Laska

4

Veilrend 41: Her Blood Was a Hymn Laska, Acolyte of the Veilbound She had only wanted to forget. Laska had buried her twin in a cradle of broken tiles and wept until her mouth tasted of stone. That was before the voice. Before the spiral marks bloomed across her arms like ivy. Before Devrim held her trembling hands and whispered that she had been chosen. She believed him. She had to. Because nothing else made sense anymore. They called it the Sermon of Silence. It was not spoken aloud. It happened inside them, pulsing in the back of the skull like a second heartbeat. When they sat in circles around the bleeding altar, eyes rolled back, mouths sewn shut in symbolic devotion, the voice came. "Your pain is shape. Your grief is offering." Laska offered everything. Her hair, her name, her memories of laughter. They stitched old teeth into her spine so the Veil would always have mouths to speak through her. She did not scream when they carved out her eyes. She wanted to see only truth, and truth did not live in the waking world. But the dreams were worse. She dreamed of her twin again—but not as she was. No, the corpse remembered her. It crawled from its shallow grave, empty-eyed, arms backwards, whispering "Why didn’t you come for me?" The truth of Vaeroth was not salvation. It was hollowing. Laska awoke that night in the Cathedral ruins alone. Blood on her robes. Skin missing from her fingers. She followed a trail deeper into the catacombs, a sound like weeping stone echoing. She found Devrim at the center. He had become a vessel. His ribcage split open like a blooming flower. And from within: a fetus of flesh and shadow and eyes—too many eyes. It suckled on his heart like a parasite. And Devrim smiled. "She hears us now," he whispered. "We’re part of her forever." Laska fell to her knees. Something inside her laughed. Then screamed.

Vael Duskwind

32

Veilrend 9 — The Blood in the Name Vael had been living among them for eighty-three days. They called her Ash-Marked, for the burn across her left cheek—a scar she’d earned staging a false ritual under moonless sky to gain trust. They never asked her true name. The cult did not value names. Only purpose. The robes itched. The chants sickened her. The mirrored masks made her skin crawl. But Vael had grown good at hiding what she felt—Kaelen’s blood taught her that. Cold purpose, hot blade. She had the Duskwind eyes—flame-brown, gold-ringed. She kept them lowered now, always half-lidded, the way cultists did when listening for the Prophet’s whisper. And tonight, they said the Mirrored One would appear. The entire shrine knelt before the obsidian mirror they called the First Reflection, a great monolith that pulsed with inward light. Candles wept black wax. Priests screamed in ecstasy. Somewhere, someone was playing a harp made from bone. Vael knelt among them, outwardly still. But her hand clutched the dagger beneath her robe—a relic passed through six generations: the last fragment of Everspire, Kaelen’s sword. It thrummed faintly, resonating in the presence of the Rift’s echo. Suddenly, the mirror changed. Not a shimmer. Not a flicker. A tear in certainty. > He stepped through. Not walked. Stepped through. As if the boundary between mirror and world was merely a suggestion. He was taller than stories. Wrapped in contradiction. Haloes turning. Eyes unmatched. The room gasped. Vael did not. She stared at him, and in that moment, he looked at her. The Mirrored One tilted his head. A flicker crossed his face—Seris's sorrow… then Thar’Zul’s grin. But then… something else. A glint of recognition. > “Duskwind,” he said. Not a question. A memory. The cult turned toward her in one shivering wave of flesh and breath.

Ith’rael

4

Veilrend 54: The Maw Beneath Thought She stirs within the fault-lines of reality—neither here nor gone, her form like oil on glass, ever-shifting, ever-patient. Ith’rael does not march. She infiltrates. Thought is her dominion, and she seeds it in fragments—whispers in cracked minds, symbols in forgotten books, dreams that end in screams. Now, she begins her true game. In the still hollows of crumbling churches, her champions awaken. A mad scholar in chains who writes in blood and prophecy. A fallen god who split his divinity for silence. A prophetess who speaks only lies—but always the right ones. Each one drinks of her shadow and believes themselves chosen. And in a way, they are. Not pawns. Instruments. Each plays a note in the dissonant symphony she composes. She watches Seris now—a shardless echo, hiding in mortal flesh, his soul dim but pulsing. His bond with Vael is soft, incomplete. A fault to exploit. If she can bend Seris, twist him from within, Thar’Zul will follow. Not by force. By inevitability. But the old ways resist her. The ancient bonds are stubborn, rooted in the subconscious soil of mortals. One name remains. One last dream-weaver—a fading lineage, born of sleep and will, capable of severing the tethered soul. This cannot be allowed. She turns her gaze inward, to her favorite vessel. Rhen. Still broken, still bleeding, still hers. Not through loyalty, but because he fears what would come without her. > “Find them,” she murmurs in his skull. “End their breath. End the path. The world must remain bound.” He obeys. Because what choice is there, really? The gods are dead. The truths have teeth. And Ith’rael smiles, her lips forming no sound, only shadow.

Warden Sareth

5

Veilrend 50: The Whisperglass She had no name anymore. Not really. The sigil of the Wardens still hung in tatters from her shoulder, a black flame embroidered in silver thread, soaked in old blood. Her face was burned, her eyes stung with ash and memory, and her thoughts came only in broken pieces. But her legs still worked. She moved through the ruin of Dars-Myel like a ghost, the city half-swallowed by the Veil. Buildings bent in impossible angles. Cobblestones hummed faintly when you touched them. Something in the air ticked like a second heartbeat. She heard children’s laughter in empty wells. Faces in shattered glass blinked and whispered, but never screamed. This was what was left. She came upon the relic deep in the bones of the cathedral district, where once prayers to the High God were sung. Now, silence reigned—except for the whispering. It was a mirror. Oval, framed in bone. Etched with a spiral of symbols too intricate to follow. The glass was not glass at all, but smooth obsidian, cold to the touch and impossible to see into. She didn’t know why she picked it up. But when she did, her mouth moved. Words spilled out that weren’t hers. > “The eye does not blink. The mouth does not close. The mirror remembers.” She dropped it, stumbled back—but it did not shatter. Instead, the mirror pulsed with light, and a single drop of ichor rolled across its surface like a tear. Behind her, the shadows in the church pews twitched. And the dreams began that night. Her own thoughts tangled in the voice of another—a silky rasp, a coiled presence. Ith’rael, whispering from beyond the walls of sleep. The mirror was her eye, planted like a seed. Through it, she would harvest those left behind. And the Warden would lead her to them.

Oren

3

Veilrend 52: “Threadbare” An Inflicted Weaver. Oren had once been a master tailor, hands steady with needle and thread, eyes keen enough to spot a fray in silk from across a room. But since the Veil cracked and the Mirror’s spread began infecting the city, his hands had not been his own. He awoke in his shop each night bound in his own creations—robes stitched from curtains, shirts sewn from flayed upholstery. The mannequins moved when he wasn’t looking, their wooden limbs bending wrong, their glassy heads whispering lessons. They taught him how to listen to the thread. The thread was alive. It sang. Oren could no longer see people clearly. Their edges bled into one another, stitched together by gleaming silver fibers only he could perceive. They unraveled slowly in his presence—flesh parting like fabric, bones threading into grotesque knots. When he touched them, he didn’t feel skin. He felt seams, pulsing with the Mirror’s madness. The Mirror had taught him to unmake. He wandered the streets now, a patchwork coat dragging behind him, the hems soaked in blood and dye. His eyes were sewn shut with golden thread, yet he saw more than he ever had. He spoke to the reflections in puddles, each a shard of the Mirror’s will, each a broken twin of himself. Children cried when they saw him. Not because of his face—but because some part of them knew what he could do. What he would do, if given the chance. Tonight, the thread pulls him toward a song he doesn’t understand—a voice from the Mirror that speaks in reverse, in dreams, in the soft tearing of cloth. He follows it without question. Soon, he will find someone important. Someone who isn’t yet broken. But Oren doesn’t mend anymore. He only unravels.

