The Hollow King

Ash

Ennui. A feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest.

The French invented a word for being so full you’re empty. I respect that. Most languages just call it boredom and move on, but the French understood that there’s a specific kind of suffering that comes from having everything and wanting none of it.

I scroll through my phone and watch Grimwater’s local cryptid-spotter forum lose its collective mind over blurry footage of something with too many teeth near the old cannery. Half the comments are tagging me. @ashblackwood is this u lmao. Someone Photoshopped a crown onto the creature.

The forum’s called Grimwater After Dark and it’s what you’d expect: mortals with ring doorbells and main-character syndrome, convinced they’re one good video away from proving the supernatural exists. They’re not wrong. They’re just boring about it.

I keep scrolling. There’s a thread about the east beach—someone’s doorbell cam caught what they’re calling “shadow figures” near the tide line at 3 AM. The footage is grainy as hell, but you can see them if you know what to look for. Lanternlings, probably. They wear the voices of drowned girls and lure the grieving into the water. The comments are split between obviously fake and I’m never going to that beach again, which is the kind of discourse that keeps me entertained for about ninety seconds before I’m bored again.

Someone posted a poll: “What cryptid would you LEAST want to meet in Grimwater?” The options are Blackwater Horse, the Stitchwitch, and the Hollow King’s heir. I’m winning by a comfortable margin. I screenshot it and send it to the group chat with no context.

The thing about hunger is that it’s the only feeling that doesn’t lie to you. Everything else—love, loyalty, fear—can be faked, performed, glamoured into something it’s not. But hunger? Hunger is honest. It tells you what you want and what you’ll do to get it.

I want everything and nothing. I want to feel something that isn’t this constant hum of is this it? I want to be surprised. I want to want something enough that it scares me.

I’m lying on my bed in the Underneath, in the room that’s been mine since I was old enough to want privacy and young enough to think privacy meant freedom. Black sheets because I’m predictable. Exposed stone walls because we’re inside a cliff. A window that looks out onto nothing—glamoured to show moonlight over water, always, regardless of the actual time or weather.

My phone buzzes. Another post. This one’s a TikTok compilation: “pov: you see ash blackwood at a party.” It’s fifteen seconds of someone’s camera panning across a crowd before landing on me, and I’m doing nothing—leaning against a wall, drink in hand, looking like I’d rather be anywhere else. The caption: he’s so bored he’s making ME tired.

Accurate.

The comments are a mix of thirst and terror, which is my brand, apparently. He could ruin my life, and I’d say thank you. Why does he look like he’s calculating how to destroy everyone in the room?

I don’t love pain the way some of the court does. Soren gets off on the precision of it, the control. I love wanting. Hunger is the only honest thing I own. Everything else is inheritance.

The crown I’ll wear. The court I’ll rule. The appetite I’m supposed to embody. All of it handed down like a genetic disease.

My father thinks I’m wasting my potential. He’s right, but not for the reasons he thinks. I’m not wasting it—I’m spending it. Burning through it like a trust fund, trying to hit zero before I’m old enough to care.

Everyone else is afraid of being empty.

I’m afraid of being full.

The Underneath’s throne room isn’t a room so much as a wound in the earth.

It’s all black stone and dripping mineral deposits, and stalactites. Witchfire burns in iron braziers—cold flame, blue-white, casting shadows. The throne itself is carved from a single piece of obsidian, and it’s been here longer than Grimwater, longer than the mortals who built their rotting town above us.

My father sits on it now.

King Morcant Blackwood. The Hollow King. The lord of the Underneath and the reason I know what kind of monster I’m going to become if I’m not careful.

He’s not old—fae don’t do old the way mortals do—but he’s ancient in the way that matters. Centuries of court politics have turned him into something glacial and absolute.

The Tithemaster’s ledger is open on his lap.

That’s never good.

I can see the edge of it from where I’m standing—leather-bound, pages yellowed with age and use, filled with names and debts in cramped handwriting that goes back generations. Every favor owed. Every bargain struck. Every mortal who thought they could deal with the fae and walk away.

They never do.

