I would recommend that you go to my page and check out my explanation for this fic before you start reading it, it's not quite the same as your usual fanfiction! Hopefully it still makes sense without me having to explain what I'm doing here, but you might just want a little warning. Unless I think it's urgent I won't be posting any author notes in this story apart from this one, but I will try to update notes on my page. All that's left to say is enjoy! And sorry if it sometimes takes me a while to update.
The silence lifted with the closing light. Clouds poured over the high reaching peaks of Hueco Mundo, the fast fading light chasing the shadows of the blue stone ridges creeping into the sand, like hands snatching the remnant of the day from the desert. The dusty plains surrendered and let the blue-black of the otherworldly night take hold and the shadows seemed to boil before it; this world was ruled by night. Time moved faster than a man could run, spurred on by the gentle whisperings floating on a non-existent breeze.
The land was softly singing to itself.
From one of the pools of shadow striding out across the wasteland, something took form, pushing forth from the mists in a haze of dust. Slowly, it freed itself from the land that birthed it and began to rise. Past the shadows, past the peaks until it burst through the clouds, only to find itself tumbling through them into another night.
It oozed. Seeping from one world to the next in long black tendrils and plummeted towards the earth. Its urgency dragged it to the city streets from which the scent of an easy feast sprung forth.
We have no form, therefore we fear it...and because we are formless, we revere it.
Formless no longer, it hit the earth with the force of a juggernaut. Debris scattered at its feet and fell in its unseen shadow as it raised a head as white as death to the skies and howled the howl of the truly starving. The souls of the dead shuddered.
Free of true form, a butterfly scampered towards the moon, full this night and lighting the city. Oxford slept below, blissfully unaware of the cogs turning, unaware that at that moment in a far off part of the future, the fate of their world was decided that night, in that city, decided by those who lived among them, but were to live as Gods.
They were being watched. The powers that were, will be and ever shall be had decreed it so, it was impossible for so many souls to live unaided, in this world or the next. So they sent the footmen, and the footmen watched, waited and disposed of threats to the peace of the two worlds. The formless taken form, the aimless gained a purpose, the soul with no soul; we call it nightmare.
They call it Hollow.
A slim frame could not be seen above the roof tops. It did not take the moon's penumbra and use it as its own and it did not watch the town it knew nothing of and would die to protect. How could it? It was not there, it cannot exist in this world any longer, and it has passed on. Yet there it was. As clear as if nothing were there at all.
It smelled the formless taken form. It knew its hunger and it knew its path. With a leap lighter than the fall of a rain drop, it crossed the city, across a pathway through the sky it had created for itself. It felt the strong pulse of the formless beginning to move, but it knew it, it could find it, Hollow could live in this world no more than it could.
Thus we are slain
And then there was nothing there, just as there had always been. Just the moon, the sleepy silence of night and the thunder of the end in the murky distance of a future that all but one soul in Oxford would never live to see.