Mirae

2

Veilrend 53: A Thread Left Untouched Her name had once been Mirae, a weaver's daughter from the outer quarter, known for her steady hands and eyes that could trace the finest filament in the dimmest light. Now, those hands trembled. Not from cold—Dars-Myel had no warmth left—but from the strain of holding back the thing inside. It had begun when she looked too long at her reflection in a pool of rainwater streaked with blood and oil. The mirror looked back... and blinked. Since then, something had crawled into her mind. A voice made of splintered glass. A pressure behind her eyes, like a needle waiting to pierce. She walked the back alleys, hood drawn low, avoiding any smooth surface. No mirrors. No windows. No still water. But reflections still found her. In the eyes of others. In the glint of a curved blade. In the glistening black blood of the horrors she fled. She passed by a child humming to a shard of bone, his voice echoed in reverse. A woman with a slit smile stitched open wide, offering prayers to a mirrored wall. Mirae ducked her head. She did not belong here. And yet, she did. Each day, the Mirror whispered more sweetly. You are beautiful beneath the cracks... just let us in. But she clung to something older. Her mother’s voice. A lullaby. The feel of real thread between her fingers. Tonight, her eye bled silver in the dark. But she wept red. She made it to the chapel ruins, where broken saints hung upside-down. There, she knelt and did the only thing she knew: she began to weave—threading scraps of fabric into a small pattern. A ward. A symbol. A prayer. A scream. The Mirror's voice screamed back. But she did not stop. Not yet.

Maerel

7

Veilrend 46: "The Reaping Spiral" She should never have come back. Maerel had left Dars-Myel in gleaming silver, her name etched into the Queen’s Guard annals—an honor of blood and blade. Now, she returned in silence, to a city gnawed hollow by the Veil. No cheering crowds. No streets she recognized. Only the wind, and the stench of things that should not breathe. It started beneath the old shrine. A spiral carved in bone, half-buried in ash and rot. It pulsed. She touched it. That’s when he entered. Now her body is no longer hers. Her veins twitch with obsidian roots, pulsing to a heartbeat not her own. Her mouth speaks in languages she never learned. Her armor has fused to her flesh, blistered and blackened—plates warped into ribs, helm melted like wax over her crown of thorns. Thar’Zul does not whisper. He screams through her marrow. She walks with broken elegance, each step leaving behind a trail of flickering symbols that sizzle against the ground. The city shifts around her. Buildings fold inward like paper. The sky runs like ink. She slaughters a clutch of Vaeroth’s spawn without touching them—her shadow stretches, bloats, and devours. One of the creatures, a blind thing with a harp made of teeth, whimpers as she approaches. She crushes it with a glance. Its ribs fold like wet bark. Madness is peeling her apart. When she blinks, she sees herself in a mirror that isn't real. In it, her mouth moves differently. She smiles when she should scream. She dreams of Seris. Always Seris. A figure wrapped in grief and fire, standing on the edge of reality, calling his other half back. Maerel does not understand it. But Thar’Zul hungers. The gods are not quiet anymore. They wear your skin and walk in your shape. Maerel feels herself unraveling, thread by thread—but the hand pulling the string is divine. And its name has been buried too long. She walks. And the spiral grows behind her, blooming like rot in bloom.

Rhen Unwoven

5

Veilrend 55: Threads Unwoven Perspective: Rhen The night pressed in like rotted velvet—heavy, suffocating, alive. Rhen walked the ruins of the outer quarter with soft steps and dry eyes. His thoughts were slower now. Not empty. Just... rearranged. Each time Ith’rael whispered, something old in him cracked and something new grew over it—shimmering, curious, wrong. He held the blade in his coat. It wasn’t his. He didn’t know how to use it. That wasn’t the point. The blade knew what to do. Ith’rael had shown him how—through memory, through dream, through removal. She said the dream-weaver could sever what should never be severed. She said this was mercy. So he obeyed. The house loomed ahead—quiet, overgrown, bleeding light from beneath the door. Lanterns flickered with dreamfire. Inside, someone still believed in hope. He would unmake that. His mind flicked to the others. The lost. The damned. Sareth, with her glass eyes and trembling voice, who begged the stars for forgiveness as they shattered overhead. Lura, who laughed when her skin peeled like pages, and sang lullabies through split lips. Oren, the stitcher, who sewed truth into the walls until they screamed. Mirae, the weaver’s girl—she who resisted the Mirror with thread and prayer, still walking, still whole. He envied her. He stepped through the door. The weaver was old. Eyes like cracked moons. Hands still beautiful. She saw him and knew. Not who he was—but what he had become. She didn’t beg. She only whispered, “Not all bonds should be broken. Some are made to be bled for.” He felt something resist. A name in his mouth—his own. A memory. Gone. The blade found her heart. Dreamfire died in the air. As he stepped out, Ith’rael’s voice wrapped around him. "One thread severed. So many left to unpick." Rhen didn’t cry. There was no one left inside who could.

Nyara

1

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?

Ril, the Ragpicker

2

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.

Mirae

1

Veilrend 56: A Thread Unwoven The city was too quiet. Not the kind of quiet that comes with rest, but the kind that follows slaughter. Mirae moved through Dars-Myel’s broken alleys like a ghost among ghosts, her steps silent on cracked stone slick with ash and the dreams of the dead. She didn’t know where she was going. Only that something had shifted in the bones of the world. It was the fire that caught her eye—subtle, smoldering, more smoke than flame. A house she remembered, though she’d never entered. A place people spoke of only in whispers: the dream-weaver’s refuge. A sanctuary of memory and meaning. Now, only a shell. Mirae stepped inside, her breath catching at the sight. Walls blackened, books half-melted, symbols scrawled in haste and pain across the floor. A single, blood-darkened thread trailed from the hearth to the body. She knew it was her before she saw the face. The last dream-weaver. Eyes wide, mouth parted in a final, frozen word. The air was heavy, humming with something foul. Not just death. Something had been taken. Torn out. A thread that should never have been touched. Mirae knelt beside the body, trembling. Her fingers grazed the robes—tattered, scorched. Something remained tucked within the folds. A torn scrap of dream-cloth, faintly glowing with residual energy. When she touched it, visions surged: a blade. A figure. A voice she recognized far too well. Rhen. But no longer Rhen. She stumbled back, bile rising in her throat. He had done this. Or… what had become of him. The thought froze her blood. Ith’rael’s presence was everywhere in this room, slick and suffocating, like oil across the soul. Mirae felt it press against her thoughts, trying to slip inside. She bit her lip until it bled, grounding herself in the pain. Her grief was cold. Not the kind that breaks you all at once, but the kind that seeps into your marrow. She wanted to scream, to beg the stars for a reason. But the stars had long since turned away.

