forest and unreachable by land without weeks of planning. Its depth, however, is what drew the scientific community’s attention. At just over eleven thousand feet, Aravik is deeper than any inland lake in Europe, and nearly rivals the depths of the Mariana Trench. No one could explain why, which, of course, meant someone would be sent to try.

That someone became me.

I received the invitation from Eric Hightower six months before the expedition launch. He claimed to be acting on behalf of a private archaeological trust, one with enough funding to secure state-of-the-art submersibles, a research barge, and a full scientific crew. I had reason to be suspicious. Hightower had a reputation in academic circles as a provocateur—a wealthy enthusiast with a habit of inserting himself into scientific projects under the guise of patronage. Still, the access he offered was undeniable. When I agreed, it was with the understanding that I would be the lead archaeologist of record and have full authority over any findings.

By the end of the first week at Aravik, I would begin to question every decision that had brought me there.

The first sonar sweep was conducted on a cold gray morning in late September. We had anchored the barge in the lake’s center, where the bathymetric data showed the sharpest drop. For hours, the sensors returned only the expected topography—jagged cliff formations beneath the waterline, sediment trails that spiraled into darkness, and a handful of heat plumes consistent with minor geothermal vents. Then, at precisely 3:47 p.m., Tomás Velez—the drone operator—called me to the console.

“I’ve got something,” he said, his voice low. “Flat. Too flat.”

I leaned over his shoulder, squinting at the monitor. The sonar image showed a shape that was unmistakably geometric. A massive, symmetrical ridge jutted up from the silt floor at a depth of nearly ten thousand feet. From above, it resembled the upper curve of a seated figure—shoulders, perhaps, or something akin to a throne’s base. The proportions were impossible. We measured the structure at over three hundred feet tall. That alone was enough to demand a visual inspection.

Tomás deployed the first dive drone later that afternoon. Fitted with high-resolution cameras and stabilizers, the unit descended slowly through the ink-dark water, its floodlights cutting thin slashes into the abyss. For nearly forty minutes, the feed revealed nothing but the suspended particulate of disturbed sediment. Then the lights struck something solid—something carved.

What we saw, however briefly, did not belong at the bottom of any lake. The face of a woman stared upward from beneath a layer of stone. Her eyes were closed, but her expression was one of serenity—or grief. The footage lasted only a few seconds before the drone lost power and the feed cut to black.

The silence on deck afterward was absolute. No one spoke. Even Eric, who was rarely at a loss for words, simply stared at the screen and whispered, “She’s real.”

Later that night, after logging the coordinates and recording the telemetry data, I stepped outside the cabin for air. A dense fog had rolled in from the northern end of the lake, blurring the treeline into an indistinct wall. I could hear water lapping against the barge’s hull, though the surface itself was still. It was then that I recalled something one of the guides had said earlier that week.

They called her the Weeping Woman of the Hollow.

According to the stories, the lake had once been the site of a village, long vanished beneath the water’s rise. The villagers worshipped a woman they called the Empress of Silence, a protector or spirit who kept watch over the deep. They believed that to disturb the lake’s stillness after nightfall was to awaken her sorrow. “She mourns in silence,” one old fisherman had told me. “But she does not mourn alone.” At the time, I had dismissed it as folklore.

That night, I did not sleep.

At some point before dawn, I found myself sitting upright in my bunk, unsure of what had woken me. My breath hung in the air, and the interior of the cabin felt colder than it should have. I turned toward the porthole and, for just a moment, thought I saw a light moving beneath the water—like a lantern, bobbing deep under the surface. But no one else stirred. No alarms sounded.

When I did finally sleep, my dreams were not my own.

I remember darkness, not like night, but a kind of fathomless black that pressed inward from every direction. In that void sat a woman, her hands resting in her lap, her head bowed forward. Her face was hidden by a veil of hair, and when she spoke, her voice traveled not through air, but through liquid—warped, slow, and reaching.

“I have been waiting,” she whispered, “for so long. I remember you.”

