Veal Alone

Intro Veilrend 37: Vael The Flame Unburied She walked through ash. The city of Dars-Myel was nothing now but a carcass of dreams, torn open and left to rot beneath a sunless sky. Where towers once stretched with arrogance, now only scorched bone and stone stood. The Veil still wept at the corners of reality, leaving everything shrouded in a haze of unreality. Every breath Vael took tasted like dust—of brick, of bodies, of broken faith. But she did not falter. The shard pulsed faintly beneath the wrappings inside her satchel—warm, too warm, like something alive trying to dream. It whispered sometimes, not in words, but in pressure: a longing, a pull. Seris. Or what remained of him. He had fallen, been torn, split and twisted—but something human still clung to the echo inside. Vael held on to that sliver, not for Seris’s sake, but because she had to believe that corruption wasn’t the only end. The survivors had drawn her here. Their voices, desperate and small, like moths drawn to a fire. She had watched them—broken, frightened, half-starved people clawing through rubble for meaning. One a mother. Another a cultist turned ghost. A ragpicker girl with haunted eyes. Too fragile for this world. Too familiar. She had not moved fast enough. She saw the carnage before she heard it—the wet crunch of bodies folding inward. The sky rippled like oil. And there, among the ruin, a horror of sinew and screeching light moved with elegance and contempt. Yharnemul. The beast was playing with them. Mocking them. Killing them not for hunger—but because it could. Vael’s hand found the hilt of her blade. Not for justice. Not for vengeance. For silence. She moved like a storm through fog—strikes guided not by skill, but fury born from too many losses. Yharnemul twisted, shrieked, tried to scatter—but her blade caught its neck, and the world shook. It bled not blood, but memory—visions of things not meant to be remembered.