Act II — The Mythos: The Day the Song Fell Silent
Whispers of the Hollow and the Rise of Flame
Two Versions of the War
Boss Slayer is both a system and a myth.
The system is a framework of inner trials—tools for real spiritual transformation, built from discipline, self-confrontation, and soul work.The mythos is its reflection in story. It takes the same themes and reimagines them in a fallen world, where soul-wounds become monsters and trials become legends.
The system is for those who want clarity, tools, and growth.
The mythos is for those who need meaning, immersion, and mythic fire.They do not always match exactly—nor should they. The mythos does not explain the system; it reveals its soul.
You can walk either path—or both. The war is the same.
The Awakening
The world has long since cracked—
not in one cataclysm, but in countless silent breaks.
Time no longer flows. It flickers.
Names vanish. Maps forget. Roads collapse into dream.
And beneath this haunted crust... something stirs.
The soil dreams. The stars whisper.
And in lost places, strange fires flicker—old, sacred, and alive.
Some say the world is dying.
Others say it is remembering.
But those who feel the ache know the truth:
This land is not merely broken.
It is becoming something else.
This is no ordinary earth.
And the souls who walk it are no ordinary kind.
The Song Broken
Once, there was a Song.
Not melody—but resonance.
A sacred frequency that united soul, soil, sky, and time.
It pulsed through all things:
the wind, the fire, the heartbeat, the grave.
Every being carried a fragment of that harmony.
But humanity turned away.
They chose abstraction over embodiment.
Control over communion.
Certainty over truth.
They silenced the resonance.
And from that silence… came The Hollow.
The Hollow — The Soul’s Undoing
The Hollow is not chaos, nor deity.
It is consequence. It is sacred undoing.
Where soul-resonance is denied, it gathers.
Where grief, memory, or purpose are abandoned, it roots.
It waits—not with malice, but inevitability.
The Hollow is not a monster.
It is what becomes of meaning when forgotten.
It births mythical beasts—living allegories of desecrated truth.
These creatures are not evil.
They are divine horrors—manifestations of what the soul could no longer bear.
The Hollow does not conquer. It corrupts.
It is the shadow of forgotten truths.
It is the divine tragedy of a soul turned inward and undone.
The Spread of the Hollow
The Hollow does not descend like a storm.
It seeps.
It infiltrates memory, belief, silence.
Some isles are lost—frozen beneath its stillness, overgrown with twisted beauty, or buried in mists of forgetting.
Others remain in motion—warmth flickers, fire dances—but even these are not untouched.
The Hollow does not announce itself.
It unweaves.
The Frost is its oldest and deepest form—
A concentration of soul-death where even time forgets to move.
Where the Frost reigns, the Hollowborn rise in legions.
Names vanish. Roads dissolve. The world forgets itself.
Yet even lands without frost are haunted.
The Hollow spreads in silence, veiled in wonder, hidden in decay.
It is not bound to weather.
It is bound to what has been lost.
Where Did the Hollow Come From?
Its origin is fragmented:
Some say it began as a fracture in the cosmic Song itself.
Others say it is the world’s revenge—a sorrow for all humanity forgot.
Some claim it is the lament of ancient gods, twisted beyond time.
There is no consensus.
Only echoes.
This uncertainty is the Hollow’s veil—
a wound no one can name, only feel.
The Fractured Earth — Isles of the Shattered Song
When the Song broke, the world shattered.
Not just in spirit, but in form.
Land splintered into countless Isles—
each drifting in storm-wracked seas,
each pulsing with its own broken harmony.
Some isles flicker with warmth, where flame still survives.
Others lie entombed in silence, ruled by the Hollow’s forms.
Each Isle is a fragment of Earth—
a memory of what was, corrupted into what is.
The Frost Isle is the oldest.
The deepest scar.
The coldest grave of resonance.
A sacred ruin where memory and numbness merge.
All Isles remain connected by soul-thread—
but their faces, climates, and griefs are uniquely their own.