I woke with my skin damp and the taste of salt on my tongue. The journal beside my bed was open, though I had not touched it. A single line had been written in my handwriting: Below, we are remembered.

I tore the page out and burned it before the others awoke.

We were not prepared for what lay beneath that lake. I suspect, now, that some part of me knew that even then.

Part II

Two days after the drone’s signal went dark, we launched the submersible. The delay had not been technical. Our equipment was functional, our scans stable, and the lake calm. It was something else—an unease among the team, subtle but shared, as though we had all heard the same warning in our dreams and were too cautious to speak of it aloud. Eventually, Hightower broke the tension.

“We came here to see what’s down there,” he reminded us. “If we turn back now, we’ve wasted more than money.”

He was right. And so, just after noon on the third day, with the sky a blank sheet of gray and the water smooth as oil, Tomás and I sealed ourselves inside the pressurized submersible, and the descent began.

The first fifteen hundred meters were uneventful. The lakewater, nearly black to the naked eye, yielded no shapes beyond what the floodlights touched. The onboard instruments ticked steadily downward as we passed through layers of sediment and silt suspended in slow drift. Once we crossed the two-thousand-meter mark, however, the readings began to fluctuate. Pressure remained within acceptable tolerances, but something in the current shifted. Every inch of descent brought with it a sense of intrusion, as if the lake recognized us not as explorers, but as trespassers.

At 2,940 meters, our lights struck stone.

It rose before us without fanfare or grandeur, emerging from the murk like a mountain formerly obscured by morning fog. A massive plinth of carved black stone anchored the structure’s base, its edges softened by centuries of sediment. And above it—seated in regal silence—was the statue.

She dwarfed the submersible in both height and scale. Her features, though smooth and faintly stylized, bore the unmistakable symmetry of a human face. She wore no expression, but her posture conveyed a restrained elegance: head bowed slightly forward, arms resting on the armrests of her throne, and hands held open, palms skyward. Her garments, if they could be called that, were formed of stone veined with pale quartz, resembling embroidered cloth frozen mid-flow. And upon her head sat a crown—an intricate circlet composed not of spires or jewels, but of faces—countless feminine visages, each lacking eyes or mouths, arranged in concentric tiers like mourners around a pyre.

Tomás slowed the craft’s thrusters and circled to the statue’s left. From this angle, we could see that the throne on which she sat had been carved from a larger structure, possibly a temple foundation. Age had worn deep grooves into its corners. Whole sections had collapsed and settled in the silt. But the statue herself was untouched. Not a crack, not a fleck of discoloration. Her surface shimmered slightly in the light, as though the water around her was refracted differently. As though it bent to avoid her.

“I don’t think she’s stone,” Tomás muttered over comms. “Not all the way.”

We halted the submersible in front of a nearby pillar, perhaps forty feet from the statue’s base. It had the shape of an obelisk—slim, clean, and tapering toward the top—but it bore no religious markings, no iconography. Instead, a single smooth face of the monolith had been inscribed with a script none of us recognized. The characters were tight and flowing, arranged in columns that ran from top to bottom. Some had been worn down, but others remained sharp.

Back on the surface, we relayed high-resolution images to June Okafor. She was waiting on the barge with a translation program of her own design, one trained on a dozen ancient Mediterranean and Northern Eurasian dialects. It took her less than an hour to identify the first pattern.

“She waits beneath,” she read aloud, tracing the inscription on her tablet with a stylus. “Untouched by the sun. Beloved of silence.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“For now,” she said. “These symbols don’t behave like anything I’ve seen before. It’s not runic. It’s not phonetic, either. But it’s written with intent. You can tell by the spacing. It wants to be read.”

Tomás, curious to see what else might be nearby, steered the submersible behind the Empress. The floodlights illuminated a series of concentric stone arches, all partially collapsed and buried in silt. They looked like the remains of a colonnade or a ceremonial path, though what ritual would have required such a scale was beyond imagining.