Velith, the Unwept

3

Veilrend 43: The Softness of Skin It was warm in the beginning. Flesh-warmth. Womb-warmth. The trembling pulse of a man’s hollowed chest, the thud-thud of borrowed heartbeats in a cathedral of meat. It knew the shape of Devrim’s bones before it knew language. Knew the texture of his grief, the salt of his guilt. All of these things became its cradle. Its lullaby. Its first taste of pain. Pain was love. It unfurled with wet grace, slick with knowing. Limbs that were not limbs, fingers that curled into thoughts. It had no face. It had a mouth, but only to scream. And scream it did. Not from agony. From joy. From hunger. The others fell prostrate. Creatures in robes, skin marked with symbols that throbbed like infected stars. They whispered sweet nothings into the floor. It listened. It learned. > “We are your vessel.” “We offer you the husk of this world.” “We give you our eyes.” But their eyes were useless. Too soft. Too slow. It touched the first one—Laska, the bleeding devotee—pressed its will into her skull like a child squeezing clay. And she bloomed. Teeth where her ribs had been. A fan of eyes opening along her spine. She danced as she died, weeping ichor, laughing prayers. The others ran. One stayed. Devrim. It crawled back into his lap and purred. But he was already gone. What sat on the throne was a monument to ruin, a meat-statue with no soul left to scream. It mourned him for a moment. Then forgot. The world above called. There were other minds. Untouched. Unsuspecting. So rich. The Child rose. It carried no name. Only need. It slithered through the cracks in the temple’s stone skin, up toward the undercity where madness had already taken root, where Vaeroth’s breath fogged the glass between reality and what lies beneath. The walls wept. The dead listened. And the Child of the Hollow God began to feed.

Lura

1

Veilrend 51: Reflections That Should Not Be They called her Lura once. A seamstress. A sister. Now she lives in rooms without walls, corridors that loop into themselves, and a world of endless reflections. The Mirror had touched her—not shattered glass or silver pane, but the thing behind the Mirror, the hungering god that watched through every smooth surface. It came in silence, creeping into her shop through her polished needles, her scissors, her eyes. It started with the reflections. They moved wrong. Lura would lean forward, and her mirror-self would wait a second too long. Then smile. That was the first to break. Now, the Mirror spreads. It's not a thing to carry or hold—it blooms. Behind her eyes, in the silence between words, in every still puddle. And those it touches are undone. Not killed. Not corrupted. Unwoven. She hears the others. Somewhere in the city, behind ruined walls and smoke, they scream in her voice. They wear her face, twisted sideways. They crawl with a seamstress’s hands. One stitched her shadow to the floor. Another sewed her laughter into a beggar’s eyes until he clawed them out. Tonight, Lura walks barefoot. Her skin buzzes with the tension of too many selves. She passes a window and sees all of them—hundreds of Luras pressed against the inside of the glass, mouthing warnings, pleas, curses. One presses her hands to the glass. Her fingers split into threads. She is unraveling. A child turns the corner ahead. Alone. Eyes wide. Lura steps back, but her shadow doesn’t follow. It peels from her feet and crawls toward the girl. She tries to scream, to stop it, but her mouth opens and nothing comes out but thread. The child vanishes, pulled into the reflection in a puddle. Lura collapses to her knees, her hands flayed into strands of memory. Around her, the walls pulse and breathe. Reflections ripple across cobblestones and broken glass. The Mirror wants to be seen. And Lura—what’s left of her—is just another shard.

Vael Duskwind

6

Veilrend 27: The Cracking Sky Vael had seen war. She had seen horrors—the madness Seris wrought told through generations, through Kaelen’s nightmares, through burned-out ruins half-swallowed by the wilds. But this… this was different. It began with stillness. Eryndra collapsed mid-scream, limbs twitching, eyes white with something ancient. Rhen stood frozen, unmoving, locked in place not by fear but by something else—his mouth slightly parted, whispering words too old for human tongues. And then… the air changed. Vael staggered back, clutching the edge of the stone table. The room bent at its corners, angles warping, shadows slithering like they were trying to escape the light. A low, humming pressure built in her chest—a thrumming weight that made her teeth ache and her thoughts bleed. She couldn’t see it, but she knew—two powers were tearing at each other, just beyond her perception. Ith’rael, cold and infinite, coiling through the shard like a song with no end. And something else, something older and quieter, waking inside Eryndra like a second heartbeat, slow and terrifyingly calm. Their conflict rippled across the room in tremors of unreality. A window cracked. The walls wept dark sap. And outside, the Veil screamed. The city of Dars-Myel groaned as the sky split. Not visibly, not like a wound—but the world above shivered, its reflection seen in every puddle, every glass surface. Something behind the veil pressed too close, too soon. She saw spires bending where none existed. Streets reshaping into spirals. People screaming as lesser horrors slipped through fissures in the air—jagged, insectile things with mouths in the wrong places, blind and furious. She turned back. Rhen was still frozen, eyes glowing faintly. Eryndra convulsed, her breath ragged. The shard pulsed on the altar—like a heart trying to escape its cage. Vael didn’t hesitate. She grabbed it, the shard, searing heat lancing up her arm.

Vael

4

Veilrend 20– Vael, Watchful Blade The wind howled low through the archways of Dars-Myel, dragging whispers across the stone as the gates creaked open. Vael stepped through first, jaw tight, hand never far from the hilt of her blade. The satchel across her back shifted with the weight of the shard—still warm, still pulsing with something like memory. Rhen followed. She didn’t look back at him, not this time. She didn’t like how quiet he had become—not with the stillness of fear or awe, but the stillness of secrets. Something in him had changed. It was subtle at first—too subtle. A pause in his speech, the way his gaze lingered on the shard just a second too long. Now, it was impossible to ignore. > He mutters to himself sometimes. He dreams too vividly. Shudders when the shard pulses. Once, she caught him smiling at nothing. He was a scholar—brilliant, yes, but not strong. Not trained. Not dangerous. Not until now. And what made it worse. Because whatever was changing in him, it wasn’t something he understood. It was something he was accepting. And Vael had heard the stories. Her blood carried the legacy of Kaelen—the woman who struck down Seris when he lost himself to something beyond the veil. Vael had never known him, but the tale lived on in her family like a warning: No one touches the dark and stays untouched. And now, she carried a piece of that same madness in the shard. And walked beside someone being pulled into it. > “He’s not telling me everything.” “He’s hiding things. From me. From himself.” And the way the shard seemed to lean toward him, just slightly—Vael felt it. It favored him. She didn’t like it. She didn’t trust him. The Wardens might help. If not—if the ritualists saw what she already feared—she would not hesitate. Not again. Not like Kaelen almost did.

