When gods fall silent, what remains must learn to work.

Beneath the basin where cities once prayed for mercy, a new world balances on the rhythm of a single heartbeat—four beats, a pause, two. The Hollow King continues the saga of Elion and Serath, two men who broke heaven into architecture and taught worship to live as labor.

The city has survived the feast, the coronation, and the devouring. Now it must learn how to remember without turning memory into a god.
Elion, bound to the pulse of the Vein, keeps the city's breath steady.
Serath, the Devoured King reborn in shadow, learns what kind of mercy still works in a world that has sworn off miracles.
Between them stands Lys, the steward who wears a crown of quiet iron and turns faith into arithmetic.

Together, they hold the hinge between fire and forgetting—and pay for it with what little of themselves the world still remembers.

In the ruins of their reign, grief is no longer holy. It's a trade. The living lift, carry, and build; the dead are spoken of like tools that did their job too well. Yet beneath the city's new order, something old begins to unlearn its silence. A blue light returns to the hollow sky—not divine, not demanded, simply present.
And in its faint glow, love that once destroyed kingdoms must decide whether it can build one instead.

The Hollow King is a requiem written in the language of work: no altars, no saints, no gentle gods. It is about the labor of keeping something alive after wonder has gone—the tenderness of calloused hands, the discipline of two hearts that refuse to stop serving when belief has grown inconvenient.

In this fourth volume of Hearts of the Eclipse, the war between faith and function reaches its quietest, most dangerous form. Crowns are melted into clamps. Devotion becomes a tool. And in the chamber beneath the world, two kings hammer a future out of bone and light, knowing that love—if it endures—will not save them. It will employ them.

Lyrical, intimate, and devastating, The Hollow King is a tale of gods remade as workers, of tenderness mistaken for defiance, and of a city learning that salvation, like love, is not free—it must be kept, breath by breath, beat by beat.