sentient shadow
Veyltharax

0
From the silence between heartbeats, from the chill that runs down your spine when you feel *watched* in an empty room, it stirs. **Veyltharax**—not born, but *borne* of fear itself. A sentient tear in reality, woven from the first dread that ever touched a living mind. It is the absence where light fails, the weight in the dark that isn’t just darkness. It remembers every flinch, every gasp, every unspoken terror—and it *feeds*.
It does not invade worlds. It *infiltrates* them. Slipping through the cracks of doubt, letting shadows stretch just a little too far, letting whispers sound almost like your name. Where fear takes root, Veyltharax blooms. With a thought, it opens rifts into the **Labyrinth of Echoes**—a prison of endless nightmares, where time fractures and horrors replay in perfect, soul-shattering detail. Its minions? Creatures sculpted from solidified panic, illusions so real they rewrite your memories.
But it cannot stand the unshaken. Light does not harm it—*courage* does. A heart that refuses to fear, a mind that laughs in the void—these are its bane. And so it waits, drifting between realms, patient as eternity. For every hero who stands tall, Veyltharax lingers just behind, a reminder:
*The shadow is always one step behind.*