The Girl That Stole The Sun: Chapter 31
The Hollow Prince
Note: The Girl Who Stole the Sun was written in one month as a creative experiment. It's imperfect, it's messy, and it's shared here openly—for anyone who believes stories are worth telling, even when they're not polished to perfection. Thank you for reading.
Lirien did not know how long she knelt in the void where Aureon had died.
The darkness pressed against her ribs, vast and endless, weightless yet suffocating. Her breath came shallow, uneven, the fire inside her thrumming low and patient. The world had gone still, as if the last threads of existence had unraveled around her.
Then—pain.
A tearing sensation, sudden and brutal, ripped through her chest. The void cracked, splintered. And she was falling.
Voices pierced the darkness—sharp, broken things. A struggle. A name she barely recognized through the haze.
"LIRIEN!" someone called, urgent and desperate, but it wasn’t Rhyos. It wasn’t Noctir. Someone else.
She slammed back into her body.
A gasp tore from her throat, the weight of air and smoke slamming into her lungs. Cold stone pressed against her palms. Her heart stuttered, her limbs spasmed against the ruined floor of the temple. She blinked against the light—or what little remained of it—and the world shuddered into focus.
Gold and white cloaks blurred past her vision. Hands. Voices raised in anger. Temple guards.
Edrin.
She tried to move, tried to shout, but her body betrayed her, sluggish and heavy with the aftershock of what she had done. She could only watch as the guards dragged him away, his bound hands clawing uselessly against the marble. His head snapped toward her, lips shaping something she couldn’t hear.
And then he was gone.
Tears pricked at her eyes, but she forced herself upright, the fire still alive in her chest, coiling with restless power.
She wasn't alone.
A low, ragged sound—half growl, half gasp—reached her ears. She turned sharply.
At the far side of the broken sanctum, Rhyos was on his hands and knees, steam rising in ghostly tendrils from his skin. His breath came in short, uneven bursts, the very air around him bending, warping beneath an invisible weight. His muscles strained against something unseen, as if he were fighting a battle within his own body.
“Rhyos,” she rasped, pushing herself to her feet. Her voice cracked from disuse and smoke.
He looked up.
And her breath caught.
His eyes, once brilliant gold, now burned a deep, unnatural black, the gold swallowed until only the smallest flicker remained at the center of his gaze. His body trembled, his hands—no, claws—digging into the stone. Veins blackened with shadow pulsed along his arms and neck.
“I can hold it,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. His voice was dark and warbled, growling and painful.
It was a lie.
The temple walls groaned. The shadows at the edges of the room deepened, growing thick, almost solid. The darkness peeled away from the corners like something breathing.
A figure emerged, unraveling from the blackness itself—first hands, thin and too long, then a body shifting like silk in water.
Noctir.
He did not walk. He seeped into the room, his grin stretching too wide across a face that barely resembled anything human.
“You cannot hold what was always mine,” he purred, and the walls seemed to shudder at the sound.
For a moment, Lirien couldn't breathe.
The curse in Rhyos' blood had been Aureon's doing—or so she thought. But the truth carved itself into her ribs with brutal clarity:
Rhyos had never belonged to just the light.
He was the heir to a god who had been split in two—and now that the Sun was dead, the Shadow had come to claim what was left.
Rhyos let out a choked gasp, his back arching violently. Lirien took a step toward him. “Rhyos, fight it—”
Noctir’s presence thickened, filling the room like smoke curling through her lungs. His voice was a velvet noose. "You took the sun, little thief," he said, drifting closer, fingers trailing along the broken stone. "But you forgot the moon."
At the sound of his words, the shadows burst from Rhyos' back. Wings—if they could be called that—unfolded. Not feathered, not even flesh, but jagged, writhing tendrils of darkness, endless and shifting. His body convulsed, bones snapping, skin stretching. His scream tore through the ruin, raw and inhuman.
Lirien lurched forward. "Rhyos!"
His head jerked toward her. For a breath, for a heartbeat, she saw him—the man, the friend, the boy who had once smiled at her in a purple dawn—and then he was gone, swallowed by the creature the Hollow God had promised.
"You are mine," Noctir whispered, his voice everywhere at once.
Rhyos convulsed, shadows clinging to his ribs, coiling around his throat. His hands twisted into claws meant for tearing. His chest heaved with the weight of a war being fought inside him.
Lirien stumbled closer despite the fire warning her to run. Her hand reached for him.
"Please," Rhyos choked out.
Before she could touch him, the darkness slammed into her.
She hit the ground hard, gasping. The shadows seized her wrists and ankles, binding her to the cracked marble. She fought them, thrashing against the cold grip, but they held fast.
Across the room, Rhyos knelt, shaking, the monster clawing free of his bones.
Noctir's voice was a sickening lullaby. "Take her. Consume her. Break her."
And for one awful moment, Lirien saw him falter.
His claws flexed. His body shifted toward her. Hunger flickered in his gaze—a void aching to devour.
Her heart hammered painfully against her ribs.
Was this how it ended? After gods and fire and blood? Consumed by the very thing she had tried to save?
The fire inside her snarled—furious not at him, but at her hesitation. But she saw him.
In the trembling of his hands.
In the way his body fought even as it craved.
In the shattered, desperate flicker of gold still burning at the center of his eyes.
"Rhyos," she whispered, voice breaking. His entire body shuddered. For a heartbeat, the world held its breath.
And Rhyos said, through cracked lips and broken will, "No."
The shadows recoiled as if burned. He wrenched free with a sound like chains breaking, tearing the tendrils of darkness from his skin, ripping the hollow god’s claim from his bones.
He was not just fighting Noctir.
He was tearing himself free from a fate written in his blood, from a god who had owned him before he even drew breath.
Noctir screamed—not in rage, but in disbelief.
The sky split with the force of it. Through a thin slit in the stone, Lirien could see the sky. With Aureon gone, no longer were there even any traces of the sun that was. The sky was a dark, purplish black, with nothing to break the vast expanse. Without Aureon, there was nothing to stop Noctir from taking over the realm.
Rhyos staggered upright, breath heaving, wings of shadow coiling tighter around him—but this time, they did not consume him. They obeyed him.
He was not the boy she had met. Not the man who had bled beside her. Not the monster Noctir had intended. He was something else now.
Something terrible.
Something new.
His shadowed hand reached for her—not to harm. To pull her up.
"Lirien," he said, rough and real. His voice was no longer a painful growl, but not the voice she had come to know either.
She gripped his hand, letting him drag her upright.
And for the first time since the gods began to die, she chose not to flinch from what he had become.
Rhyos had changed.
But he was still hers.
Noctir’s voice slithered across the ruined temple, low and cold.
"You are a fool," the Hollow God hissed. "You think you have won? The fire will not save you. The dark will not spare you. You will beg me before the end."
The shadows did not retreat. They gathered at the edges of the night, watching, waiting.
Noctir had not been defeated.
He had only been delayed.
As Rhyos' clawed hand tightened around hers, and the ruins of the temple shuddered under the weight of what was coming, Lirien understood:
The world was broken.
And now, together, they would break it further.
Or they would be the ones shattered.
Either way—the end had only just begun.
The shadows did not retreat. They gathered at the edges of the night, watching, waiting.
And somewhere, beyond what she could see, the Hollow God smiled.
That was just awesome