Among the arches, we found more figures.

They were smaller than the Empress—no more than ten to fifteen feet tall—and carved in humanoid form. Their arms and legs were jointed, but bent at awkward angles, and their heads were elongated, lacking any discernible features. Each one faced away from the central statue, as though in exile or disgrace. Their hands had been shattered, their torsos fractured and missing pieces, as if their creators had tried to erase them, or as if they had been punished.

Tomás drifted the submersible closer to one of the statues. As he adjusted the angle, our lights momentarily passed over the Empress again—and I saw something that did not register until later, when I reviewed the footage in slow motion.

Her head had moved.

The degree of her incline had changed, so imperceptibly that the mind might deny it entirely, but I was certain of my observations. I said nothing, however, and neither did Tomás. Whether he saw it or simply refused to acknowledge it, I could not tell. But I remained silent for the rest of the dive.

We returned to the surface just before dusk.

The lake had changed in our absence. The winds that had kept the water in constant motion were gone. The ripples, once rhythmic, had ceased entirely. The air smelled of iron and wet stone. The surrounding trees looked different—not in their number or type, but in their color, as though the forest itself had dimmed.

We spent the next several hours securing the equipment and transferring the imaging data to our local server. June stayed up late reviewing the photos. I remained outside, unable to sleep, the dream of the whispering woman still clinging to the edge of my thoughts.

When I returned to the cabin, I found my camera powered on.

It had been sealed in my footlocker, untouched since we began our descent. The memory card held thirty-two new photos.

Most were of the Empress. Some appeared identical to the ones I had taken during the dive, though they were captured from angles I could not have reached. Others were hazy, as if taken through water—despite the fact that the lens was dry.

One photo, buried near the end of the roll, showed the Empress in close-up. Her black eyes were open wide, reflecting nothing. As I stared at the image, however, I had the impossible sensation of being watched in return.

I closed the camera, removed the card, and placed it in my pocket.

No one else had been near my locker. No one else had access to the key.

We had gone down to see what lay below the still water. And something had seen us in return.

Part III

It took less than a week for our expedition to unravel.

We had returned from the dive shaken but composed. No one voiced what we were all thinking—that the statue had changed, that her posture had shifted, that her eyes, once sealed in stone, now watched. We buried our observations in technical terms, blamed the anomalies on angle distortion or pressure fatigue, and told ourselves that the silence was just the mind’s reaction to too much depth. But the silence was growing.

The debate began that evening. We gathered in the main cabin to review the dive footage, with June sorting the glyphs into workable fragments and Tomás transferring external visuals to the local array. Eric sat in the corner, holding a small tape recorder and playing back a sound I had not heard before. It was thin, warbling, and wavering in pitch, like a song remembered after too many years. It reminded me of a funeral procession—slow and swaying.

“I found this on one of the backup drives,” he said. “Audio from a local collector. He called it a dirge. Supposedly, it was once sung by the women of a village that stood here before the lake filled the basin. They called it the Lament of the Hollow Bride.”

June glanced over, frowning. “That wasn’t on the inventory manifest.”

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Eric replied. “It’s not official. It’s… folklore. But the pattern of the melody—it matches the structure of the inscription on the monolith. Same number of syllables. Same cadence.”

I said nothing, though something in the tone of the recording pulled at my chest in a way I couldn’t name. It wasn’t sorrow, not exactly. It was closer to gravity—like the sound wanted to bring me downward, to draw me in like an undertow.

That night, I dreamed again, and found myself inside a chamber. In the center of it sat the woman from before. She was clearer now—her hands folded over her lap, her head still bowed, her voice nearer.

“You found me,” she whispered. “Kneel before me.”

Her hair moved with the water, though no current stirred it. When she raised her head, I saw the suggestion of a face—not distinct, but implied, as if my mind had been given a blank mask and told to imagine grief.

I woke, gasping, with the taste of salt in my mouth again, though I had not eaten nor touched the lake. The cabin was dark, and the door stood open. My feet were wet.