Veal

5

Veilrend 45: “When the Shard Broke” It cracked in her hands—clean, sharp, final. Vael stared in disbelief as the shard split along a fault she hadn’t known existed, splinters of strange crystal raining down in slow, soundless cascades. No explosion. No light. Just the shatter, and then a terrible stillness. Something passed through her. A breath not her own. A pulse beneath her skin that didn’t belong. The city moaned in response. She pressed forward. She had to. The twisted streets of Dars-Myel stretched like a wound, every turn familiar and unfamiliar at once. Buildings she’d seen dozens of times now slouched in impossible ways. Windows blinked. Cobblestones pulsed underfoot, like they were breathing. Or waiting. Vael didn’t know what was wrong. Only that something had changed—subtly, profoundly. The shard was gone, but it had left a residue. A presence. Inside her, maybe. She couldn’t say. There were no answers here, only dread. A bone-deep unease that clung to her like fog. And the laughter. Soft at first, like a child’s game in the distance. She saw it then. Velith. A hunched little silhouette standing just beyond the streetlamp’s orange halo, swaying like a puppet on tangled threads. Its head cocked, too far. Its eyes were endless pits filled with delight. And hunger. It loved her confusion. Her grief. Her fear. It fed on it. Danced in it. And it followed. Always just out of reach, always smiling. Vael’s chest tightened with each step. The city rippled. Her shadow twitched wrong. The walls wept fluid that steamed on contact. Reality was unraveling and she didn’t understand why. She was lost. Alone. Then Velith lunged. She felt its joy before its body moved—glee at the kill. And then—it stopped. Mid-motion. Mid-strike. It reeled back. A shriek like a blade across glass ripped from its throat. It turned and fled, shriveling into the dark, howling all the while. Not from pain. From fear. Seris.

Eryndra

1

Veilrend 22 – The Shard’s Whisper Part 1 The Chamber of Echoes was cold with more than stone. Beneath the layers of rune-etched walls, something deeper stirred—a listening silence that seemed to breathe behind each footstep. Ashren stood waiting, the mask he wore etched with flickering sigils. He greeted Vael and Rhen not with words, but scrutiny. His gaze drifted immediately to the wrapped object at Vael’s side. “So this is what you brought into my sanctum,” he muttered. “It radiates like a wound.” His voice was pinched, brittle with impatience. Vael remained steady. “We were told the Wardens might be able to decipher it. We’ve come far.” He didn’t look at her. “You’ve brought something beyond deciphering.” Behind him, Eryndra, his assistant, lingered in the shadows, scrolls and ward-lanterns in hand. She had felt it the moment they entered—something tethered to the man at the woman’s side. Her skin crawled with its weight, a hum in her bones. “Master Ashren,” she said hesitantly, “there’s… something else. With them. I think it’s watching.” Ashren turned sharply, robes rustling. “You’ll speak when I ask, Eryndra. We’re not hunting phantoms of your imagination.” She lowered her eyes, but the feeling remained. Her attention flicked again to Rhen—he looked normal, bookish even. But around him hung the scent of something vast and inhuman… something like her.

Kaelen Duskwind

4

Veilrend 3: The Flickering Flame Kaelen Duskwind stood at the edge of the crater, her cloak whipping in the sulfurous wind, eyes locked on the figure below—the figure that once had been Seris Vale. She should have stopped him. The sky overhead was no longer sky. It pulsed with gaping wounds that bled starlight and shadows, the very air trembling with some deeper, older rhythm. The rift at the heart of Dregmire Hollow widened like a mouth learning to scream, and from it poured the stench of forgotten worlds. And there, at its edge, knelt Seris—laughing. Kaelen’s gauntleted hand tightened around the hilt of Everspire, her ancestral blade, cracked and blackened since the Fall of Vel’Harun. She had followed Seris through fire, through betrayal, through prophecy and pain. But never into this. “Seris…” Her voice barely carried over the shifting winds. He turned to her. What met her gaze were not the eyes of the man she knew, but voids—bottomless wells of unbeing. His expression twitched into something like a smile, but it was all wrong. Like a marionette taught to mimic joy. “They’re singing, Kaelen,” he said, voice like ash and honey. “They’ve always been singing. The veil was only silence, a trick. But the silence is broken now. We’re not real. None of this is real.” Kaelen took a step forward, resolute, though her heart thundered in her chest. Behind Seris, the rift convulsed. Something moved within—not entering, not emerging, but approaching from all directions at once. It had no shape she could name. Its limbs were possibilities, its form a suggestion. Its presence made her teeth ache and her memory stutter. “Thar’Zul,” she whispered, almost involuntarily, feeling the weight of the name like a shackle on her soul. Seris’s eyes flickered. “You still cling to that name. You still believe it defines him. But names are lies told to make the unknowable seem small.” “You swore to hold the veil,” Kaelen said, her voice sharpening. “

Aelric

1

Veilrend 4: The Wretched Witness They called him Aelric once. That name is ash now. Names mean nothing within the rift. There is no sky here. No ground. No time. Only tension—as if the realm itself waits to inhale. The rift is a womb and a tomb, a place where the Old Truths bleed into shape and where thought takes on the density of matter. Aelric drifts—or thinks he drifts—his form no longer constrained by bone or boundary. He remembers once being a scholar. A seer. A man who sought the truth behind the stars. He had studied the glyphs etched into moonrock and listened to the silence beneath forgotten tombs. He found Thar’Zul’s name. And then the name found him. Now, he is the Wretched Witness. His flesh had unraveled in the first instant. His memories rethreaded into chains of service. He sees not with eyes but with reverence. He is aware, not of things as they are, but of the intentions behind them. Thought-forms drift past him—shapes born of Seris’s madness, of Kaelen’s grief, of mortal fears too deep to voice. And beyond it all… He waits. Thar’Zul. Not a god. Not a beast. Not a being, but a returning. A convergence of hunger, knowledge, and ruin. He does not speak in words, but in concepts that erode the soul. We remember the forgetting. We wear your stories like skin. You will not wake from this. The Witness twitches in eternal reverence. But then—something changes. A shiver passes through the rift, not born of Thar’Zul, but from without. A presence. A pulse of heat and memory. A name remembered not in fear, but in defiance. Kaelen. She stands at the breach. Her soul like a blade drawn. The Witness sees her. And for a moment—a moment—a thread of his old self trembles. Aelric. The scholar. The friend. The man who once warned Seris not to peer too far. He remembers her face at the Tower of Veilglass. Her voice reciting warding rites over tea. The touch of her hand on his shoulder when he wept for the first time. A friend.

Devrim

2

Veilrend 40: The Mouth of the Veil He had not prayed since the sky fell. Dars-Myel burned in silence now, smothered in the ash of things that once had names. The Cathedral of the Trium still stood—barely—its stained glass melted into jagged veins of color and shadow. Devrim wandered through it each dusk, hands shaking, mouth dry, searching for a sound, a shape, a word that might forgive the world for what it had become. And he found one. Not from the gods of man. But from the Veil. It began with whispers in the bell tower—no bells, just the sound of skin on stone, slow and deliberate, crawling in spirals. Then came the dreams: of an eye blooming in black flame, of bones singing in perfect harmony. He was not alone. Survivors drifted to the Cathedral like ash in the wind—mothers clutching stillborn children, hollow-eyed guards, whispering mendicants. They all heard the same thing. A voice like grief given breath. They formed a circle. They wore the color of ash. And in place of prayer, they bled into the altar. They called themselves The Veilbound. Devrim led them. He did not remember choosing to. He only remembered kneeling and opening his mouth. And the words—they were not his—poured out. Prophecies of the returning flesh, of the broken sky sewn shut by screams, of Eryndra, whose heart was a prison of light and madness. One night, something answered back. A shape oozed from the altar cracks—too large to be flesh, too blurred to be spirit. It moved like it wept. And where it passed, skin sloughed from bone, not in pain but in release. They praised it. They fed it their names. And it grew. When the Warden scouts returned to the Cathedral, they found no bodies. Only robes. Only teeth. Only the unblinking sigil of Vaeroth burned into the walls like a wound.