The Raven — Harbinger and Keeper of the Fracture
Long ago, when the Song was whole,
the Raven was its messenger—
a sacred bridge between soul, spirit, and time.
But when the Song fractured,
the raven’s purpose twisted.
Now it serves as a harbinger of the Hollow—
appearing before isles are consumed,
before Hollowborn rise from the deep.
It cries not with words, but with broken tones—
a music almost remembered.
The Raven is ambiguous:
It guides some Flamebearers toward lost shards.
It haunts others with sorrow and silence.
Sometimes it simply watches, holding no answer.
Its feathers are said to carry resonance fragments.
Some even claim the Raven remembers what the world forgot.
But the Raven is not the only remnant left adrift between realms. There are others—less visible, more fragile—who linger in the cracks the Hollow leaves behind...
Echoes of Lost Souls
Not all spirits pass into rupture.
Some become Echoes—
spectral remnants of memory and meaning.
They do not seek vengeance.
They whisper.
Wandering ruins, shadows, or frozen hills,
they linger near sacred places—
guiding the brave, warning the lost, or weeping for what once was.
They are neither ghosts nor guardians.
They are reminders.
While the Echoes whisper of what was lost, the Sun Shards remember what can still be reclaimed.
Sun Shards — Embers of the Broken Song
Scattered across the Fractured Earth lie the Sun Shards—mythic remnants of the ancient resonance that once unified soul, soil, and spirit. These are not artifacts. They are living echoes of the original Song: pulses of primordial harmony, buried beneath centuries of silence and soul-forgetting.
Some lie hidden in sanctuaries swallowed by time. Others flicker faintly under storm-stained skies, humming quietly in the breath of dreaming ruins. Many remain dormant—waiting for the right hands, the right wound, the right flame.
To touch a Sun Shard is to feel the world remember you.
The shards are drawn to places heavy with meaning—fallen temples, grief-soaked vaults, forgotten groves where sorrow clings like mist. Some are protected by soul-bound guardians. Others drift untethered, seeking those whose inner fire can stir their resonance from slumber.
Where a Sun Shard is reclaimed, the Hollow recoils.
Where it is forgotten, the silence deepens.
Each rekindled shard restores a piece of the world’s sacred frequency—softening entropy, reweaving memory, and awakening the buried pulse of life. They are not found in harmony, but in fragments: hunted, hidden, and hard-won.
They are not to be worshiped.
They are to be forged.
Shard-Smithing — The Alchemy of Flame and Truth
The Hollow cannot be slain by steel alone.
It feeds on silence, grows in forgetting, and seeps into the cracks of spirit. Only relics forged from the Sun Shards—those living echoes of the Broken Song—can cut through its veils and halt its advance.
This ancient practice is known as Shard-Smithing.
Through sacred rites lost to most and guarded by the Flamebound, the Shards are tempered in ritual fire, shaped not by tools—but by truth. Few can endure the process. Fewer still survive it unchanged.
The result is myth-forged weaponry—not symbols, but sacred armaments crafted to stand against the Hollow’s dominion.
Each transformation is unique. No two shards are alike.
Their resonance chooses its wielder—and its form.
🐺 The Hollowborn — Mythical Beasts of Desecrated Meaning
The Hollowborn are not summoned.
They are exhumed—
unearthed from the soul’s deepest fractures,
where silence festered too long.
They are not predators.
They are what remains when meaning dies unloved.
Formed from broken resonance,
they do not kill for hunger.
They consume what they once were:
warmth, memory, name, purpose.
To face one is not a battle.
It is a reckoning.
Yet some flicker.
A gesture. A ruin they return to.
A phrase uttered with no voice.
A pause before the strike.
These are not signs of mercy.
They are the final twitch of a soul
too shattered to rest.
Some Flamebearers believe these beings can be freed— not slain, but unbound. That somewhere within the fracture… a spark still waits.