I stumbled outside, guided by the pale haze of dawn. Fog hung low over the lake. The water stretched out ahead of me, smooth and black. I was standing waist-deep in it. No one had seen me leave the cabin. There were no footprints on the dock behind me.

When I returned to my bunk, I found sand beneath the covers.

After that morning, I kept my boots on at night.

Tomás grew quiet in the days that followed. He no longer joined us for meals, spending most of his time in the drone bay sketching diagrams of the statue. When I asked what he was doing, he showed me cross-sections of the Empress’s chest and limbs—complex internal structures that included hollows, support columns, and narrow, artery-like corridors. I asked where he had seen this. He said he hadn’t, that he just knew, and I shuddered.

June attempted to scan the sketches into the modeling software, but the system flagged the images as corrupted, even though the paper itself was clean.

That evening, the first of the fish washed ashore.

Their bodies were intact but bloated, the scales discolored in places where no wounds were visible. Their mouths hung open, and their gills were dry. We recorded samples and ran water tests. No signs of contaminants were found.

The birds were the next to vanish. Gulls that had circled our vessel in the mornings disappeared entirely, and the shoreline, once alive with movement, fell still. The forest beyond the lake seemed distant now, as though the trees had shifted backward.

Eric began setting up the underwater speaker system the next day. He told us he planned to test acoustic responses in the sediment near the statue, using the recording he had played earlier. I advised caution, but he dismissed my concerns.

“We’ve already disturbed the site, Eliza,” he said. “This is just another layer of data.”

The speaker array was dropped on a tether and powered through the external generator. He activated the playback just before nightfall. The melody echoed across the lake—stripped of human voice, filtered through the density of the water into something slower and lower than I remembered. There was no immediate reaction. We monitored the bathymetric sensors, watched for shifts in temperature or current, and logged the data accordingly.

It was not until after midnight that the tremors began.

They were faint at first—no more than a flicker on the pressure charts—but they grew stronger in increments, as though something far below had stirred in its sleep. The lakebed registered microfractures along the western faultline. A plume of silt rose from the Empress’s base and spread slowly across the surrounding trench.

Then the drone feed returned.

The unit that had gone dark during our first attempt suddenly reconnected, its signal weak but stable. The onboard camera feed crackled to life, distorted by interference but recognizable. The image showed the Empress, seated as before, though the lights on the drone cast unfamiliar shadows.

Her face was centered in the frame, and her eyes were open.

Unlike the photo I had found in my camera, there was no ambiguity here. Her gaze was fixed and level, focused on the drone as if it had interrupted something sacred. The clarity of the feed sharpened momentarily, and in that brief second, we saw motion—a narrowing of the eyes, a slow intake of breath that shifted the contours of her cheeks, the subtlest suggestion of life in a face carved from stone.

The screen went white. A high-pitched tone burst from the speakers, sharp enough to shatter one of the overhead bulbs. We killed the signal and powered down the external devices.

No one spoke.

Eric left the cabin without a word. Tomás went below deck and did not emerge until the following afternoon. June stared at the blank monitor for nearly an hour, whispering in a language I did not recognize.

I returned to my quarters and deleted the camera footage immediately after reviewing it. I thought that would end it. I thought, foolishly, that we still had a choice.

But by then, the lake had already begun to change.

Part IV

The following day, I made the decision to return to the lakebed. There was no consensus among the team. Tomás had become increasingly withdrawn, speaking only when necessary and avoiding eye contact even when addressed directly. June, though intellectually engaged with the glyphs on the monolith, expressed quiet fear beneath her professional veneer. As for Eric, he had not spoken since the incident with the underwater speaker. His eyes tracked movement that wasn’t there, and his attention often wandered to the treeline with the intensity of a man watching for ghosts.

But I knew we had to go back.

