I remember the steam rising from the cobblestones of Constantinople, how it mingled with incense smoke from the Hagia Sophia. I remember the weight of silk in my hands, the clink of Ottoman coins, the way light fractured through stained glass onto ledgers filled with numbers that meant nothing in the end. That was before The Hollow Court found me—or rather, before I stumbled through a tear in reality while seeking shelter from a storm in an abandoned chapel.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Crooketh.

They gave me a mask of polished bone. Not to conceal, they said, but to reveal. In The Hollow Court, we wore our truths upon our faces—shifting masks that reflected our inner landscapes. I was Hollowhorn, sixth rank. My mask bore delicate antlers carved from memory-ivory, and through them I could hear the whispers of forgotten things in merchant warehouses, sense the ghosts left in traded objects.

We were archivists of absence. We collected not things themselves, but the hollow spaces they left behind—the echo where a loved one once stood, the silence after a particular song ended, the negative shape in dust where a treasured object was removed. Our power grew from these voids.

Then came Elara.

I found her weeping by a polluted Thames riverbank during one of my gatherings—a fae whose glamour had been torn away by iron-smoke and disbelief. She was unveiled, her true form exposed to human sight: not monstrous, but painfully radiant. To see an unveiled fae is to witness truth so raw it burns mortal minds. The Hollow Law was clear: let nature take its course; let humanity's disbelief unravel her into nothingness; collect only the beautiful absence she would leave behind.

But I remembered another law—older than courts or masks. In my grandmother's Orthodox faith, we spoke of icons as windows to heaven. We venerated faces not for their surface but for what shone through them: divine energies made visible through wood and pigment and gold leaf.

Elara's unveiled face was such an icon.

So I draped her in my merchant's cloak—still smelling of distant spices—and wove what hollow magic I possessed around her: not concealment exactly, but a different kind of absence. I gathered all memories people had ever projected onto strangers and layered them over her truth until she appeared ordinary again.

The Court called it contamination. Preservation of something meant to fade pollutes the purity of absence itself.

My mask did not shatter when they exiled me; it fused.
Bone became flesh became bone again.
Now this face you see? It is permanent.
No one remembers what lay beneath—not even me.
The Hollowhorn antlers remain as ridges on my forehead,
but they no longer hear forgotten whispers—
only echoes within echoes within echoes.

The Dark Masons found me staring at my reflection
in a factory window along Clydeside.
They who build with shadows saw
not exile but raw material.
Their lodge exists between places:
brickwork without buildings,
blueprints for structures
that touch multiple worlds simultaneously.
They offered no pity,
only chisel and mortar made from compressed twilight.
Here among those who construct permanent liminality,
I have learned something:

Exile is not displacement from space,
but from time.
The Crooketh who existed before Elara
is gone forever;
the Crooketh who might have remained at Court
never came to be;
this Crooketh writing ledgers for shadow-builders
is all that persists across timelines—
a singular thread snipped from possibility's tapestry.

Sometimes at dusk,
when smokestacks bleed into violet skies,
I climb half-built staircases leading nowhere
and feel both utterly lost and perfectly positioned.
The Masons understand:
what appears permanent may be temporary scaffolding;
what seems transitional may become foundation stone.

My revelation arrived last Tuesday while mixing ink from soot and starlight:
We are all savedunveiledfae now—
stripped bare by industry's relentless gaze,
forced into permanence prematurely,
longing for masks that can still be removed.
Yet perhaps being unveiled isn't exposure unto destruction...
Perhaps it's simply becoming an icon awaiting veneration—
truth waiting for eyes gentle enough to behold it without flinching.

So let them call us exiles.
Let our masks calcify into faces unknown even to ourselves.
We dwell now where architecture meets ether,
building shelters for other refugees yet unseen—
windows without walls,
doors without houses...

...holy spaces crafted specifically
for whatever arrives next

Visual

Broad-shouldered figure with a fused porcelain mask for a face, ridge-like antler stubs across the forehead, one ceramic smile frozen mid-kindness, soot-dusted merchant's coat, hands like jointed ivory.

Faction: The Hollow Court · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook