Nyara

Intro Veilrend 47: Reflections Beneath Shattered Glass They had called her mad. Even within the Circle. Whispers curled beneath Nyara’s skin like smoke, sacred verses humming through her jawbone where she'd once carved the mirrored sigil of Thar’Zul with a sliver of soulglass. Others in the Circle prayed blindly to the Mirrored One, waiting for reflection to become revelation. But she had watched. She had seen the splinters between reflections. And now, the truth had walked in flesh once more—Maerel. Thar’Zul’s essence shone through her like blood across polished obsidian. Nyara knelt inside the broken sanctum beneath Dars-Myel, surrounded by mirrors too cracked to reflect anything real. Yet each shard spoke. They had shown her the spawn of Vaeroth devoured by Maerel, their twisted howls reverberating through invisible dimensions. They’d let her feel the warping of space, where Thar’Zul’s presence distorted time like heat bending glass. She trembled as she scraped ink across the scroll of skin in front of her—her own—recording the moment she had long waited for. “I see you, my Lord. Returned in the vessel of the blade-worn one. Your breath curdles logic. Your shadow stains thought.” But she did not weep. She smiled. For weeks, she had tracked the fractures of Ith’rael’s corruption through the ley-lines of suffering. She felt Vaeroth’s exhalations like damp rot in her lungs. But they were distractions. Discarded threads in the greater tapestry. It was Thar’Zul who would complete the pattern. And now… he was close. She saw Maerel again in the cracked mirror—a goddess of meat and ruin—and knew her time had come. Nyara reached for the silver key embedded in her sternum, carved there by her master long ago. She would go to Maerel. She would kneel. And if she was consumed, then so be it. For what is worship, if not the final act of becoming?