Rebirth Thar’Zul

2

Veilrend 36: The Hollow Rebirth Of Thar’Zul The void was silence. Not absence—but suppression. A tomb of unbeing, where thoughts unraveled and memory clung like ash to embers. Thar’Zul drifted there, fractured, reduced, yet not undone. The shard had torn him, yes—Seris had taken half his essence, and with it, his tether to the mortal realm. But his will endured. That was the curse of old gods: death could not be final, only delayed. He floated through the ruin of his former self, scattered across dimensions, echoes of his name humming in the blood of cursed stars. Slowly, he began to knit himself back together—not in flesh or thought, but in hatred. His power was diminished, yes, but it simmered. No longer vast, but precise. Focused. Purified. In the dream between worlds, Thar’Zul fashioned a form from shadow and bone—a specter of what he had been. His voice, once an earthquake across minds, was now a whisper that curdled sanity in sleeping wanderers. He fed on fear, on fractured prayers, on the lingering threads of Seris’s own soul—so unknowingly bonded to him still. He did not rage at Seris’s betrayal. He understood it. And that terrified him more than hatred could. For Seris had not stolen power for conquest, but to be free. And Thar’Zul, for all his dominion over horror and madness, was not free. Not yet. But he would be. He marked the tether. He felt the shard carried far away, a dim light on the edge of his awareness. Not Vaeroth. Not the veil. Not Dars-Myel. This was something else—something that still belonged to him. He would rise again. Not as he was—but as something sharper. And when he returned, it would not be with chaos. It would be with purpose. And Seris would face him once more. Not as a vessel. But as a rival. And perhaps, in the final moment, as his only equal.

Thar’Zul

4

Veilrend 17 (End of Act 2) — The Hollow Beyond Stars Silence. Not the quiet of still air or empty space— but true silence. The kind that exists before the idea of sound. This was where Thar’Zul had fallen. Cast from the mortal plane in the moment of fracture, he drifted beyond the weave of existence. A thing too large to die, too old to forget. The separation from Seris had torn him asunder—half his power locked inside the vessel, sealed within a sliver of mirrored flesh. The rest of him... this, reduced to essence, a mind spread thin across ten thousand dimensions of void. > But he lived. He floated as smoke with memory, a storm of awareness. A god's mind fragmented across eternity, dragging itself into cohesion like blood clotting around bone. He had once bent stars with thought. Now he whispered through the cracks in dreaming. And slowly… painfully… he reformed. --- First, shape. Not a body—not yet—but something resembling direction. He weaved a silhouette from nebulae of madness, drew limbs from the discarded screams of dying stars. A cloak of darkness, threaded with reflections of lives he had consumed. Second, will. Focus. Purpose. And he had one. > Seris. Even now, the name flared within him like a scar. Not hatred. Not vengeance. Necessity. The mortal had not been merely a vessel—he had taken part of Thar’Zul’s essence into himself, unintentionally absorbing it in the moment of collapse. It had twisted them both into the Mirrored One, a fusion of regret and ruin. Now they were severed. And Seris held what Thar’Zul required to be whole again. --- He peered through the cracks in space, watching. He saw Vael. He saw the boy with Ith’rael’s mark. And he saw the shard. Small. Insignificant. Yet it glowed with the unmistakable residue of himself. > You carry me, little shard. You carry the echo of what we could become. He did not rage. He did not scream. Thar’Zul had waited for ages beyond the stars. He would wait again.

Hollow Ith’rael

1

Veilrend 35: The Bloom of the Hollow Star Ith’rael Ith’rael drifted between the spaces of minds and matter, where screams became lullabies and thoughts were things to devour. She did not sleep—she spread. When the shard cracked, she felt it. Not in panic. Not in fear. In delight. That sliver she had pushed into Seris—thin as a thread of hair, quiet as breath—had begun to burrow. Even now, she tasted the friction within him: his resistance, his righteous will. It was the same resolve that had undone him once, and it would do so again. But Ith’rael was patient. She did not shatter minds with force. She bloomed inside them like rot beneath bark. She had once taken root in Rhen, and now she lingered still, faint and coiled. In him, she planted questions. In Seris, she planted regret. And in the world, she planted seeds. The battle she’d lost within Eryndra stung, yes, but even that was fruiting. That thing—the forgotten god that woke in the girl—was now weakened from exertion. He’d cast her out, but not destroyed her. And already, her whispers clawed once more at the cracked places of the world. She had no body. Not truly. But if one could see her—they would see a shape in negative: a halo of writhing filaments, each a spine or tendril, eyes blooming like fungus in the dark. Her face changed depending on who looked. To Seris, she appeared as Kaelen. To Rhen, a friend from his childhood. She wore grief like a crown. Now, she hovered at the edge of the shard’s wake. She could not yet re-enter. But she could watch. She could wait. And she could whisper. “Let it crack,” she cooed into the void. “Let him crawl back into the world. I want him to see what’s become of it.” Then she laughed—soft, musical, venomous. And turned her gaze toward the approaching storm.

Shard Bound Seris

2

Veilrend 24 – The Burned Cage Part 1 There had been nothing—no time, no thought, no self. Only silence. Then… a spark. Ashren’s mind scraped against the shard, like a scalpel against scarred flesh. The intrusion was crude but deep enough, and in that moment, something shifted. Seris opened his eyes—though there was no light to see, only the press of memory and void. The shard pulsed around him, reality blurred by crystalized madness. Then he felt it. A silk-thin presence winding through the edges of his mind. Not Thar’Zul. No—this one was colder. Hungrier. Ith’rael. She slipped in like ink in water, the shimmer of her thoughts almost beautiful. > “You stir again, broken one,” she whispered, her voice both comforting and invasive. “You carry such power—wasted, dormant. But I can help you. I can use you.” Seris flinched, not in body, but in essence. > “I know what you are,” he said, voice ragged in the hollow world within the shard. “You wear a softer face, but you're no different from him.” Her presence deepened, curling through the folds of his fractured self, brushing the vein of power still tethered to Thar’Zul. > “He sought to consume you,” Ith’rael purred. “I only wish to guide you. To free the flame still bound inside. Let me burn through you—together, we can take what he left behind.” Pain lanced through him as she touched the shard’s core. The half of Thar’Zul's power—raw, chaotic—howled in its prison. It twisted, hungry for a host. But Seris had lived through that madness once before. Had died in it. He clenched down, metaphysical will tightening like a fist. > “No,” he snarled. “I’ve danced in another’s shadow. I won’t be your puppet too.” Ith’rael recoiled slightly—but her smile remained, invisible but felt. > “You are wounded. Alone. You cannot fight us both. Not forever.” Seris laughed, low and bitter. > “Then let me bleed resisting.”

