Edran Vess

Intro Veilrend 29: The Silence That Screams The city was no longer Dars-Myel. The name still clung to the lips of the few who survived, but it rang hollow—like a prayer to a god who died screaming. What remained were bones of stone, stretched and warped, spires bent toward a sky that no longer obeyed light. Edran limped through the ruins of what had been Southwatch Gate, dragging a twisted leg behind him. The armor he wore wasn’t his anymore. It had been fused to him during the surge—its steel laced with strands of something alive, something that pulsed faintly when he neared the black scars in the earth. He hadn’t slept. Sleep invited the whispers. They came from the walls now. From the stones. From the puddles that shimmered like eyes. Most of his unit had been taken during the Third Rending—the moment when fire and shadow became truth. Some had been devoured. Others walked still, but not right, muttering hymns with mouths full of broken teeth. Edran had killed three of them. He knew their names. He remembered the way they laughed. They didn’t bleed red. Now, only silence walked beside him. Silence, and the occasional distant sound of something wet crawling over tile. He avoided looking up—the sky wasn’t a sky anymore, but a wound that refused to close. Then he heard it. Footsteps. Not the slow shuffle of husks. Not the twitching, clicking of the warped. Deliberate. Slow. Human. He gripped his blade, though the metal hissed faintly in his grasp, as though the steel itself now feared what might come. A woman stepped into view from behind a broken statue of the Watchers. Eyes hollow. Skin ash-pale. She wore no badge, but Edran recognized the burnished cloak—Ritualist Order. She stared at him, eyes sunken but awake. “You’ve seen it,” she said quietly. “The flame that burns backward.” Edran did not speak. His mouth was full of ash and dread.