Hollows
The Hollows are the natives of the Silence, the plane without meaning. They do not speak, gather, or want anything; each is an island of awareness slowly dissolving into the stone around it. They matter to the peoples of Caeldon as the fate the plane holds for every traveller who stays too long, because a Hollow’s emptiness spreads.
Appearance
A Hollow is of about Human size and shape, but gaunt and colourless: skin the faded grey-white of the plane’s stone, hair thin and pale or gone, limbs long and slack. The face is the thing travellers remember. It is blank, not calm but empty, with no expression ever passing over it, and the eyes are milky white, seeing nothing and everything at once. Hollows wear nothing, or the faded remains of whatever they once wore.
They stand motionless for long spans, and when something moves them they move in jerks, with a mechanical gait, as if pulled on strings, and then stop again. They make no sound at all; on the Silence there is little sound to make. They have no smell that anyone can name.
Habitat and Range
They stand or drift alone across the flat, featureless stone plains of the Silence, and among its nameless geometric structures. No two are found together on purpose.
Behaviour and Temperament
A Hollow has no society, no rank, and no shared purpose. It does not speak, eat, or truly sleep, but lives in a torpor from which it moves only when an outside force stirs it. It feels neither pain nor pleasure. It does not attack unless provoked, and it does not defend itself either; it simply is, waiting to fade.
Abilities
A Hollow’s emptiness is contagious. A traveller who stays near one feels thoughts slide away faster and purpose thin, as though the Hollow were a hole the plane drains through.
Life Cycle
Hollows are not born so much as reached. The plane’s slow erasure, which travellers call the Fade, takes memories first, then personality, then the will to live, until whoever it took is a Hollow too. A Hollow in its turn dissolves, slowly, into the background of the plane.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing. Their danger is the Fade: a traveller who lingers among them becomes one of them.
Lore and Belief
The few who return from the Quiet Gates, libraries where nobody reads any more and places of deep meditation, speak of the blank-faced people of the white plain, and say that some of them still wear the clothes of Caeldon. Whether all Hollows were once travellers, or some were native to the plane from the start, is not known. The advice that comes back is for travellers to write down their names and purposes often, and to say them aloud to themselves.
Ruin-delvers fear the dead libraries for this reason: they speak of a band that went into one for its lost books and came out years later, one by one, without their names.