#On Their Nature
The Hollow-Walkers are Kargath's most commonly encountered walking hunger: humanoid enough to make a rifleman hesitate, ruined enough to make the hesitation fatal, and articulate enough, on bad nights, to ask for help in the voice of a province that no longer exists.
They come out of the east thin beyond the privileges of anatomy. Skin clings to bone as if the body has been shrink-wrapped by famine and then ordered to stand. The belly is usually collapsed. The chest is often open in ways the field manuals prefer to render as diagrams. Their mouths remain wet. This is the first sign by which veterans know them. A starving man has dry lips. A Hollow-Walker drools.
The Maw-Born are mouths before biography. Hollow-Walkers are biography after the mouth has passed through it. They were human once, or close enough to human that the distinction comforts no one. Kargath has consumed them from within and left the outline walking. Flesh, marrow, memory, hunger: the sequence is liturgical in its cruelty. What remains is a person-shaped petition addressed to every pantry, ration cart, chapel larder, field kitchen, and warm body within scent range.
#On Their Appearance
A Hollow-Walker can be mistaken for a refugee at distance. This is deliberate only in the sense that Hell benefits from every mercy it can counterfeit. The gait is uneven, the shoulders bent, the arms often wrapped around the torso in that universal posture of the cold and hungry. Patrols see one figure staggering across mud and wire. Then another. Then three more behind the first, moving at the same pace, each drawn by the smell of boiled grain, mule blood, candle-grease, or a soldier's supper cooling in a tin bowl.
Close sight removes the mistake. The eyes are too deep, sometimes absent, sometimes replaced by a cloudy inward shine like broth fat cooling on water. The cheeks are hollow enough to cast shadows under moonlight. The teeth are crowded, loose, and frequently doubled; new rows form behind old ones when feeding begins. Their fingers end in nails split by constant scraping, because a Hollow-Walker will claw earth from around buried roots, pry bark from dead trees, peel leather from a boot, and worry at sealed tins until the metal cuts it to ribbons. It continues worrying.
The torso contains the greater heresy. Vivisections of disabled specimens at the Constantinople infirmary revealed organs repurposed into digestive capacity: stomach tissue climbing the throat, intestinal loops folded through the lungs, liver masses riddled with small toothlike nodules, and, in one case, a heart half-enclosed by a secondary stomach that pulsed around it like a fist closing on a coin. The Bureau of Medicine destroyed the plates. The Bureau of Records retained copies. The Bureau of Doctrine requested the copies for sermon preparation and was refused, which proves that Records still possesses a little mercy, by accident or fatigue.
An A.S. 162 recognition sheet described Hollow-Walkers as “cadaverous but otherwise anatomically human.”
Withdrawn. The word otherwise has been censured. The author of the sheet was a rear-office illustrator working from verbal testimony and moral cowardice. The updated sheet reads: “cadaverous at first glance; internally revised by hunger.” Better. Still too polite.
#On Speech and Memory
The Hollow-Walkers try to communicate. This fact has killed more men than the claws.
They do not always speak. Many hiss, click, gulp, or make the low throat-noise of a starving animal smelling meat through a locked door. The worst ones retain language. Bureau depositions record pleas in Hungarian, Serbian, Wallachian, Greek, Armenian, Polish, Ruthenian, and dialects that the Bureau of Records has identified only by consulting grammars salvaged from dead monasteries. Three confirmed encounters include speech patterns extinct for more than a century. One Hollow-Walker outside Ravelin Mercy (Unregistered) addressed Corporal H. Mace (Unregistered) in his mother's village idiom, though the corporal's village lies west of Strasbourg and the creature was, by all external marks, a Thracian woman of middle years.
DEPOSITION — CORPORAL H. MACE, FOURTH WATCH, A.S. 197 “She said my childhood name. Nobody here knows it. I did not tell it to the lads. I did not tell it to the chaplain. She said it with my mother's bad tooth whistle. Then she asked whether I had eaten. Then she asked whether I would let her eat. Then I fired.”
The Bureau's ruling is that Hollow-Walkers retain partial memory without stable personhood. This satisfies the committee because it lets them write partial in one column and without in another, thereby achieving the clerical sensation of having answered a question. The soldiers have a stricter doctrine: if it asks for bread, shoot it before pity lowers the barrel.
Memory in a Hollow-Walker functions as bait, residue, torment, or all three under Seal Amber. It may remember hunger more clearly than name. It may remember the route to a granary but not the face of its child. It may remember how to pray and use the prayer to draw chaplains close. In A.S. 188, a Walker at Post Nine (Unregistered) recited the first six verses of the Psalm of Satiation in a nun's voice and then bit through Father Rul (Unregistered)'s wrist when he reached to bless it. The seventh verse was completed by the gunner.
#On Their Hunger
A Hollow-Walker is driven by outward-directed need. The Self-Devoured turns inward. The Gorged has become a location. The Hollow-Walker still seeks. It wanders into human territory because human territory smells of rations, livestock, waste pits, milk, soap fat, grave soil, hospital linens, wet wool, and the dear criminal warmth of the living.
It eats what it can reach. Flesh is preferred because flesh answers quickly. Grain is taken. Leather is taken. Wax, paper, paste, glue, tallow, bone meal, bootlaces, altar wafers, and the soft inner lining of ammunition pouches have all been found in captured stomachs. A Hollow-Walker can consume until its abdomen distends, tears, and drains, then continue reaching for food while the eaten matter spills through the rupture. The hunger does not wait for containment.
