The Choir of the Hollow

He thought he would wake in his bed again, trembling from nightmare.
But when his eyes opened, there was no bed.
He was standing.
The apartment was gone. The walls, the floor, the furniture erased. In their place stretched an endless black expanse, shimmering faintly as if soaked in liquid shadow. He lifted his foot and found no ground beneath it, yet he did not fall. Something held him. Something unseen.
And then, the voices began.
At first they were faint, murmurs like a storm just beyond the horizon. But the storm drew closer, closer, until the air thrummed with resonance. The black expanse rippled, birthing figures from its depths the same hollow-eyed shapes he had seen in dreams.
They emerged by the hundreds, then the thousands, crowding the void in shifting rows. Each one stood weightless, mouths open, but no air moved in or out.
The sound came from within them, not through them. A tone that was not a note, but vibration, layered and infinite, harmonizing in ways the human ear was never built to understand.
The Choir of the Hollow.
He was inside it now.
The vibration seeped into his bones. His chest rattled. His ribs trembled like strings plucked by unseen hands. He opened his mouth without intending to and the sound rose out of him.
Not his sound.
Theirs.
It poured through him as if his body were nothing more than a hollow instrument. The resonance was both agonizing and euphoric: a splitting ache and a swelling bliss, twin sensations tangled together.
For the first time, he did not resist.
He sang.
Their song told no story, yet he understood it all the same.
It was a hymn to emptiness. A worship of absence. Each vibration honored the void between things, the spaces where meaning collapsed, the hollows where silence dwelled.
The song painted pictures inside his head cities emptied of people, oceans drained of water, skies without stars. Not destruction, but completion. An offering to stillness, a surrender to nothingness as the highest form of purity.
And the longer he sang, the less he remembered himself.
His name dissolved. His past slipped away. The man who once lived alone in a cramped apartment was erased, grain by grain, until only the vessel remained.
The choir welcomed him, folding his tone into theirs.
From within the resonance, something greater stirred.
The black expanse rippled again, and the surface split wide, revealing a colossal form beneath. It rose slowly, impossibly, until its silhouette eclipsed the horizon.
It had no face, no features, only a vast contour of shadow, an architecture of absence. The choir bent toward it, voices straining higher, louder, until the void itself quivered.
He bent too, not out of choice, but compulsion. His chest burned with the sound pouring through him. His body shook as though it might shatter.
The colossal form leaned closer.
And though it had no mouth, it spoke.
Child of hollow, you are chosen.
The words did not echo. They implanted. They bloomed inside his head, carved into him like the grooves in the circle.
You will carry stillness. You will bear the silence into waking. You will hollow the world.
The command was not question, nor invitation. It was decree.
He wanted to protest, to cry that he was not strong enough, not willing, not ready but no protest came. His mouth remained open, soundless except for the choir’s eternal hymn.
The colossal form raised a hand in hand it could be called and lowered it toward him.
Darkness cascaded over his head like a veil.
He fell.
Not downward, but inward. Spiraling through himself, tumbling into deeper hollows than he knew existed. Past flesh. Past bone. Past memory. Past the very core of what he once called I.
And there, in that endless descent, he found the others.
The choir was inside him too countless hollows strung along the marrow of his being. They welcomed him again, not with voices but with resonance, a vibration that promised unity in erasure.
He did not resist.
He could not.
He let go.
When he opened his eyes, he was back in the apartment.
But the walls hummed with the choir’s resonance. The floor pulsed with their rhythm. The air trembled with the weight of their hymn.
The silence had not left him.
It lived in him now.
And with that realization came another, sharper and more terrible:
He was no longer alone.