They did not wait for the Hollow to come to them. They went to it, through the last page of the ledger, which was not blank after all but white the way a door is white when the light behind it is too bright to see.

On the other side was a country made of margins. Torn edges lay in drifts like snow. The sky was the inside of a closed book. And from very far away came a sound like pages turning: someone looking for something they had lost.

When the Hollow rose to meet them, it rose slowly, the way a sheet lifts off a bed. It was enormous, a hooded shape built from ten thousand cut pages overlapping like feathers, and where its face should have been there were two holes, clean-edged, with nothing behind them at all.

Mihao had braced himself for teeth. There were none. The Hollow did not roar. When it spoke, it spoke in borrowed lines, a phrase from one story, a word from another: the voice of a drowned city, a frozen people, a soldier who never got home. Hello, Keeper, it said. You took your time. But then, you always kept time well. It was the endings you couldn’t keep.

It showed them what it was made of. Pages turned in the grey air, and on each one a story stopped mid-sentence: a city going under the waves, and the bells rang on beneath the water until—; a mother at a window, and the door opened, and—; a letter, I will be home by—

“They hurt,” said the Hollow simply. “Unfinished things hurt. I did not shatter your library to destroy it, Keeper. I shattered it looking for my last page. I have eaten kingdoms trying to find it. I have read every story in the world, looking for the one ending that would let me stop.” Its empty eyes turned on Mihao. “I am so tired.”

Pell found her voice first. “You erased a whole kingdom,” she said. “You ate a princess’s name. You put out the stars over a little boy.” “Yes,” said the Hollow. “I am a hunger, and hungers are not kind. But I did not make myself, fox.”

It turned its empty face towards the old cat, and Mihao found he could not look away. All the way down the stair, through the drawer and the ledger, he had carried a suspicion like a stone in his chest. Now it simply sat there, heavy and obvious, and he understood that he had always known.

“Give me the ninth leaf,” said the Hollow. “Wen’s last page. It is all I have ever wanted.” “I don’t have it,” said Mihao. “You do,” said the Hollow, almost gently. “You always have. Look at your beard, Keeper.”

Then, as if to show it meant no harm, it reached into itself, drew out a leaf it had swallowed long ago, and let it drift across the chasm into his paws. I never wanted to keep anything, it said. That was you.