The City of Veridia ran on a currency more precious than gold: a finite, shimmering allotment of empathy gifted to each soul at birth. Elara, a Mender by trade, felt hers dwindling daily. Her job was to fix things—not clocks or chairs, but the delicate, unseen fractures in the world. She’d coax a frightened bird from a chimney, its terror a thread of jagged obsidian she had to smooth with her own silver supply. She’d listen to a heartbroken baker until his grief, a heavy, sodden dough, felt light enough to rise again. Each act cost her. She could feel the shimmering reservoir behind her sternum shrink, the light dimming.
When she got home, the exhaustion was absolute. She’d fall into a state of what the young people called ‘bed rotting,’ not out of laziness, but of necessity. She’d lie still for hours, curtains drawn, conserving the last dregs of her feeling, trying not to expend an ounce of care on the dust motes dancing in the slivers of light. This was the precipice of ‘quiet quitting’ her own life.
Her brother Kael was her greatest worry and her most significant drain. He was handsome and full of a heedless ‘main character energy,’ convinced the world was a story written for him. He was burning through his empathy like a wastrel prince through his inheritance.
“It’s not a relationship, Elara, it’s a situationship,” he’d explained, waving a dismissive hand. “It’s less complicated.”
But it wasn’t. He was pouring his precious empathy into a woman who offered nothing back, a beautiful, charming void. Kael called it a ‘beige flag’ that she only ever laughed when he was making fun of someone else, but Elara saw it for the gaping maw it was. He was ‘delulu,’ as the street kids would say, utterly delusional to think this emotional hemorrhage would ever clot on its own.
“You’re going to end up Hollow, Kael,” she warned him, her voice barely a whisper, not wanting to spend the emotional energy required for a full-throated shout.
The Hollows were the city’s cautionary tale. Those who had spent their last drop of empathy. They weren’t evil, just empty. They moved through the world in a state of perpetual ‘goblin mode,’ taking what they needed without a flicker of remorse or consideration, their eyes as flat and lifeless as river stones.
One evening, a city-wide ‘vibe shift’ occurred. A chill that had nothing to do with the weather crept down the cobblestone alleys. You could feel it: a collective pulling-in, a hundred thousand souls suddenly deciding to hoard what little they had left. The laughter in the taverns was brittle, the music in the square felt thin. Too many people were running low.
Desperate, Kael came to her. He’d found a back-alley alchemist selling a ‘dupe.’ A synthetic empathy, bottled and glittering. “It looks just like the real thing,” he’d whispered, his face pale and strained.
Elara had heard of these. They gave you a rush, a jolt of artificial feeling, but they corroded you from the inside. They didn’t replenish the soul; they just scoured it clean.
“Don’t,” she pleaded, but he was already gone, his desperation a tangible force.
She found him hours later in his apartment, shivering on the floor. The dupe had failed. His situationship had ended in a screaming match that had cost him the last of his genuine reserves. He was flickering. The light in his eyes, the innate shimmer that made him Kael, was guttering like a cheap candle in a gale. He looked at her, and for a terrifying second, she saw nothing there. Just the flat, acquisitive gaze of the Hollow.
He was going.
In that moment, Elara felt a surge of something she hadn’t felt in years: reckless, boundless love. It was the memory of being a child, when empathy felt as infinite as the sky. She couldn’t let him become one of them.
She knelt and placed her hands on his chest. Mending a person was forbidden, a fool’s errand that cost more than anyone could afford. But he was her brother. She closed her eyes and pushed. She didn’t try to smooth his terror or untangle his grief. She simply opened the valve to her own reservoir and let the silver light flow from her into him.
It was an agony unlike any physical pain. It was the feeling of her soul being unhemmed, of her very essence being siphoned away. She felt the warmth drain from her skin, the color from the world behind her eyelids. She saw the memory of her mother’s smile grow faint, the feeling of sunlight on her face as a child turn into a mere fact. She gave and gave until she felt a cold, hard bottom. A floor where there had once been a well.
When she opened her eyes, Kael was weeping. Real, hiccuping sobs of gratitude and horror. The light was back in his eyes, steadier than before. He was whole.
She, however, was not. Looking at her crying brother, she felt… nothing. A clinical observation of a wet face and shaking shoulders. She had done it. She had spent it all.
He reached for her. “Elara… what have you done?”
She couldn’t muster the energy to reply. She stood up and walked to the window, looking out over the city. The chill of the vibe shift felt normal to her now, comfortable. The world was a simple place of shapes and functions. A problem of logistics. She was no longer a Mender. She was something new. Something efficient. She had met her quota, and now she was free. The thought arrived without joy or sorrow, a simple, clean, and devastating fact.
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