The Hollowed
Continuing the worldbuilding series for The Hollow Heart. We’ve explored witches and their elemental magic, werewolves and their sacred bonds. Today, we examine the shadow side of this magical society, those labelled as broken, the ones called Hollowed.
What Does It Mean to Be Hollowed?
In a world where magic defines worth, where your elemental affinity determines your place in society, what happens to those who develop no observable power at all?
They’re called the Hollowed.
Between ages 13 and 18, every child born to witch parents goes through the settling, the gradual awakening of their magical affinity. For most, it’s a time of wonder and discovery. For the Hollowed, there is only silence.
No element answers their call. No magic stirs in their veins. At age 16, they undergo the formal Settling Test: stone, feather, coal, and water laid before them while a bored bureaucrat makes notes on a clipboard. When nothing happens, when the elements remain inert and unresponsive, their fate is sealed with the scratch of a pen, although it cannot be decreed officially until the age of 18. It is exceptionally rare for a witch to fail this test and then have their magic emerge before they turn 18.
The Test That Determines Everything
Picture this: You’re sixteen years old. You’ve spent years hoping, praying, that your magic would come. Maybe it’s late. Maybe you’re a slow bloomer. Maybe tomorrow will be the day.
Earth: Place your hand on the stone. Feel the mountain within it. Nothing.
Air: Hold the feather. Command it to stir. Nothing.
Fire: Ignite the coal. Summon the spark. Nothing.
Water: Touch the surface. Make it ripple. Nothing.
Each failure is noted. Each door slams shut. By the time the test ends, so has your childhood. You are Hollowed, and everything you thought you might become evaporates like morning mist.
Education stops. Career options vanish. Even your name feels hollow now, just a label attached to a body deemed fundamentally broken.
Life as a Hollowed: The Permanent Underclass
Education—Or the Lack of It
At eighteen, when the Settling is deemed to have conclusively failed, all formal education stops. While magical children attend academies to refine their powers, the Hollowed are considered fully trained the moment they can scrub a floor properly.
Children born to Hollowed parents receive no education at all unless they show early signs of magic. Why waste resources on the broken?
Access to libraries, magical or otherwise, is restricted. Apprenticeships in skilled trades are reserved for magical witches. The Hollowed are meant to serve, not to learn.
Work: The Only “Acceptable” Existence
The Hollowed perform all the labor that magical witches consider beneath them:
- Street sweepers and waste collectors who clear away the detritus of magical society
- Cleaners and laundry workers who maintain the spotless homes of the powerful
- Menial laborers in construction and agriculture, doing backbreaking work for minimal pay
- Live-in domestic servants who cook, clean, and wait on magical families
- Kitchen staff and stable hands who exist in the shadows, expected to be invisible
The “best” Hollowed might secure a position in a wealthy household. The worst scrape by in slums or die young from exposure, starvation, or the consequences of handling dangerous magical refuse without protection.
The Dangerous Work No One Mentions
Here’s what witch society doesn’t talk about: the Hollowed are routinely tasked with handling unstable magical ingredients, cleaning areas contaminated by wild magic, or disposing of failed magical experiments.
Because they lack observable magic, they’re seen as disposable. If they die from magical poisoning, it’s considered no great loss. Just another Hollowed who couldn’t hack it.
The families get no compensation. The positions are simply filled by the next desperate person who needs to eat.
Rights, Or Lack Thereof
Political Rights
The Hollowed cannot:
- Hold any council seat or government position
- Testify against a magical witch in most courts
- Bring formal complaints without a witch sponsor (who will advocate for them, for a price or out of pity)
Their word holds no legal weight against a witch’s. Justice isn’t blind—it just refuses to see the Hollowed at all.
Social Restrictions
The rules are both written and unwritten:
- Romantic relationships with magical witches are forbidden in most covens
- Intermarriage with a magical witch is a profound taboo
- Cannot own property in witch districts
- Must give right-of-way to magical witches on streets and paths
- Cannot use front entrances to establishments (there are servants’ entrances for a reason)
- Required to wear identifying markers in some jurisdictions, a grey armband, a specific colour of clothing, anything to immediately signal their status
The message is clear: you are less, and everyone must be able to see it at a glance.
The Indenture System: Legal Slavery by Another Name
Perhaps the cruelest aspect of Hollowed life is the indenture system.
Hollowed individuals can be legally bound to magical families through contracts. These contracts can be “in perpetuity”—lifetime servitude, dressed up in legal language about “mutual obligation” and “security.”