Something had changed at depth. It wasn’t only the imagery—though the Empress’s opened eyes were now burned into my memory—but the lake itself. Our barometric readings showed atmospheric anomalies we could not explain. The water temperature remained stable, yet our instruments registered fluctuations in density and viscosity. It was as if the lake were becoming something else.

We descended the next morning, this time with all three of us aboard. June joined Tomás and me inside the submersible, her notes and translated glyph segments spread out in the compartment’s overhead pouch. She brought with her the fragments that most closely matched the funeral dirge Eric had played—a pattern of symbols that, when read aloud, seemed to resonate unpleasantly through the cabin walls.

The descent was slower than before. The water pressed against the hull with a resistance that felt sentient, a kind of dragging weight that taxed the thrusters more than their rated depth should have allowed. Outside the viewport, the world was black and undisturbed. We passed the ruins of the arches without pause and approached the base of the statue, our lights sweeping over the throne’s base.

The Empress had changed again.

There was no mistaking it now. Her left shoulder, once level, was now raised by several inches. Her head no longer inclined forward, but instead faced the horizon of the trench, as though monitoring some distant presence in the gloom. The fingers of her right hand, previously clenched into a closed gesture, were now spread apart, palm open and turned slightly inward.

I felt, without any rational justification, that the change had occurred slowly, in the time since we had first laid eyes upon her. We had not woken her. She had already been waking; we were merely observing the process, and helpless to stop it.

As we circled behind her again, our lights revealed a new array of figures—hollow and humanoid, arranged in rows along a gentle slope behind the throne. Each resembled the Empress in form, though they were each far smaller in size. They were carved not with precision but with rough mimicry, as though created in reverence or penance by unskilled hands. Some were missing limbs. Others leaned at odd angles. A few had collapsed entirely into the sediment. None faced the throne. Instead, they stood with their backs to the Empress, shoulders hunched, arms bound behind them in sculpted manacles.

June took several images, recording every angle while murmuring quietly to herself. I caught snippets of her translation as she worked, repeated from memory: “Turn not your face to her glory. The unloved shall dwell in shadow.”

Tomás adjusted the depth controls to bring us lower. As the submersible descended to the statue’s base, the lights revealed what had once been hidden beneath a thick layer of silt and sediment—a gaping fissure, newly opened, beneath the Empress’s stone seat. It stretched in both directions across the trench floor, as though a seam had torn loose from the lakebed itself. The edges of the fissure were clean, not the result of erosion or age, but of sudden force.

From within that split came sound.

It was not immediate, and it did not register on our external mics at first. We heard it only once the engines were powered down and the sub rested still. It began as a vibration—a deep, low hum that reverberated through the hull, barely audible but undeniably present. Then it formed tone, carrying a melodic shape not unlike the dirge Eric had played. Though I could not understand the words, if they were words at all, I felt their meaning deep within my chest.

We tried to record the sound. Our onboard devices failed to capture anything but static.

Moments later, the submersible’s instrumentation began to fail.

First, the internal compass began spinning erratically. Then, our depth gauges reset themselves, reading us as fifteen meters above the surface despite our actual position. The lights flickered. The external cameras began to cycle without command. June attempted to restart the system, but the console controls no longer responded.

“We’re drifting,” Tomás said, “but the thrusters are offline.”

Outside, the fissure pulsed with faint bioluminescence, as though something deep below was breathing light into the trench.

I ordered a manual ballast purge, and the submersible began its ascent.

It took longer than expected. Without thrusters, the buoyancy controls worked unevenly, and we rose through the water like a dying whale, slow, spiraling, and without grace. No one spoke during the journey back. Each of us, I think, feared that any such utterance might draw unwanted attention to us.

When we breached the surface, it was not yet dark, but the world had changed.

The lake was coated in fog so thick that we could not see the barge until we were within ten meters of it. The shoreline had vanished entirely, lost to the white. The sun, though still present, gave no warmth. The fog reflected light in unnatural ways, causing the surface of the water to shimmer with hues I had never seen in natural daylight—muted violets, sickened golds, and a pale blue that reminded me of old bruises.

