The Hollow House was gone.
Not collapsed.
Not destroyed.
Just… gone.
As if it had never existed.
Ethan stood alone in the clearing, a heavy silence pressing down on him like the weight of a thousand forgotten screams.
In his hand, the note remained.
Aria. Ryan. Ethan.
The names inked in trembling lines, the last anchor to a truth the world had already begun to forget.
He walked for hours.
Through the woods. Down the road. Into town.
No one asked where he'd been.
No one even remembered the house on the hill.
Or the three kids who'd gone there.
At night, Ethan sat on his bed, flipping through old photos.
In every image, there were two people.
Just him and someone with blurred edges.
No matter how hard he focused, the faces never came into view.
But he remembered.
He remembered her laugh, soft like a lullaby.
He remembered Ryan's sarcasm, the way he always protected them, even when afraid.
He remembered Aria's last words, as the mirror tore her apart.
"Don't let me be forgotten."
He carved her name into the wooden underside of his desk.
Aria.
Then again.
Aria.
And again, until his fingers bled and the wood splintered.
He whispered it to himself every night like a prayer. A promise.
But time was cruel.
Days passed. Then weeks.
The memory of her face grew dim.
Her voice faded.
Then, one day… he found himself staring at the name on the note—and couldn't remember why it mattered.
Aria.
A pretty name.
It made his chest ache, though he didn't know why.
He placed the note in a box and tucked it beneath his bed.
And slowly… inevitably…
He forgot.
Years Later…
A young girl wandered the woods near where the Hollow once stood.
She stumbled on an old, rotted sign buried beneath the leaves. No words remained—just splinters and rusted nails.
Something whispered to her then.
Soft. Gentle. Like a lullaby.
She turned, and for a moment, thought she saw a girl in a torn jacket at the edge of the trees.
The girl smiled.
But her eyes screamed.
And then she was gone.
The woods fell silent.
In a town with no memory…
In a house that never was…
A soul waits.
Trapped between screams and silence.
A voice, calling into nothing.
Still whispering the same broken plea:
"Don't let me be forgotten…"
[End of "Whispers of the Hollow"]