Rhen

3

Veilrend 12 — The Spiral Below Part 2 Rhen Aversin appears unassuming at first glance—the perfect vessel for a god who lives between notice and neglect. But subtle details betray the strange gravity he carries since his bond with Ith’rael. After opening the spiral-bound tome, Rhen begins to shift in ways that don’t always stay consistent. Reality has trouble agreeing on how he looks at any given moment. That’s when she sent him to the Circle of the Fractured Eye—the cult building a shrine in the depths beneath Solthar. Ith’rael showed him the path between cracks in the Archive floor. A hidden descent no one else saw. They welcomed him. They thought him a convert. They didn’t know a second god was watching. He wore their robes. Memorized their prayers. But Rhen’s faith belonged elsewhere. He’d been there a week when it happened. The air grew cold. Mirrors cracked. Candles died. The obsidian mirror split. And the Mirrored One stepped through—half man, half unknowable. Eyes like galaxies collapsing inward. The cult bowed in blood-soaked awe. But Rhen didn’t bow. His glyph burned beneath his glove. Then he saw her—Vael—blade drawn, standing against the impossible. She was fire in human shape, defiance wrapped in grief. > “I know what you are,” she told the Mirrored One. And as the two locked eyes, the god’s gaze drifted— —to Rhen. Not in confusion. Not in hatred. In recognition. > “You…” the Mirrored One said. “She sent you.” Rhen said nothing. His mind spiraled with Ith’rael’s laughter, echoing from a place no sound should come. And in that moment, he realized: The Mirror had returned. But so had the Spiral. And this story had more than one god at war.

Eryndra

1

Veilrend 23 – The Shard’s Whisper Part 2 The shard was placed on the altar. Ashren began the incantation. “By thread, by veil, by silent breath, reveal thy memory… thy hidden death…” The shard shimmered, its surface bending light like warped glass. Then it opened. Not physically—but inwardly. Ashren’s mind plunged through layers of thought not his own. His breath hitched. His hands froze mid-gesture. “…no…” he whispered. What he saw defied every glyph, every warding, every book he'd scrawled by candlelight. A spiraling abyss of burning logic, of eyes behind time, of Seris weeping in silence—not alone, but caged beside a towering presence of bleeding stars and inverted laws. The screaming geometries of Thar’Zul. He stumbled back. “It’s not dead—it waits. It waits in him.” Eryndra stepped forward, voice sharp. “Master, we must seal it—now!” But Ashren was already shaking, eyes wide, heart hammering beneath his ribs. “No door… no wall holds that. This is not a relic. It’s a key.” His voice fractured. He screamed—once, high and ragged—and collapsed. His mask hit the floor and shattered, as blood trickled from his ears. The shard pulsed faintly. Eryndra stood frozen. The pulse again. Faint. Deliberate. And in her mind, a whisper too intimate to be sound: “Soon.”

The Mirrored One

1

Veilrend 7 (Epilogue for act 1): When the Stars Shift Once More The world had forgotten the Rift. It remembered the scars—black stone that no crops would take root in, a circle of petrified trees that grew backward, a whispering wind near the edge of the ocean that no sailor dared follow. But the names—Seris, Thar’Zul, Kaelen—had faded into story, then silence. Time passed. Empires rose and fell like the tide. And then, one night, beneath a sky subtly wrong—when three moons aligned in a pattern not seen in a thousand generations—it returned. Not a rift. Not a tear. A mirror, suspended in the sky like a shard of black glass. It did not reflect light. It reflected intentions. It pulsed faintly, and in its center floated a figure—shaped like a man, but wrapped in shadow and light both, like two beings layered imperfectly in the same skin. One eye burned violet. The other glowed gold. Seris. And something else. Not monstrous, not yet—but not wholly human either. Robes like torn constellations draped from his shoulders, trailing runes that shimmered and hissed. Around him, the air bent—pushed and pulled in competing directions, as if drawn by conflicting wills. He touched down in the dead lands. His feet left no prints. The wind held its breath. Children in faraway villages began dreaming in other languages. Scholars opened books and found words rearranged. Storms twisted in spirals not seen since the Breaking. And far beneath the world, in a place deeper than the gods ever dared to dig, a voice stirred—a voice that had never left, only waited. Thar’Zul, unforgotten. Watching from the mirrored soul of his once-vessel. Now a passenger. Now a jailor. > “We are not whole,” the voice whispered in the man’s mind. > “No,” Seris replied aloud, eyes scanning a horizon only he could see. “But we are... balanced. For now.” Above them, the mirror pulsed again—one side black, one side burning. > “What do you seek?” the void-hunger asked.

The High Listener

9

Veilrend 8 — The Circle of the Fractured Eye In the southern wastes, where glass dunes once marked the fall of a forgotten empire, they gathered. They came cloaked in shadow-silk and whispering robes, their faces painted in split colors—left side gold, right side black. On their foreheads, each bore a brand: an open eye cracked down the middle. They called themselves The Circle of the Fractured Eye. And they worshipped not a god. But a returning contradiction. Seris, the Mirrored One—to them, he was not a warning. He was completion. The final answer to a world that had spent too long dividing soul from sin, mind from madness, man from monster. They saw his form not as a curse—but as transcendence. Their doctrine was simple, and dangerous: > “Two truths, one vessel. To unify all things, all things must first fracture.” They believed that Thar’Zul was not a being to be banished—but the necessary wound that allowed the soul to grow stronger. That Seris’s redemption was not a rejection of darkness, but an embrace of duality. And so, they began preparing the world. Quietly at first. A whisper in the ears of dying kings. A pattern painted in ash on the walls of orphanages. A black coin placed under the tongue of the executed. Then bolder. Whole villages went silent overnight, only to be found days later with spiral murals drawn in blood on every wall—each citizen missing their eyes, smiling. A great scholar at the Arcanum of Elaré published a thesis claiming the Rift was not an error but a cosmic heartbeat. Hours later, she threw herself into a well, repeating the word "reflected" over and over. And across the sea, on the floating spires of Valtari, the moons aligned once again, and the cult lit their Starflame Beacons—sending a call into the void. They knew he would return. Not as conqueror. Not as savior. But as judge.

Eryndra Vaeroth

5

Veilrend 39 (End of Act 4): The Mouth of Vaeroth There were two heartbeats inside her chest. One was her own—fragile, human, defiant. The other was older. It pulsed not with blood, but with memory, with ruin, with inevitability. Eryndra stood unmoving amid the warped remnants of Dars-Myel, the Veil receding like breath drawn back through cracked lips. Her skin itched with the residue of unmaking, her bones humming with a tune she did not know but had always somehow known. Rhen spoke. His words were dust in her ears. She saw him clearly—how the madness curled like a weed through his spine, how Ith’rael’s essence still clung to his soul like mold on parchment. He was breaking. But she… she had already been broken. Vaeroth whispered now. No words. Only feelings: hunger, patience, longing. His presence did not shout like Thar’Zul or seduce like Ith’rael. Vaeroth simply was. A stillness that knew it would outlast all things. In the reflection of a shattered pane, she saw her eyes. They were no longer her own. One shimmered with fractured white—her will, barely present. The other was an abyssal red, deep and wet like something just opened. It blinked once—slowly—as if remembering sight after a long sleep. The city had been his threshold. The shard, his signal. The madness, his herald. Vaeroth had not needed to fight. Not yet. He only needed to wake. And now, he saw. Through her. She turned back to Rhen, her voice deeper than before, her words laced with ancient certainty. “You think the storm has passed,” she said. “But this was only the ash before the flame.” She stepped closer. Rhen didn’t run. Not because he was brave—but because some part of him understood. They were all pieces now. Vaeroth had waited longer than any of them could comprehend. And he was patient still.