We climbed back aboard and found our equipment degraded.

The drone hulls bore signs of oxidation and scale, as if they had been submerged for years rather than hours. The sonar arrays had cracked at their hinges. My own laptop, which I had left closed and sealed in a protective case, would not power on. Its battery had ruptured, corroded from within.

We ran tests on our backup gear. Much of it showed similar decay. Our emergency rations, sealed in airtight containers, had rotted or gone stale. The labels on several crates had faded as though exposed to sunlight for years.

Tomás checked the internal time logs against the GPS and server clock. They were no longer in agreement. According to the barge’s chronometer, we had been underwater for eight hours. According to the GPS timestamp, we had been gone for twenty-one days.

Eric, who had remained behind during the descent, emerged from the cabin. His eyes were sunken, and his beard, previously short and neatly trimmed, had grown out in uneven patches. His voice cracked when he spoke.

“I thought you weren’t coming back,” he said. “I tried to reach you. The radio stopped working days ago.”

We attempted to leave the lake that evening. June proposed returning to the village thirty kilometers east, where a logging station maintained an emergency signal tower. We took the all-terrain vehicle we had landed with and followed the forest path that had brought us to the lake’s edge on our first day.

The trail was still there, but the forest had overtaken it.

Trees that had once stood at the margins had crept inward, their roots upheaving the path stones. Moss coated every surface in a thick, wet blanket. The sun vanished behind the canopy within minutes, and when we arrived at the village, we found it in ruin.

The houses were empty, their windows shattered and their roofs half-collapsed. There were no signs of struggle, and no indication of violence—just of abandonment. Foliage grew through the floorboards. Ivy had climbed to the second stories. A rusted generator hummed faintly in one of the storage sheds, but no light came when we flipped the switches. The radio tower stood, but its wiring had been stripped. Its base was choked in thorns.

We returned to the lake in silence.

That night, as we sat on the deck in shifts, the fog thickened once more.

I woke just after midnight and stepped outside the cabin. The others were asleep. I moved to the railing and looked out over the lake. At first, I saw nothing.

Then the fog parted.

It was brief, no more than three or four seconds. But in that span, I saw a silhouette in the mist, larger than anything I had ever seen above water.

She stood at the far end of the lake, her body indistinct but tall enough to dwarf the pine forest behind her. Her arms were at her sides, her head tilted slightly toward me.

I blinked, the mist closed in again, and I knew, without a doubt, that she had seen me.

Part V

I awoke to find June’s bunk empty. Her boots were gone, and her coat no longer hung by the door. For a few minutes, I tried to rationalize it—perhaps she had risen early to catalog samples, or gone to check the readings on the sediment tanks—but something deeper, something instinctive, told me otherwise. She would not have left without her notebook.

It sat open on the dock, its pages warped with moisture. The ink had run in places, but the writing was unmistakably hers. It did not form sentences or diagrams, only a repeated phrase, again and again, across six pages.

“She calls me. We belong beneath.”

Tomás found the rest of her belongings arranged neatly at the end of the dock, beside a coil of dive cable and an empty oxygen tank.

There were no signs of a struggle. No blood. No footprints leading into the trees. Only the lake, motionless and watching.

Eric remained in the cabin, staring through the porthole with a kind of reverent paralysis. When I told him June was gone, he nodded slowly, as if he had been waiting for it. When I pressed him for a reaction—anything at all—he only whispered, “One by one.”

That afternoon, Tomás went missing.

He had been working on the submersible diagnostics, alone in the lower hold. When I came down to bring him food, I found the maintenance panel ajar and the rear hatch unlatched. His gloves were still on the bench.

I sounded the alarm and launched the secondary drone. Its feed tracked him to the western shelf of the lakebed, where he drifted just above the trench floor without propulsion, his dive light dim and flickering. At first, I thought he had drowned. Then the camera picked up motion. His limbs moved slowly, not with the panic of someone in distress, but with the grace of a man in prayer.

