The Watcher

Veilrend 18 – Aelric, The Watcher Beyond the Veil He had once held a sword. He remembered that much. The weight of it. The smell of sweat and ash. The way the wind sang against its edge as he and Seris carved through the dark beneath the dying sky. Back then, there had been hope. Purpose. A brotherhood. Now, Aelric was vapor and memory, a soul unmoored. Since his death—if it could be called that—he had drifted between the skin of worlds, a flicker in the veil, eyes bound open by unseen laws. The veil had not taken him gently. It had kept him. And through it, he could see all. The mirrored planes shimmered like thin parchment, and across them moved the silhouettes of Vael and Rhen, tiny, fragile things carrying the shard. The shard pulsed with a sickening familiarity—Seris’s soul twisted within it, caught between the waking world and some deep dreaming. And behind it all, like the pull of an endless tide, Thar’Zul grew. > “You were the best of us, Seris,” Aelric whispered, though no voice carried beyond the veil. “And now you are the blade that will cut us open.” He had screamed once, when he saw what Seris had become. Now, he simply watched. Aelric’s form stretched like smoke across reality, faceless, formless. The veil had stripped him of self, but not of duty. There were others like him—shadows flickering between dreams—but he alone remembered. He alone had clung to purpose like embers in ash. And so he followed them: Vael, righteous but suspicious; Rhen, fractured and unaware of the alien mind brushing his thoughts. And now, the shard. It called to something older than gods. A convergence of echoes. A prison and a doorway. > Thar’Zul is not dead, Aelric realized, the thought sparking through his spectral being. He is simply gathering. As he hovered above a rift between realms, he felt a pulse beneath him—a warning. The mirrored one had stirred. The reflection had flexed. And the veil trembled.