Peter Callahan had been arguing with a vending machine in the break room when the world folded itself around him and swallowed him whole.
One moment he was pressing the coin return on a machine that had eaten his last dollar, muttering the kind of complaint that no one else would ever hear. The next, the linoleum under his shoes had become packed dirt, the fluorescent hum had become wind, and a crowd of several hundred people had dropped to their knees in front of him.
“The Lightbearer,” someone whispered, and the word rippled outward through the crowd like a stone thrown into still water. “The Lightbearer has come.”
Peter looked down at himself. He was still wearing his work polo, the one with the coffee stain shaped vaguely like Florida. He was still holding his dollar. None of this made him feel like anyone’s savior.
“I think there’s been a mistake,” he said, and his voice cracked in the middle of it, which did nothing to help his case.
An old woman near the front began to weep. A child was lifted onto someone’s shoulders to get a better look at him. Somewhere behind the crowd, a bell began to toll, slow and deliberate, and the sound of it settled into Peter’s chest like a stone dropped into water that had no bottom.
They took him to a stone hall lit by torches that burned with a light too clean and white to be fire, and a woman in gray robes explained everything to him in the calm, patient voice of someone who had explained it many times before to many people who had not wanted to hear it.
Her name was Sister Ilwen. She told him that four hundred years ago, a prophecy had been carved into the roots of the world’s oldest tree, and that the prophecy described a man who would arrive wearing the clothes of another world, carrying a coin that was not gold, on the night the second moon crossed the first. She told him the Hollow King had ruled the eastern provinces of Laevmoor for three generations, and that his armies had reduced four cities to ash and bone. She told him the realm had been waiting for the Lightbearer for longer than anyone alive could remember.
“I work at a distribution center,” Peter said. “I stock shelves. I’m not a warrior. I don’t even own a knife that isn’t for cutting bread.”
Sister Ilwen smiled at him the way a teacher smiles at a child who has given a wrong but earnest answer. “The prophecy does not describe a warrior,” she said. “It describes a man who arrives unarmed, unprepared, and afraid. It says the realm will know him by his fear, not his courage.”
Peter wanted to laugh. He wanted to tell her that his fear was not a divine sign, that it was simply the ordinary fear of a thirty-four-year-old man who had woken up that morning worried about a car payment and was now expected to save a kingdom. But there was something in the certainty of her face, in the way the torchlight didn’t flicker even when the wind pushed through the hall’s open windows, that made the laugh die somewhere behind his teeth.
The days that followed blurred together in a way that troubled him more than the moving of worlds had. He was given a sword he didn’t know how to use and armor that fit him too well, as though it had been made for his exact measurements before he’d ever arrived. He was introduced to a company of soldiers who looked at him with a devotion that made his skin crawl, because he had done nothing yet to earn it and some small, still-rational part of him kept insisting that devotion earned in advance was not really devotion at all.
He tried, in those first days, to hold on to pieces of his old life. He recited his mother’s phone number to himself at night. He pictured his apartment, the specific crack in the ceiling above his bed shaped like a lightning bolt, the sound his refrigerator made when it was thinking about breaking down. He did this because it felt important, though he could not have said why, only that some instinct told him the realm was hungry for those details and would take them if he let his guard down.
It was on the fifth night that he noticed his mother’s phone number had changed in his memory. Not dramatically. Just one digit, swapped so quietly he almost didn’t catch it. He sat up in the dark, sweating, trying to remember which version was correct, and found that he genuinely could not tell.
He told Sister Ilwen the next morning, expecting concern. Instead she nodded slowly, as if he had confirmed something rather than reported something wrong.
“The realm remembers you now,” she said. “It will keep remembering you, more and more, the closer you come to the tower. This is how it has always been.”
“How it has always been,” Peter repeated. “You’ve said that phrase to me four times since I got here.”
“Because it is true four times over,” she said, and did not elaborate.
They marched east for eleven days, and each night Peter lost something small. A childhood nickname. The name of the street he’d grown up on. The face of a girl he’d dated in college, which blurred at the edges like a photograph left in the rain, until all that remained was the fact that she had existed and the certainty that he had once loved her, without any of the details attached to either.
