FIELD LOG 09 — THE RETURN TO HOLLOW PEAK

Expedition Archive // Restricted Access
Recovered Documents Dated: November 18th, 1911
Author: Alias Voss

For seven days after my father disappeared, I avoided Hollow Peak entirely.

I told myself there was nothing left there.

The fragment was gone.

Corvin was gone.

And whatever had spoken beneath the mountain had already taken enough from our family.

But grief does strange things to the mind.

Especially when guilt begins feeding on it.

At night I found myself replaying every conversation we had shared beside the riverbank. Every warning. Every hesitation in his voice. I remembered the exhaustion in his eyes the final evening before he vanished, and slowly a thought began growing inside me that I could no longer ignore.

What if he had not disappeared?

What if he had gone back?

The possibility consumed me.

By the eighth day, I stopped sleeping properly.

The dreams had returned worse than ever.

Not visions this time.

Memories.

I saw my father walking alone through the tunnels beneath Hollow Peak carrying the fragment beneath his coat while whispers echoed through the stone around him. Sometimes he looked frightened. Sometimes determined.

But always alone.

I began waking before dawn drenched in sweat with dirt beneath my fingernails and the metallic taste of blood in my mouth from grinding my teeth during sleep.

My mother noticed immediately.

“You’re starting to look like him,” she whispered one morning.

The words terrified me more than I admitted.

That afternoon I made my decision.

I told myself I was going to Hollow Peak for answers.

The truth was simpler.

I could no longer bear not knowing.

The mountain appeared different when I finally returned alone.

Winter storms had swallowed most of the northern paths beneath heavy snow, forcing me to climb through narrow frozen trails along the cliffs overlooking the valley below. Dark clouds drifted low across the peaks while freezing wind screamed through the rocks hard enough to shake loose snow from the higher ridges.

The entire mountain felt abandoned.

Watching.

As I climbed higher, I began noticing strange marks carved into the stone surrounding the old excavation route.

Not recent markings.

Ancient ones.

The Black Sun symbol repeated again and again beneath layers of frost and erosion, sometimes so faint I only noticed them when snow drifted across the rock at certain angles.

It had always been here.

Long before my father arrived.

Long before any of us.

Dusk had already begun falling by the time I reached the excavation entrance.

The site looked wrong immediately.

Several supply crates had been overturned near the collapsed outer tunnels while sections of old support scaffolding lay twisted across the snow. The ropes and pulleys left behind during earlier excavations had frozen solid beneath layers of ice.

At first I assumed the storms had damaged the site.

Then I found the footprints.

A single trail leading into the mountain.

Not fresh.

But preserved beneath the snow well enough to remain visible.

One person.

I remember kneeling beside the prints while freezing wind moved through the excavation site around me.

My father’s boots had a damaged heel from an expedition years earlier near Blackwater Ridge.

The right footprint dragged slightly deeper than the left.

I recognised it instantly.

My father had come back.

Alone.

The realization hollowed something inside my chest.

For several seconds I genuinely considered leaving.

I should have.

Instead, I lit the lantern and entered Hollow Peak alone.

The tunnels felt colder than I remembered.

Not physically colder.

Dead.

The whispers that once filled the mountain had vanished completely, replaced by an oppressive silence that made every footstep echo unnaturally far through the dark.

Snowmelt dripped slowly from the ceiling further inside the tunnels, though the deeper passages remained strangely warm beneath the stone. My lantern cast long shadows across the walls while old excavation markings guided me toward the lower descent routes we had used with my father weeks earlier.

Only now…

the tunnels had changed again.

Entire passageways no longer existed.

Smooth black walls covered sections of the mountain where natural rock had once surrounded us. The deeper I travelled, the less Hollow Peak resembled a cave system at all.

It resembled buried architecture.

Ancient corridors hidden beneath the mountain itself.

The metallic scent returned gradually the deeper I descended.

By the time I reached the lower chambers, the air felt thick enough to taste.

Then I saw the chains.

At first only one.

A massive black chain emerging directly from the stone wall itself before disappearing downward into darkness below the path ahead. Crimson fractures pulsed faintly beneath its surface like veins beneath flesh.

The metal was warm.

I remember touching it only briefly before pulling my hand away.

The chain moved.

Not much.

Just enough for the links to tighten slowly somewhere deep beneath the abyss below.

Something answered in the dark.

One impact.

The sound rolled upward through the mountain beneath my feet.

Not imagined.

Real.

My lantern flickered violently.

The silence following the impact felt unbearable.

Then somewhere ahead in the darkness…

I saw light.

Faint crimson illumination spilling through the tunnels beyond the lower chamber.

The doorway.

It was open further now.

And for the first time since my father vanished…

I heard the whispers again.

Only this time…

they were speaking my name.