READ TRUE
THE TRUE ENDING · FINISH THE READING
Hold the circle through all eight stanzas and the last line — one word long —
lands. Every deadite stops mid-step and listens. The ground takes them gently,
folded down like laundry, Quinn last, facing Sam, and for one breath the thing
wearing Quinn is Quinn:
“…thanks.”
Marta walks to the open grave like it's a made bed. The Hollow keeps her — the
thing she asked for, after thirty years of being lent. The stones go dark, spent.
Then birdsong, the first the game has ever played, and the sky's first grey-blue.
The car starts on the first try. “Of course it starts now.”
The score resolves to a major chord here — the only major chord in the entire
soundtrack. The music has been in mourning all night; the dawn is the one thing it
agrees with.
READ TRUE
The Hollow keeps what it borrows · and it was borrowed, every bit of it
The Road
ALTERNATE ENDING I · JUST DRIVE
Once the car can run, the game will let you take it. Forget the stones. Forget
all of it. Just drive.
You get four seconds of taillights and rising music — real escape music, the
only forward motion in the score — and then the screen goes dark between one
heartbeat and the next. Not a crash. A cut. The music stops with it and never
resolves: a low drone, a note rubbing against it a half-step away, one distant
question that hangs twice and is not answered.
The bridge is out. It was out before you arrived. Eleven miles is a long way,
and the Hollow does not let the borrowed leave — and by the time you chose the
road, you had borrowed quite a lot.
DON'T PLAY
THE END OF THE ALTERNATE ENDING I
R — THE NIGHT ISN'T DONE WITH YOU YET
The end card says what it says: press R. The night picks you back up where the
road refused you, everything still in your pockets. The Road is not a fail state —
it is the game letting you test the rule and reporting the result.
The Ending That Was Never Built
DESIGN ARCHIVE
The original plan had a third path: burn Eli's journal in Act III, and the
reading still works — but with the transcription gone, Sam becomes the living
voice the Hollow keeps. A playable dawn as Quinn, walking to the road, under a
grim-grin variant title card. It was never implemented; The Road took its slot as
the shipped alternate. The wiki records it because the repo remembers it, and
because it explains what the journal is for.