He raised this with the soldiers who marched beside him, a broad quiet man named Torvald who had appointed himself something between bodyguard and friend. Torvald listened, and something moved behind his eyes that might have been sympathy or might have been recognition.
“It happened to the last one too,” Torvald said finally.
Peter stopped walking. “The last one.”
Torvald’s jaw worked for a moment before he spoke again, as though the words had to be pried loose. “There was a Lightbearer before you. Nine years ago. He arrived the same way. Different clothes, but the same fear on his face. He marched the same road we’re marching now.”
“What happened to him?”
Torvald did not answer, and the silence stretched long enough that Peter understood the answer was contained inside it, the way certain truths announce themselves precisely by refusing to be said aloud.
The tower rose out of the eastern hills like something the land had grown rather than something built upon it, black stone twisting upward in a shape that hurt to look at directly, its angles wrong in a way Peter’s mind kept trying and failing to correct. The Hollow King’s banners hung from its highest windows, torn and colorless, moving in a wind Peter couldn’t feel from where he stood.
Sister Ilwen came to his tent the night before the final march, and for the first time since his arrival, she looked less like a woman delivering scripture and more like a woman carrying something she wished she could set down.
“I need to tell you what happens at the top of the tower,” she said. “You deserve to hear it from someone, before it happens rather than after.”
Peter felt something in his chest go very still and very cold.
“The Hollow King was not born hollow,” she said. “He arrived the way you arrived. Wearing strange clothes. Carrying a coin that wasn’t gold. Afraid in exactly the way the prophecy required. He climbed this same tower, fought the Hollow King who ruled before him, and won.”
“That’s not possible,” Peter said, but even as he said it, he understood that it was, and that some part of him had already suspected it, buried under the noise of everything else that had happened to him since the vending machine.
“The tower does not create a new Hollow King,” Sister Ilwen said. “It only ever transforms the one who defeats the last. Every generation, the realm calls for a Lightbearer. Every generation, the Lightbearer climbs, and wins, and the winning is the curse, because the tower does not know the difference between conquest and inheritance. What you take from him, you become. It has always been this way. It will always be this way, unless someone refuses to climb.”
Peter sat with that for a long moment, the torchlight steady and white and utterly indifferent to what it was illuminating.
“Then why bring me here at all,” he said. “Why not just tell every Lightbearer this and let them walk away?”
Sister Ilwen’s eyes were wet, though her voice did not waver. “Because the realm needs a Hollow King to fear, or it stops needing a Lightbearer to hope for, and a realm without hope does not survive the winter that follows. I have told this to eleven Lightbearers before you. Only two believed me. Neither of them walked away either, in the end. The tower calls, and something in the ones who are chosen always answers, no matter what they’ve been told. I don’t know if that’s the prophecy’s cruelty or simply what people are.”
Peter thought, standing at the base of the black tower the next morning with Torvald’s hand on his shoulder and several hundred soldiers waiting behind him with faces full of a hope he had done nothing yet to deserve, that he understood now why the prophecy asked for fear rather than courage. Courage could refuse. Fear, it turned out, could be marched forward one step at a time by people who loved you, by people who needed you to be the thing they’d been promised, until refusal stopped feeling like an option at all.
He climbed anyway. He told himself it was because thousands of lives hung on the outcome, and that was true. He told himself it was because some part of him still hoped Sister Ilwen was wrong, that this Lightbearer might be different, might be the one who broke the pattern by winning without losing himself in the process. He told himself several things on the long climb up the twisting black stairs, and by the time he reached the top and saw the thing waiting for him in the throne room, hollow-eyed and crowned and wearing, underneath the ruined armor, the faded remains of a shirt that might once have been a work uniform, he no longer had the clarity of mind to remember which of his reasons he had actually believed.
The fight did not last as long as he expected. Nothing about winning felt the way he thought it would.
Nine years later, in a village on the western edge of the realm, an old woman in gray robes knelt in the dirt in front of a man in a coffee-stained work shirt who had arrived that morning through a fold in the world, still holding a coin that was not gold.
“The Lightbearer,” she whispered, and the crowd around her began, one by one, to kneel.
And somewhere behind her, at the edge of the crowd, a boy who would grow up to be a soldier named Torvald watched the black tower on the eastern horizon, and thought he saw, just for a moment, something move behind its highest window.
