THE HOLLOW CRY

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Once, in a time forgotten by the world, there was a soldier who lost everything his mission, his comrades, his reason to breathe. They tore his child from his arms, and in that moment, something inside him broke so completely that even death could not claim him. His soul, twisted by rage and unbearable grief, refused to cross over, festering into something monstrous.

Wherever the world tore and bled, wherever the rain whispered of the dead, he would appear. Mist thickened, light died, and the slow scrape of boots across wet mud filled the air. He was no simple spirit of vengeance he was grief itself, a memory so powerful it had rotted into something real, something merciless.

Survivors spoke of battlefields erupting from the earth trenches clawing open like wounds, rusted weapons thrusting up from the soil, and ghostly soldiers rising to obey him. They fought not for victory, but because sorrow bound them tighter than any order.

He did not speak. His voice leaked through shattered radios, through the guttering of dying fires, through the wet slap of footsteps in places no one dared walk. His presence gnawed at the mind, dragging forgotten guilt to the surface, drowning victims in their own pasts before his cold hands ever touched them.

He searched endlessly for what had been stolen a small, fragile life he once swore to protect. He no longer remembered the child’s face, only the crushing need, the hollow hunger that drove him to tear through the thin walls between life and death.

Each time he emerged, the land itself twisted into a nightmare. Roads crumbled into trenches, forests sank into blackened swamps, the sky wept filth instead of rain. Time collapsed. The dead stood shoulder to shoulder with the living, all trapped under the weight of a sorrow too heavy for flesh.

There was no escaping him. No weapon could wound what was already broken beyond death. He was not a ghost, not a monster. He was a wound deep and festering in the heart of the world, forever bleeding memory and ruin.

And somewhere, beneath every battlefield he summoned, a hollow cry echoed a father's desperate call to something that would never answer, fading into the endless rain.

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THE END