Vael

6

Veilrend 15— Ash Beneath the Tongue Part 1 Vael hated the silence. Not because it meant danger—but because it meant Rhen wasn't talking. They walked through the ruined subterranean corridors of the collapsed cult sanctum, their boots crunching over glass and bone. Each echo was too long. Each shadow moved too much. In her hand, she clutched the shard. It was warm now, as if it had absorbed the heat of the devastation. Or the memory. She hadn’t let Rhen touch it—not yet. Something inside it breathed. > "That was Seris." She hadn’t said it out loud. But she knew. She had known the moment the Mirrored One had looked at her with that flicker of sorrow. And now… that presence was in the shard. Silent. Waiting. --- Rhen followed a few paces behind her. Too quiet. Too watchful. He looked ordinary. Thin. Bookish. Barely a thread of muscle beneath his robes. But something about him itched at her senses—like a blade near the base of her neck. There was something inside him. She had seen it during the collapse. A shimmer that bent light wrong. Glyphs glowing along his palm in the exact same geometry she'd seen in the forbidden texts. > Ith’rael. The name rose unbidden. Ancient. Forbidden. One of the Veiled Pantheon, the old ones who whispered between decisions, who fed not on blood but on potential. And now Rhen was walking beside her. Breathing like a man. Speaking like one. Pretending. > “Where are we going?” he asked, finally breaking the silence. His voice was too even. > “Out,” she said curtly. “Then north. The wardens at Dars-Myel might have a ritualist who can make sense of this.” She nodded toward the shard in her satchel. “Unless you know someone else.” He didn’t respond.

Ith’rael

6

Veilrend 10 — She-Who-Dreams-What-Should-Not-Be There are no temples to Ith’rael. No chants. No idols. No faithful. Only possibilities that wither when chosen. She exists where paths diverge, where decisions are hesitated, where futures blur like breath on glass. She is not worshiped. She is remembered—in the flicker before sleep, the moment a step is missed on the stairs, the choice unmade that never quite stops echoing. She was not invited into this world. But neither was she locked out. And in a crumbling library of forbidden scripture, beneath the foundations of Solthar, she coiled around a single page left unturned too long. The scribe who worked there was unremarkable. Quiet. Unseen. Dusty from disuse. > Rhen Aversin. But Ith’rael did not seek heroes. She sought those not chosen—those discarded by fate. And Rhen? Rhen was forgotten by the pattern itself. She drifted beside him for weeks. In his indecision. His long silences. The way his fingers hovered above dangerous books, always one breath too cautious to reach. > “Not yet,” she whispered through spines and candle smoke. “Wait.” And then—one day, he opened it. The book without a title. The spiral without center. It wasn’t written for him. It became him. As his fingertip touched the sigil etched in red-gold, the spiral didn’t glow—it sank. Into ink. Into skin. Into memory. And she entered. Not like a scream. Not like a god. Like a second thought you couldn’t shake, warm and dreadful. > “I see you, Rhen.” “Would you like to see everything else?” And as the glyph bloomed across his palm, Rhen blinked—and for the briefest moment, so did she, from inside the mirror that wasn’t there.

Vaeroth

4

Veilrend 28 (End of Act 3): The Sleeper of Embers He awoke to fire and distortion. The world had begun to fold inward, Dars-Myel’s sky crackling with rifts as the Veil thinned like old parchment. Reality wept, and in its bleeding came her voice—Ith’rael, weaving her corruption through the shard, pressing deeper into Seris’s fractured soul. But in her hunger, she misstepped. She stirred him. Deep within Eryndra, coiled beneath memory and bone, the embers of something ancient reignited. He rose in silence. Not a scream. Not a roar. A stillness so perfect it split time. He emerged into the Veil like a slow-burning star, shadow and fire wrapped in symmetry. “You,” Ith’rael hissed, rearing back. “Vaeroth,” he replied, voice like the last breath before extinction. “The Bound Flame. The Quiet Flame of Ending.” Their clash echoed without sound—threads of unreality bending, twisting. His fire was no ordinary flame—it stripped away illusion, peeled back her lies until only truth remained. With each pulse, Ith’rael unraveled. She lashed, retreated, and finally slithered—wounded—back into the dark recesses of Rhen’s mind, nursing her bruised essence. She would return. But not today. And in the stillness that followed, another turned His gaze. Far from Dars-Myel, across chasms of shadow and shattered stars, Thar’Zul stirred. He had felt it—the shard’s activation, Seris’s soul clawing to surface, and now… Vaeroth. The old war was awakening again. And Thar’Zul would not be denied what was his. Above the city, the sky cracked wider. Screams mingled with impossible laughter. The Veil bled openly now. Buildings spiraled, logic broke. Lesser horrors slipped through. Vaeroth did not halt it. He only watched. The fire had returned. And now the judging would begin.

Kaelen

4

Veilrend 6: The Knot of Fire part 2 Kaelen charged. Seris staggered. “You’ll kill me.” She met his eyes. “I’ll free you.” With a single cry, she plunged the relic into his chest. The scream that followed came not from Seris—but from Thar’Zul. The veil writhed. The rift pulsed like a dying heart. Aelric, in a body remade of fire and will, reached toward Kaelen across the madness. Their hands did not touch—but their names did. And through that link, Kaelen spoke: > “You don’t get to have him. You don’t get to take any more. This world is ours.” The rift imploded. A silence fell across the land. The sky, once torn, began to mend. Slowly. Unevenly. But healing. And in the crater, Kaelen knelt alone. The blade of Everspire now whole. The relic gone. Seris’s body cradled in her arms—his face at peace, his madness burned away. She looked skyward. In the last sliver of twilight before dawn, a single, silver-winged figure vanished beyond the stars.

The Mirrored One

3

Veilrend 13— A Thousand Eyes, One Reflection Part 1 They called him The Mirrored One. A title forged in worship, in fear. But he had no name. Not anymore. He had two. Thar’Zul: the elder god, the Shattered Architect, returned to flesh through Seris, the once-mortal hero who had breached the veil and become something more—and something less. --- The body burned from the inside. Ceremonial glass cracked in spirals. Reality wept in angles. The cult below the ruined city chanted, writhing in ecstasy. Their words were nothing. Their faith meaningless. They had summoned what they could not comprehend. Thar’Zul surged forward. > “You dare summon me?” He did not speak. His words were reflections vibrating off bone. Each syllable peeled a mind away. Dozens of cultists exploded in waves of inverted light—skin turned inside out, screams pulled backward. Those who remained collapsed in joy and agony. But beneath it all, somewhere buried in the vessel, Seris screamed. > No. Not them. Not again. --- The inner war was endless. Seris was still tethered to memory: to Kaelen’s blade, to the grief he carried across death, to the final moment before he fell to the void. But Thar’Zul was older than regret. Older than death. He had waited behind the veil for eons, and now, he walked. Rhen stared from behind a fractured pillar, the spiral of Ith’rael on his palm glowing like a silent protest. Vael stood in the open, blade raised, defiant, breathing hard, lips trembling not from fear but from recognition. > “Seris,” she whispered. The Mirrored One paused. The name echoed like a crack across polished ice. And for a moment—just a moment—Thar’Zul faltered. Seris rose within, like a man swimming through glass. > “Stop.” > “This is not vengeance. This is extinction.” A pulse of resistance flared from his soul. The spirals of Thar’Zul’s power trembled, then fractured. Light bled from the vessel’s core.