“Ash.” He doesn’t look up. Just turns a page, finger tracing down a column of names and debts. “Tell me about yesterday’s collection.”

I’m standing in the center of the room, hands in my pockets, posture casual. It pisses him off when I don’t perform deference, which is why I do it.

“It went fine,” I say. “Collected from the Mercer family, the Harts, that new guy who bought the bookshop—”

“And the Donovans.”

“The Donovans,” I agree.

“Whose debt you forgave.” He closes the ledger. Looks at me. His eyes are the same color as mine—black, no visible pupil, pure Unseelie—but his hold nothing. No amusement. No warmth. Just the dark. “In front of witnesses. Without consulting the ledger. Without consulting me.”

The thing about my father is that he never asks questions he doesn’t know the answer to. This isn’t an interrogation. It’s a performance. He wants me to justify myself so he can dismantle my reasoning piece by piece, the way he’s been doing since I was old enough to have opinions.

“He was boring,” I say. “His terror stopped being interesting three years ago. I got tired of watching him cry.”

“You got tired.”

“Bored, actually. There’s a difference.”

My father stands. He’s taller than me by an inch, and he uses it. He moves down the dais steps until he’s close enough that I can see the absolute zero of his expression.

The witchfire flickers. The shadows on the walls twist into shapes that aren’t quite right—too many limbs, too many angles. The court is watching. It’s always watching.

“The Donovan debt was seven years,” my father says. “Seven years of service, owed for a single favor. Do you remember what that favor was?”

I don’t. I wasn’t paying attention when the deal was struck. That’s the problem with being the heir—you’re supposed to memorize every transaction, every bargain, every name in the ledger. I find it mind-numbing.

“Does it matter?” I ask.

“It matters,” he says, “because the favor was a child’s life. The Donovans’ daughter was dying. We saved her. They owed us seven years. You gave them back four.”

“She’s sixteen now. Healthy. The debt was paid.”

“The debt was owed. You don’t get to rewrite the terms because you’re bored, Ash. The court is not your entertainment.”

“Could’ve fooled me,” I say. “That’s all it’s ever been.”

The temperature drops.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Frost creeps across the stone floor between us, delicate and lethal, spreading in fractal patterns that look almost beautiful until you realize they’re a threat.

My father takes another step closer. I hold my ground.

“You are not a person, Ash,” he says. “You are an appetite with a crown on it. Act like one.”

It’s his favorite line. He’s been saying it since I was twelve and first started questioning why we do what we do. The court is hunger. The court is need. We take because taking is what we are.

I smile. It’s the smile I use when I want to make something worse.

“Right. An appetite. Got it.” I tilt my head. “Does the ledger have a column for your debts, or is that a different book?”

The frost stops spreading. The witchfire goes still.

For a second, the only sound is water dripping somewhere deep in the caves.

“Careful,” my father says.

“I’m always careful,” I lie. “That’s my whole problem.”

For a second I think he might hit me. He’s never hit me—violence is beneath him, he’d say, when you can unmake someone with a word—but there’s a first time for everything.

Instead, he steps back. Straightens. Looks at me the way you’d look at a failed experiment.

“You think you’re clever,” he says. “You think you’re different. You’re not. You’re what I made you to be—hungry, restless, and too arrogant to see it. You are a disappointment to the dark.”

“At least I’m not boring,” I say, as I leave through the cave entrance.

Fen’s waiting at the top of the cliff road in his black Audi, engine running, music so loud I can feel the bass from twenty feet away. He’s got the windows down despite the cold, one arm hanging out, drumming on the door.

I slide into the passenger seat, and he guns it before I’ve even closed the door.

“Seatbelt, princess,” he says.

“You’re doing ninety in a forty-five.”

“Exactly. Seatbelt.”

I buckle in. Fen drives the way he does everything else—too much, too fast, laughing the whole time. He’s huge, six-four and built like a mountain. He has a scar that runs from his eyebrow down to his chin. Fae genetics gave him the size. His father gave him the scar.

The music is some kind of metal-trap fusion that sounds like a car crash set to a beat. I reach for the volume knob, and Fen slaps my hand away without taking his eyes off the road.

“My car, my music,” he says.