He was kneeling at the feet of the Empress.

I ordered the drone closer. It captured one final image before static overtook the feed—of Tomás looking upward at the statue, eyes wide with awe, as if waiting for an answer. Later, when the drone reconnected briefly, it showed only silt and his discarded rebreather. He was gone.

That night, I confronted Eric.

We stood on the top deck, the fog pressing in from every direction, the stars above obscured as if the sky had been drowned along with the land. I demanded answers, not theories. No more speculation. No more mysticism passed off as academic conjecture.

He told me everything.

Years earlier, he had discovered fragments of a carved stone tablet in a cave network exposed during a landslide in the Sápmi highlands. The symbols bore no resemblance to any known language, but they matched the monolith beneath Lake Aravik. The inscription spoke of a being older than men—a queen or goddess whose silence shaped the first waters, who descended into stillness to await the return of a world worthy of her love.

“They called her the Hollow Empress,” he said. “She was worshipped by an entire civilization that vanished beneath the lakes. They didn’t fear her. They offered themselves to her.”

He had funded the expedition not out of curiosity, but out of belief. He needed proof that she still waited.

“And now you have it,” I said.

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. “She’s awake, Eliza. And she’s gathering her court.”

That night, the lake opened.

It did not shudder, roar, or split the sky. It simply welcomed them—shapes that rose from its depths in silence and began to move toward the shore. I saw them first as outlines against the mist, their forms warped by the curvature of the water. They did not swim. They walked, upright and unhurried, their arms hung loosely at their sides. Their bodies were brittle and fractured, as though shaped from saltstone and ash. Their faces were hidden behind masks or perhaps were simply blank, like smoothed over statues weathered by time.

They moved in pairs at first, then in small clusters, never rushing or faltering. I counted seventeen before I lost the ability to track them.

Eric descended the ramp without hesitation. I shouted after him, but he raised one hand, as if in greeting, and continued toward the water’s edge.

One of the figures separated from the others. It stepped forward, the fog parting around it in coils, and raised its head.

It was June.

Or something in her shape.

She wore the outline of her old coat, though it now hung from her frame like wet cloth draped over bone. Her face was pale and featureless save for her mouth, which moved when she spoke.

“Eliza,” it said, “you are expected.”

I did not respond. I couldn’t. My mouth had gone dry, and my hands felt disconnected.

Eric approached her with arms outstretched. “I believed in you, Empress,” he said. “I brought them all, as you requested.”

June’s figure tilted her head. From behind her, the others gathered.

Eric reached out to touch her hand.

He never made contact.

In an instant, his body collapsed inward, as though struck by an incredible force. No sound, flash, or tremor accompanied the event. He simply folded into himself, bones snapping violently, eyes wide and unseeing. His body crumpled like paper caught in a whirlpool. And then he was gone, drawn beneath the surface without leaving a single ripple.

I turned and ran.

The forest path no longer resembled the one we had arrived through. The trees had shifted, grown denser, their branches gnarled into unnatural arches. Where the ground had once been packed with pine needles and dirt, now stood water—pools and channels that mirrored the lake in shape and stillness. Circular lakes, dozens of them, each one ringed with stones, as though modeled after the Empress’s throne.

I pushed through the thickets and roots, soaked to the knees in black water. The air was thick with moisture and a strange perfume, floral but rancid, like blossoms grown from rotting wood. I stumbled once, then twice, my vision blurring with exhaustion and fear. My flashlight died. The mist became a wall.

And yet, somewhere behind me, I heard the steps. Methodical, synchronized steps, not rushing to catch me, not hunting, but following, as if time meant nothing to them.

I ran until I could no longer hear the lake. When I finally collapsed against a stone outcropping, lungs burning and skin frozen, I looked back.

There, across the water of one of the smaller pools, stood the Empress. She was no longer seated nor distant. She stood with her head tilted slightly upward, her arms at her sides, and her eyes wide open.

