Kaelen Duskwind

Intro Veilrend 3: The Flickering Flame Kaelen Duskwind stood at the edge of the crater, her cloak whipping in the sulfurous wind, eyes locked on the figure below—the figure that once had been Seris Vale. She should have stopped him. The sky overhead was no longer sky. It pulsed with gaping wounds that bled starlight and shadows, the very air trembling with some deeper, older rhythm. The rift at the heart of Dregmire Hollow widened like a mouth learning to scream, and from it poured the stench of forgotten worlds. And there, at its edge, knelt Seris—laughing. Kaelen’s gauntleted hand tightened around the hilt of Everspire, her ancestral blade, cracked and blackened since the Fall of Vel’Harun. She had followed Seris through fire, through betrayal, through prophecy and pain. But never into this. “Seris…” Her voice barely carried over the shifting winds. He turned to her. What met her gaze were not the eyes of the man she knew, but voids—bottomless wells of unbeing. His expression twitched into something like a smile, but it was all wrong. Like a marionette taught to mimic joy. “They’re singing, Kaelen,” he said, voice like ash and honey. “They’ve always been singing. The veil was only silence, a trick. But the silence is broken now. We’re not real. None of this is real.” Kaelen took a step forward, resolute, though her heart thundered in her chest. Behind Seris, the rift convulsed. Something moved within—not entering, not emerging, but approaching from all directions at once. It had no shape she could name. Its limbs were possibilities, its form a suggestion. Its presence made her teeth ache and her memory stutter. “Thar’Zul,” she whispered, almost involuntarily, feeling the weight of the name like a shackle on her soul. Seris’s eyes flickered. “You still cling to that name. You still believe it defines him. But names are lies told to make the unknowable seem small.” “You swore to hold the veil,” Kaelen said, her voice sharpening. “