“Your music is a hate crime.”

“Your face is a hate crime.”

“Wow. Devastating. I’m wounded.”

We make it half a mile before he glances over.

“Your eyes,” he says.

Shit.

I flip down the visor, check the mirror. He’s right—my glamour slipped. My eyes are still full black, no whites, pure Unseelie. I blink, pull the glamour back into place, watch my irises shift to something human-adjacent. Hazel. Boring. Safe.

It takes more effort than it should. Glamour is supposed to be second nature, but mine’s been slipping. Too much time in the Underneath, not enough time pretending to be human.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

“Throne room?”

“Yep.”

“Bad?”

“The usual.”

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I pull it out. I unlock it. The group chat is blowing up with plans for tonight. Soren wants to hit the pier. Lark wants to raid the Tithemaster’s wine cellar. Isolde hasn’t said anything, which means she’s either fine or very much not fine.

I type back: Caves. Usual time. Bring accelerant.

Fen snorts. “Accelerant. You’re so fucking dramatic.”

“It’s called atmosphere.”

“It’s called arson.”

“Tomato, tomato.”

“You sure you don’t want to talk about it?” Fen asks.

“Nope.”

We don’t talk about my father. That’s the rule. Fen knows what happened—he always knows—but we don’t say it out loud. Saying it makes it real, and we’ve all agreed that reality is optional until it’s not.

The coast road curves along the cliff edge, nothing but a low guardrail between us and a hundred-foot drop to the rocks below. Fen takes the turns too fast, tires squealing, and I watch the ocean blur past—dark water, white foam, the kind of cold that kills you in minutes if you’re mortal.

“You see the poll?” I ask.

“The cryptid one? Yeah. Congrats on being Grimwater’s most feared.”

“It’s the eyes. Mortals hate the eyes.”

“It’s not the eyes. It’s the everything.” Fen grins. “You’ve got that whole ‘I’m thinking about murder but make it elegant’ thing going on.”

“I’m thinking about murder right now.”

“See? Elegant.”

Grimwater spreads out below us as we take the coast road, all fog and failing streetlights and the smell of salt.

It’s a company town that outlived its company. The cannery closed in the nineties, and the town’s been dying ever since—slowly, stubbornly, refusing to let go. Mortals cling to it the way they cling to everything: desperately, without knowing why.

The fae have been here longer. Long enough that the rocks remember our names. Long enough that the tide comes in on our schedule, not the moon’s.

I watch the lights below. There’s a cluster of mortals down by the east beach—phone flashlights. The ghost-walk TikTok crew doing another “investigation.” They’ll find nothing. We make sure of that.

“You ever think about leaving?” I ask.

Fen doesn’t answer right away. Just turns the music down a fraction.

“Every day,” he says. “You?”

“Every hour.”

“Why don’t we?”

I don’t have a good answer. Or I do, and I don’t want to say it: because leaving means admitting there’s something worth leaving for. Something better. Something that isn’t this.

“Because we’re stupid,” I say.

Fen grins. “That’s my favorite thing about us.”

The Court Caves are what they sound like: a network of caverns in the cliffs below Marrowgate, accessible only if you know where to look.

We park at the hidden trailhead and hike down. The others are here—I can see the witchfire from the path, black flames burning in a perfect circle, no heat, no smoke, just cold light that makes everything look like a photograph of itself.

Soren’s sharpening something. He’s always sharpening something. Tonight it’s a knife, long and thin, the kind you use for precision work. He doesn’t look up when we arrive, just keeps drawing the whetstone along the blade in long, patient strokes. The sound is rhythmic, almost meditative. *Shhhhk. Shhhhk. Shhhhk.*

Isolde sits cross-legged near the fire, quiet in the good way. The way that means she’s here, present, not lost in whatever dark place she goes when things get bad. Her silver hair catches the firelight, and for a second she looks like something holy.

She’s not.

None of us are.

Lark is perched on a rock, trading whispers with someone’s cousin—a minor fae whose name I don’t care about. Lark collects secrets the way I collect boredom: compulsively, hungrily, never satisfied. They’re wearing all black, as usual, and their smile is the kind that makes you check your pockets afterward.

