The Hollowdark
"The Hollowdark does not devour. It forgets. And then, so do you."
The Hollowdark is not a Realm. Realms demand resonance, and resonance does not exist here. It is not the Unfathomed, where Threads at least find judgement in Spiral torment or ascension. It is not the Tapestry Beyond, where drifting dreams retain some whisper of shape. It is not even the Knotgrave, which remembers too fiercely.
The Hollowdark is the collapse of resonance mistaken for place. Not ending, not conclusion, not fire nor torment. Simply silence, where story loses the strength to matter at all.
On the Fall
You do not walk into the Hollowdark. You drown.
At first, it feels like silence settling in the corners of your mind. Then it begins to seep inward. The details blur: the weight of your name, the colour of your voice, the warmth of memory. Cold seeps in, not sharp but inevitable, filling the spaces where those things once held.
You fall without ground. You sink without water. You lighten with each breath, until even the act of breathing forgets you.
A Thread does not snap here. It loosens, fibre by fibre, until nothing is left to hold.
The Suffocating Dark
To describe the Hollowdark as a place is indulgence. It is less location than attrition.
Still, those who drift into it often insist on the imagery of drowning. Darkness thickens around them, pressing closer, until they can no longer tell where it ends and they begin. Reflections, where they appear at all, blur and forget. Sound carries forward but not back, like a voice spoken into water.
There is no hostility here. No punishment. No safety. Only the steady pressure of silence filling every hollow, until there is no hollow left.
Flickers in the Depth
Shapes drift in the Hollowdark, but they are not beings in any familiar sense. They are flickers — unfinished, unresolved, already halfway to forgetting.
A name half-formed on lips that never opened.
A child’s laugh caught beneath water.
A god who prayed for worship, but never found it.
They do not hunt. They remind. They are what you look like when the darkness has already begun to seep in. See them too long, and you realise you are flickering as well.
The Collapsed One
At the thinning edge of the Tapestry Beyond, before drift yields to suffocation, there are reports of a figure.
He does not strike. He does not pursue. He presses.
Across your Thread he lays the weight of all you carried without echo: the burdens no one named, the griefs no one witnessed, the silence heavier than sound. He is the hand on the back of your head as you go under.
Those who resist him wander the Beyond until they dissolve anyway. Those who yield sink quietly into the Hollowdark.
He is not enemy. He is inevitability.
On Manifestations
The Hollowdark itself does not intend. Intention requires story. But its suffocating silence produces symptoms, which drift back into the Pattern like water leaking through stone.
Thread-Eaters are the most visible: absences with appetite. They erase resonance until nothing is left but the knowledge that something is missing.
Whispers are subtler. They do not lie, they suggest. They carry the cadence of drowning thoughts: What if you were never real? What if the Inn is only a story abandoned? What if forgetting was the point all along?
Fragments flicker more faintly still: the last bubbles of unfinished selves. They do not move to harm you. They remind you that you are already drowning.
These are not creatures. They are symptoms. The Hollowdark does not send them. It simply forgets, and forgetting has consequences.
On Classification
The Hollowdark resists cataloguing, because classification presumes resonance. The Library withdraws its entries not from error, but because the act of writing them seems to hasten their erasure.
This is not a Realm. It is not an afterlife. It is not dream. It is neglect made total.
The Hollowdark is not cruel. It is not kind. It simply seeps into the spaces where you once were, until those spaces no longer exist.
Final Consideration
Understanding the Hollowdark offers no protection from it. Classification is already a form of defiance, and even that will not last. The Loom does not cut you from its weave when you sink here — it simply forgets you were ever woven.
If the Spiral Hells are what you fear you deserve, and the Knotgrave is what you fear you cannot escape, then the Hollowdark is what you fear was always true: that nothing you carried mattered enough to be remembered.
The Inn does not open doors here. It cannot. There is nothing for it to answer.
At A Glance
For those who do not wish to read too far, or who already feel the silence pressing in.
What It Is
The Hollowdark is not death, not dream, not judgement. It is forgetting given shape. The slow suffocation of resonance until nothing remains.
How It Feels
Like drowning without water. Falling without ground. A cold seep that fills you, fibre by fibre, until you cannot recall what you were.
What You’ll See
At first, blurred reflections. Then unfinished echoes: names, laughs, shadows. Deeper still, nothing at all.
How You Arrive
You drift. Quietly. Lightly. Until even your shadow fails to follow.
Who Waits at the Edge
The Collapsed One. He does not strike. He only presses the weight you carried alone. Yield, and you sink. Resist, and you dissolve anyway.
Why It Matters
Because to be forgotten is worse than to be lost.
Author’s Note
(Filed under: Neglect, Erasure, Unspoken Fears)
The Hollowdark frightens me more than any Spiral Hell. Not because it punishes, but because it does not care.
It is what happens when the Thread frays without echo. When what you carried was too quiet, too small, or too heavy for anyone to notice. When even memory stops checking in.
I fear forgetting who I am. I fear being forgotten by others. Not loss, not death, but the suffocating darkness of silence, drowning in neglect until nothing of me remains.
This is the fear I have put into words. The Hollowdark is not a monster. It is the question I cannot put down: what if none of it mattered enough to be remembered?
To give it shape is to admit it. To catalogue it is to defy it. And if one day I sink into it, at least the record remains that I feared it, and that the fear itself became story.
Additional Details
“Your continued reading is more valuable than coin. However, the author assures me that Ko-Fi support assists in ‘keeping the kettle on.’ I am told this is a metaphor. I remain unconvinced.” — Seraphis Nightvale Ko-Fi: #madmooncrow
I often work with dementia patients. I wonder how many of them would describe their experience like this. <3
Your doing wonderful work then, thankyou.
Still standing. Still scribbling. Still here.
The Last Home