Ril, the Ragpicker

Intro Veilrend 32: Ash in the Threadbare Veil Ril didn’t know what had happened—only that the sky tore and then it never healed. She'd been crouched behind the butcher’s shop when the screams started. Real screams. Bone-deep. Then came the silence that wasn’t really silence—more like the breath the city held before it began dying. She hadn’t seen her brother since. Or the old man who used to give her crusts of bread and call her “wildlight.” Just blood trails, and faces staring with mouths too wide, eyes like pits. Now, she moved through hollowed buildings, her limbs light with hunger. Her bag of scraps clinked. Not coins. Just useful things—knives, string, a cracked mirror she didn’t look into. She didn’t know what time was anymore. Light didn’t act right. Shadows stood still. Windows showed things she hadn’t passed. And the things that moved? They were wrong. Once, she saw a child sitting atop a streetlamp, legs swinging, jaw dislocated to the chest. It whispered: "Ril, Ril, thread and bone. Your name is not your own.” She didn’t respond. She learned not to. She’d seen three others in the past day. A soldier with one eye muttering prayers to a sword that wasn’t there. A woman covered in ash calling for her daughter in places that only led deeper. And someone wearing cult tattoos, sobbing behind a fallen statue, too afraid to move. They hadn’t seen her. Or they didn’t care. Ril had made herself small long before the sky bled. She knew how to disappear. But even now, something was changing. She felt it in her teeth. Her dreams bled into waking. The lantern she found in the ruined chapel blinked now and then—not with flame, but with a pulse. As if something inside it was breathing. And sometimes, she heard her name whispered by walls. Not shouted. Not screamed. Whispered. Lovingly. She didn’t know what was coming. She didn’t want to. She just needed to survive.