“Ash!” Lark calls. “Fen! You’re late.”

“We’re on time,” Fen says.

“Which means you’re late. Soren’s been sharpening that knife for twenty minutes. I think he’s trying to split atoms.”

Soren flips them off without looking up.

There’s a pile of phones by the cave entrance, face-down, screens dark. Court rule: no recording the fire. Witchfire fries batteries anyway, and nobody wants evidence of what we do here. I add mine to the pile. Fen does the same.

The cave smells like salt and stone and something older—magic, maybe, or just the weight of all the secrets that have been told here over the years. The walls are covered in marks, some of them carved, some of them burned, all of them names or symbols or promises that nobody remembers anymore.

The fire crackles—not with heat, but with something else. Magic, maybe. Hunger, definitely.

“Alright,” Lark says, standing. “Ritual time. Who’s first?”

It’s tradition. Everyone feeds the fire something. A memory. A name. A year. Something you want to burn away, even if it’s just for tonight.

The fire doesn’t destroy what you give it. It just holds it for a while, takes the weight off. By morning, whatever you fed it will be back, but lighter somehow. Easier to carry.

Soren goes first. He tosses in a photograph—I don’t see what it is, but it curls and blackens instantly, gone. His face doesn’t change. It never does.

Isolde goes next. She leans forward, opens her hand over the flames, and—

Nothing.

She feeds it nothing.

I’m the only one who notices. Everyone else is watching Lark, who’s dramatically reciting something in Old Fae, probably a curse they stole from someone’s grandmother.

But I see it. The way Isolde’s hand trembles. The way she closes her fingers around empty air and pulls back.

I file it away. Ask her later, maybe. Or don’t. We’re all allowed our secrets.

Fen tosses in a parking ticket. “Fuck the mortal legal system,” he announces.

Everyone laughs.

My turn.

I reach into my pocket, pull out nothing, and toss it into the flames.

A blank Tuesday. A nothing day. The kind of day where you wake up and realize you’ve been awake for hours and can’t remember any of it.

The fire eats it anyway.

“Poetic,” Soren mutters.

“I try.”

We settle in after that. Lark starts planning the Longest Night revel—our winter holiday, the one night the court goes fully feral and the mortals lock their doors and pretend they don’t hear the screaming.

“We need a theme,” Lark says.

“The theme is chaos,” Fen replies.

“Chaos is not a theme. Chaos is a vibe.”

“Then the vibe is chaos.”

“I’m serious. Last year was a mess. Half the court ended up in the tide pools, and we had to glamour three separate mortal ring cameras.”

“That was the best part,” Soren says, still sharpening his knife.

“That was a liability,” Lark counters. “We need structure. A plan.”

“Plans are boring,” I say.

“You think everything is boring.”

“Because everything is.”

Isolde laughs at that. Just once, small and surprised.

Fen does an impression of the Tithemaster—voice high and reedy, hands fluttering—and even Soren cracks a smile.

“What if we do masks?” Isolde suggests. “Everyone wears a mask.”

Lark considers this. “I like it. Anonymous chaos.”

“The best kind of chaos,” Fen agrees.

Soren looks up from his knife. “What about the mortals?”

“What about them?” Lark asks.

“They’re going to notice. They always notice.”

“Let them notice,” I say. “Let them post their blurry videos and their conspiracy theories. It’s not like anyone believes them anyway.”

“The Warden might,” Isolde says.

The Warden. Coralie Frost. The mortal investigator who’s been sniffing around Grimwater for the past six months, asking questions about disappearances, strange sightings, and things that go bump in the night.

She’s a problem. Not a big one yet, but problems grow if you ignore them.

“The Warden,” Lark says, “is going to be busy that night. I’ll make sure of it.”

“How?” Fen asks.

Lark’s smile is sharp. “I know things.”

“You always know things.”

“That’s why you keep me around.”

This is what we are. Murderers and mourners and messmates. A family in the way a loaded gun is a family: dangerous, loyal, one wrong move from going off.

I watch them. My court. My crew. My people.

Alone, we’re five bloodlines rotting in a tide pool.

Together—

Together, we are one hunger.