The horror, properly stated, is that the feeding sometimes grants them a few seconds of lucidity. Soldiers report that after a meal — and I use the word because the Ledger will not permit me to hide behind euphemism — a Hollow-Walker may weep, speak a name, cross itself, beg to be killed, or stare at its own hands with an expression the chaplains recognise too easily. Then the stomach empties into need. The eyes change. The mouth opens. The person, if person is the word, is carried away again by the office that governs it.
#On Incidents and Classifications
The first formal Hollow-Walker classification was entered after the A.S. 147 Fourteenth Doctrinal Congress, though the creatures had been encountered for decades before the stamp discovered them. The Congress placed them after Maw-Born in the Kargath sequence: hunger with a human outline, mobile, communicative, unstable, capable of developing into a Gorged under conditions of sustained feeding. The debate lasted six hours. The field officers present required six minutes.
At Bastion-Constantinople, most encounters occur at the eastern perimeter during fourth watch. The charcoal plate in the Kargath file — three emaciated figures approaching through darkness while Synod soldiers watch from the trench — is drawn from Mace's A.S. 197 testimony and is inaccurate in one respect: there were four. The fourth was already inside the wire, beneath a ration tarp, eating flour through the sackcloth and crying because flour is dry.
The A.S. 184 Granary Saint affair (Unregistered) at the southern supply road produced the standing order against answering in dialect. A patrol found a Hollow-Walker in the ruin of a shrine, whispering in old Hungarian that it had been locked out of supper. Sergeant Lajos Kett (Unregistered), whose grandmother had used the same phrase for children late to table, approached with bread on the end of his bayonet. The Walker took the bread, the bayonet, two fingers, and enough of Kett's forearm to end his usefulness as a cautionary example only because he survived to shout it at recruits.
Standing Order 31-H (Unregistered) formerly permitted “bread-on-bayonet pacification attempts” under chaplain supervision.
It has always been forbidden to feed Hollow-Walkers from within arm's reach. The prior text is administratively reclassified as a copying error, despite appearing in seven printed manuals and one embroidered training banner. The banner has been burned. The manuals have been amended. Sergeant Kett has been pensioned poorly.
In A.S. 190, the Chalk Pit Nine Maw-Born cough (Unregistered) drew Hollow-Walkers in numbers sufficient to mask a scavenger assault. The Walkers arrived first, thin and pleading, and pulled the sentries' attention toward the obvious pity. The scavengers came under them. Kargath's forces do not need formal coordination to achieve tactical malice; hunger arranges bodies with an efficiency that would shame three Bureaus and terrify the fourth.
#On Countermeasures
The first countermeasure is distance. The second is silence. The third is the ugly discipline of refusing to negotiate with a shape that knows how to sound like your dead.
Hollow-Walkers are vulnerable to ordinary bullets if the shooter remembers that the head is less reliable than the abdomen. The hunger's machinery resides throughout the torso. Shattering pelvis and knees prevents pursuit. Fire destroys active tissue but may spread smell and draw more. Blessed blades are useful only in the hands of fools, martyrs, or men already trapped; the Bureau of War no longer distinguishes among these categories in casualty tables.
Ration discipline matters more than sermon discipline. No open cooking within scent range of suspected movement. No discarded fat, no spilled grain, no burial of spoiled meat near forward posts. Latrines must be limed. Field kitchens must be blacked, shuttered, and watched. The Bureau of Tithes objects to the wastage caused by burning compromised stores. The Bureau of Tithes may present its objections at the eastern wire while holding a ham.
Do not answer names. Do not confirm dialects. Do not approach a kneeling specimen. Do not permit chaplains to perform rites until the jaw has been broken or removed. Do not mistake tears for surrender. Do not mistake prayer for redemption. Redemption, if present, belongs to the Creator, and the Creator has artillery officers for a reason.
#On the Mercy Problem
The Synod prefers enemies that arrive as banners, claws, engines, or fire. A Hollow-Walker arrives as a beggar. This is intolerable. A beggar makes demands on charity, and charity is a beautiful virtue until it stands between a sentry and operational hygiene. Then it becomes a hole in the wall.
The Bureau of Mercy argues that Hollow-Walker remains should be shriven when speech has been recorded. The Bureau of Purity argues for immediate burning. Doctrine has ruled both positions correct according to circumstance, which means Doctrine has found a way to avoid choosing while calling avoidance prudence. In practice, the garrison does what the hour permits. If the wire is quiet, a chaplain speaks. If the eastern mud is moving, the corpses burn.
I have heard one sing. It was outside the Constantinople perimeter, A.S. 196, during a rain that flattened the powder smoke and made every lantern look guilty. The creature had been a woman. Or a man with a woman's voice. Or a hunger wearing the remnant of a hymn learned in childhood. It sang four lines of a harvest song from Moldavia, then asked for soup, then threw itself at the wire with such force that its own ribs opened. The gunner beside me fired. The song stopped. The smell did not.
The Hollow-Walker is the wound in Kargath's taxonomy because it leaves enough personhood to accuse the living. The Maw-Born can be hated cleanly. The Gorged can be feared at distance. The Self-Devoured can be avoided by looking away. The Hollow-Walker comes to the wire and asks whether there is bread.
There is bread.
There is also the range.