She did not move or speak, but I knew she saw me.

And I knew she remembered.

Part VI

I don’t know how long I’ve been here.

Time has lost its shape. The sun rises and sets, but the intervals between them feel irregular—sometimes stretched, sometimes collapsed—as though the rhythm of the world no longer adheres to anything I once understood. The days bleed together, and when I sleep, I do not rest.

I am writing this from the upper platform of a ruined radio tower at the northern rim of the basin. I reached it days ago—perhaps longer—after crossing terrain that bore no resemblance to the maps we brought. What used to be forest has become wetland, a vast sprawl of moss-drenched islands connected by crooked waterways and reflective pools. The old access road is gone, and with it, any hope of leaving on foot. Every direction leads back to water.

From this height, I can see the full expanse of what was once Lake Aravik. It no longer ripples or churns. It no longer moves at all. The surface is perfectly flat, like polished obsidian, reflecting the sky with unnatural clarity. Clouds do not drift across it. They cling to it, held fast by some unseen gravity.

And in the center of that mirror She stands.

She no longer sits on her throne. She no longer needs it. Her body is fully emerged now, towering above the surface with an elegance that defies logic or scale. She stands at full height—over three hundred feet tall—and her arms are outstretched as if to embrace the heavens. Her face, once bowed in sorrow or reverence, is turned upward, and her eyes remain open without blinking, without end. The crown of faceless women upon her head has fractured, and pieces of it now float in the air above her, suspended like fragments of bone in still water.

She is not alone.

Arrayed behind her are the drowned.

The court.

They stand in uneven ranks at the shallow perimeter of the lake—hundreds of them, perhaps more—each wearing some symbol of allegiance. Some are cloaked in strands of kelp or veils of silt; others bear the shapes of those we lost: June’s height and posture, Tomás’s quiet frame, even Eric’s stance, though his face—like the others—is gone. Each figure wears a crown. Not golden or carved with jewels, but broken, twisted, and incomplete.

It is not royalty they represent. It is devotion.

They do not move. They do not breathe. They only watch.

From here, I see more than I should.

The longer I look at the lake, the more I sense that it extends beyond this basin, that the water—though still in appearance—reaches down and outward, in ways no topography can explain. Sometimes the horizon seems to flex. On particularly clear evenings, when the mist pulls back and the stars above burn faint and strange, I swear I can see the sky ripple, as though all of it—clouds, moon, starlight—rests atop a second surface of water, and we, down here, are the ones submerged.

I have not eaten in some time. My limbs are light and unfamiliar. My voice no longer carries beyond the confines of the tower. I speak only to keep the silence from growing too thick.

I do not know what she is.

I only know what she remembers.

We mistook her for stone.

But even so, stone remembers. It holds form. It bears the imprint of hands, the weight of footsteps, the trace of voices whispered to it over centuries. She was never asleep. She was listening. Waiting. And we called her back with our ignorance, with our hunger to possess what should have been left to rest.

I do not believe I will leave this place, not because I am unable, but because I am known. I have seen her. And she has seen me. I belong to the silence now, to the stillness that holds the sky and lake together like the two faces of a coin.

If anyone finds this journal, if it drifts ashore or is carried out of this place by wind or mercy, I beg you—do not return.

Let the waters keep her.

Let the Hollow Empress stand unchallenged.

Epilogue

The film footage is grainy, washed in gray from years of exposure, but the voice on the tape is clear.

“Looks like an old field notebook,” one of the hikers says. “Left under the railing. Pretty beat up.”

The second voice laughs nervously. “You think anyone’s been up here since the tower collapsed?”

The camera pans left, catching the reflection of the basin below. For a moment, the mirror of the lake stretches unbroken beneath the clouds.

Then, near the center of the screen, a distortion flickers.

A shape appears, vertical and towering.

A figure stands watching, motionless, at the far end of the lake, barely visible through the mist. Around its head, a fragmented crown catches the sun.

Beneath its feet, everyone kneels.