Sacred Ruins — Thresholds of Memory
The world did not simply collapse.
It transformed.
Time shattered, and in the fracture, something ancient surged upward—or inward.
Now, scattered across the isles, remnants of two worlds remain:
the ruins we recognize, and the ones that defy all memory.
Collapsed towers overgrown by vine and frost.
Bridges half-swallowed by stone and sea.
But beside them—
temples carved in languages no people recall,
shrines that shift when unobserved,
fortresses grown from mineral and myth, lit from within by breathing stone.
Were these sanctums of a forgotten civilization?
Or did the Hollow itself birth them—as echoes of soul and silence made solid?
None can say.
Even the Flamebearers only guess.
Some claim they are remnants from before the Song was shattered.
Others insist they rose afterward—born from grief, dream, and resonance.
What is known is this:
They are alive.
They respond to presence.
They do not forget.
To enter is to walk through a living memory.
To stay too long is to risk rewriting your own.
It is in these ruins that the Flamebound often begin their path—where flame rekindles, shards awaken, and silence finally breaks.
The Flamebound — Defenders of the Remaining Fire
The Flamebound are not a kingdom, nor a church.
They are a resistance—part survival guild, part soul-military order.
Tempered by trial, called by resonance, and chosen by the Song’s broken pulse, they are the last organized light before the dark consumes all.
At their center walk the Flamebearers—seekers who have crossed the mythic gauntlet of soul and shadow.
They have faced the Soul Trials: ancient soul-wounds made monstrous, known only in whispers as the echoes of the self denied.
These are not trials of battle alone—but of memory, identity, purpose, and silence.
To survive them is not to win, but to become.
To be reforged.
The Flamebound are those who have endured the path of the Boss Slayer—
a crucible through which fragmented souls are burned clean and rekindled into something unyielding.
They carry flame not just in hand, but in soul.
Each Flamebound outpost is a sacred refuge:
part forge, part sanctuary, part forgotten shrine.
There, Shard-Smiths temper myth into weapon.
There, wounded pilgrims find shelter.
They do not seek conquest.
They seek resonance—the restoration of what the Song once was.
Their oath:
“Where fire fades, we kindle.
Where truth is buried, we burn.
Where the Hollow spreads, we return as flame.”
To walk as Flamebound is not to save the world.
It is to remember what the world once was—and carry its ember through the dark.
But the Flamebound are not the only ones who endured. Across the isles, others rose—twisted, adapted, or wild—each shaped by their own response to silence and fracture.
Factions of the Fractured World
Other tribes and orders remain, each shaped by grief and adaptation:
The Forsworn — oath-breakers, now wanderers of myth and exile
Scavenger’s Veil — mask-wearers, traders, whisper-walkers
The Fringeborn — dwellers of the in-between, where veils thin
The Wildborn Pack — storm-riders and soul-beasts, children of primal fire
These factions are neither fully ally nor enemy.
They move like stories—changing shape with each age.
Prophecies and Whispers
In dreams and ruins, words echo still:
“When the last ember dims, the Hollow shall sing its final dirge.”
“A soul forged in both shadow and fire shall mend the fractured song.”
“The isles will bleed and bleed again before the true dawn.”
None know the source.
Some believe them.
Most are too weary to care.
But still, the words remain.
This is the myth of us all:
That life fractures us, and yet we move.
That wounds shape us, and yet we carry fire.
That redemption is not a path—but a remembering.
And in the broken song, we find our unbroken selves.
Whether these prophecies are warnings or invitations,
they all point to the same hidden truth:
The Song is not lost.
It waits.
The Return of the Song
The Song does not return in chorus.
It rises in flickers, in fragments.
Through you.
Through Shards.
Through Fire.
Through Remembering.
The Hollow cannot be slain—
but it can be unmade.
Each shard forged.
Each Hollowborn faced.
Each fire rekindled—
is a note returned to the world.
And somewhere, beneath all ruin…
the world begins to hum again.