Here’s how it works:
- A magical family “offers” to take in a Hollowed
- In exchange for room, board, and “protection,” the Hollowed signs their freedom away
- Breaking the contract is a criminal offense punishable by imprisonment or worse
- Children born to indentured Hollowed are automatically classified as Hollowed until proven otherwise, and they inherit their parents’ indenture
It’s generational servitude, but witch society doesn’t call it slavery. They call it “practical necessity” and “charitable accommodation.”
After all, what would the Hollowed do without their benevolent masters to provide for them?
The Daily Reality of Abuse
Physical punishment for failures, real or perceived, is common and entirely legal. A broken dish. A spot of dust on a shelf. An expression that displeases. Any excuse will do.
The abuse takes many forms:
Physical
- Beatings for mistakes
- Withholding food as punishment
- Forced labor beyond human endurance
- Deliberate exposure to magical contamination
Sexual
- Unwanted advances that cannot be refused
- Exploitation of power imbalances
- Forced “grooming” and intimate service
- No legal recourse for assault (a Hollowed’s word against a witch’s)
Psychological
- Constant degradation and humiliation
- Deliberate destruction of any sense of self-worth
- Gaslighting about their “proper place”
- Systematic breaking of spirit and hope
The truly horrifying part? Much of this isn’t even illegal. The Hollowed exist to serve, and what happens behind closed doors stays there.
Complain, and you’ll be punished. Resist, and you might not survive. The system is designed to break you, to grind down any spark of defiance until obedience is all that remains.
The Children: Growing Up Hollow
For children who emerge as Hollowed, the transition is brutal.
One day, you’re just another student at the orphanage or in your family’s home. The next day, after the Settling Test confirms what everyone suspected, you’re other. The magical children you grew up with suddenly have a future. You have only the certainty of service.
Families with Hollowed children face whispers about “tainted blood” or “weak lineage.” Some abandon their Hollowed children to orphanages like Stonehaven. Others keep them but treat them as shameful secrets, as failed investments, as disappointments that must be hidden.
Growing up Hollowed means learning to:
- Make yourself small and invisible
- Read the moods of the powerful to avoid their wrath
- Swallow your rage because expressing it means punishment
- Kill your dreams before they kill you
It means watching magical children your age learn wonders while you learn which cleaning solution removes blood from marble.
The Whispered Legends: Null Towns and Hope
But here’s what witch society doesn’t like to admit: not all Hollowed accept their fate.
There are whispers—passed from one desperate soul to another—of Null Towns hidden deep in the Wildlands, beyond the reach of the Accord. Secret settlements founded by escaped Hollowed, places where magic doesn’t define worth, where former servants build their own communities on their own terms.
No one knows for certain if they exist. The Ironwardens claim they’re myths used to lure the desperate to their deaths in the wilderness. But the stories persist:
“There’s a place where you can just be a person.”
“Beyond the Ring of Protection.”
“A hollow haven where we take care of our own.”
For most Hollowed, these are just dreams. But dreams, however unlikely, are sometimes all that keep you alive when the alternative is accepting that this, servitude, abuse, invisibility, is all you’ll ever be.
The Underground Network
What magical society doesn’t see is that the Hollowed have built their own support systems in the shadows:
- Information networks about which households are “safer” and which are death sentences
- Quiet aid when one of their own is injured or starving
- Teaching each other survival skills: reading faces, avoiding triggers, becoming invisible when necessary
- Passing down forbidden stories about what they believe they truly are
There’s a legend whispered among Hollowed communities, passed down through generations:
“The Dawn is coming.”
A mythical future when the truth about the Hollowed will be revealed. When they’ll be recognized as whole. When the servant system will end. When justice will finally come.
It’s probably just a story. A way to cope with lives of unrelenting hardship.
But sometimes, stories are all you have.
The Moral Architecture of Oppression
The Hollowed aren’t just a marginalized group. They’re the foundation upon which witch society’s comfort is built.
Who cooks the meals? The Hollowed.
Who maintains the estates? The Hollowed.
Who handles the dangerous work? The Hollowed.
Who does all the labor that allows magical witches to focus on scholarship, politics, craft, and art? The Hollowed.
Witch society’s entire structure depends on their exploitation. And any structure that depends on oppression will fight viciously to maintain it.
Because if the Hollowed aren’t actually broken, if the label is a lie, then everything witch society believes about itself shatters.
Ziggy Silver 
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