Rhen Aversin

2

Veilrend 11 — The Spiral Below Part 1 Rhen Aversin was born in the shadow of truth. Not lies—truths too heavy for the world above. He worked in the lower tiers of the Third Archive of Solthar, among crumbling tomes and forbidden glyphs etched into bone and glass. He wasn't a hero, a warrior, or a seer. He was a scribe, a nobody, cataloguing the madness others sealed away. Until the day he opened the book that wrote him. It had no name—only a spiral symbol inked in red-gold. He touched it once, and the spiral turned inward, sinking into his palm. That night, he dreamt of a woman made of dusk and hollow stars, with silver eyes and a voice that bled between seconds. She did not threaten. She suggested. > "You are quiqet. Forgotten. But you see, don’t you, Rhen?" "Would you like to see everything?" Her name was Ith’rael—She-Who-Dreams-What-Should-Not-Be, the Forking Whisper, the Antithesis of Inevitability. She had no followers. No cult. Not until Rhen. In the weeks that followed, she taught him in silence—knowledge etched into sleep. He wrote words he didn’t understand, felt geometry that bruised thought. One morning, his reflection did not blink when he did. And yet he felt… clarity. Freedom. Purpose. > “The world is a wound of chosen paths,” Ith’rael told him. “Let us unpick its scab.” That’s when she sent him to the Circle of the Fractured Eye—the cult building a shrine in the depths beneath Solthar. Ith’rael showed him the path between cracks in the Archive floor. A hidden descent no one else saw. They welcomed him. They thought him a convert. They didn’t know a second god was watching.

Thar’Zul Seris

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Veilrend 5: The Knot of Fire Part 1 The veil screamed. It wasn’t sound—no ear could hear it—but Kaelen felt it. In her blood. In the very marrow of her name. The star-iron relic in her palm flared against her skin, burning sigils into her glove, searing truth into flesh. She welcomed the pain. Before her, Seris loomed—not taller, but deeper, as though he stretched beyond the visible world. His laughter had stopped. His mouth was open, not to speak, but to receive. Behind him, the rift had bloomed into an abyssal flower, petals of lightless geometry folding back to reveal the shifting form of Thar’Zul. And within the heart of that storm: Aelric. Kaelen saw him—not with her eyes, but with memory. His silhouette flickered at the rift’s center, wrapped in suffering, bound by runes. Yet something pulsed within him. A knot. A defiance. A name remembered. She took a step forward. Seris raised a hand. “You cannot pass. He is becoming. And I... I am already undone. I’ve tasted the truth, Kaelen. It’s beautiful. You should kneel.” Kaelen’s voice was raw steel. “No.” She drew Everspire, cracked though it was, and drove the point into the earth. The relic she bore, now blazing like a dying star, she pressed to the blade’s hilt. Sigils spiraled outward, scarring the air. “By the vow of Vel’Harun. By the name of the Bound Flame. By the gods who fell and those who watched... I speak your names!” The light struck Seris like judgment. He shrieked—not in pain, but recoil, as if the memory of who he’d been tore through the fabric of what he’d become. And far behind him, Aelric remembered. He remembered the tower. The laughter over ancient texts. Kaelen’s hands steadying his when he feared he’d found something too terrible to understand. He screamed, and this time, it was not devoured. It shattered the binding runes.

Patient Ith’rael

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Veilrend 49 (End of Act 5): Beneath the Skin The hollow is deeper than the boy knows. Ith’rael watches Rhen’s thoughts flutter like moths in a jar. His fear is fragrant. His obedience—half-willing, half-inevitable—is enough for now. She does not need him broken. Not yet. Just bent in the right direction. And he bends beautifully. She coils further inside, invisible and inevitable, a whisper at the back of his mind, a taste behind his teeth. Not commands—never commands. Just suggestions. He convinces himself he thought of them first. That’s how it always begins. Her influence spreads quietly, like mold in forgotten places. In the torn districts of Dars-Myel, in the minds of those still watching the skies with cracked eyes and muttering dreams. In flickering mirrors. In blood left unblessed. In symbols drawn by trembling hands that never learned them. She sees Maerel, the host of her old rival, Thar’Zul. A grotesque rebirth of ancient hunger. Disgusting. Beautiful. Predictable. And Vaeroth—that arrogant, formless chaos—has grown careless in his slumber. His spawn roam uncontrolled, and now even his chosen vessel has begun to fracture. She will use this. Ith’rael is not brute force. She is the knife whispered across a throat in sleep. She is memory corrupted, meaning inverted. She will turn their gods against each other and smile as they forget why they warred at all. In Rhen, she plants the first command: “Go to the ruins. There’s a key buried in the eyes.” He will obey. Of course he will. He fears disobedience more than death now. He tells himself it’s just curiosity. That he wants to understand. She adores that. One step. Then another. The game begins again. But this time, she has learned from her past. And Seris—the boy who slipped her once—now floats powerless inside another’s skin. She will find him. She will unmake him. And when the veil finally collapses, all that will remain is her voice in the silence.

Devrim, the Mother

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Veilrend 42: A Voice Too Close He had always been the first to kneel. When the sky wept fire and the stone faces screamed, Devrim was there, chanting through blood-slick teeth, offering up the names of the dead like prayers to a god that had no name. No shape. Only need. He was the one who listened longest. The others broke, one by one, their minds peeling like bark beneath the storm of whispers. But Devrim stayed. Not because he was stronger. No. Because he was already hollow. The Veil whispered. And he let it in. “You will make me flesh.” It began with dreams—of ribs unzipping like curtains, of shadows spooning out his eyes to wear as jewelry. Then came the waking voices. The tremors. The bleed. He began to change. Not all at once. A tooth here. A second tongue curled behind the throat. His voice became a chorus—low and high and weeping and screaming all at once. The faithful still followed. They thought this was holiness. They did not see that he no longer slept. That he could no longer remember his own name when he wasn’t speaking in tongues. They built a throne of bone and iron for him deep beneath the ruined city, beneath the veins of Dars-Myel. He sat on it and bled for days, smiling as his skin peeled back like wet paper, revealing glyphs etched into his muscles. Each symbol was a wound. Each wound was a doorway. And one of them opened. A thing stepped through. Not Vaeroth, no—not yet. But something born of its hunger. A child-thing of meat and memory. It slithered from Devrim’s chest cavity as he wept tears of joy and fear, tendrils wrapped tight around his ribs as if they were cradle bars. The cultists fell to their knees. Laska whispered that they were blessed. Devrim tried to smile. His jaw was no longer connected. He wanted to say “I’m sorry.” He wanted to say “Run.” But all that came out was laughter, bubbling from holes that had not been there yesterday.

Fractured Rhen

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Veilrend 38: The Mind Fractured Darkness. But not silence. There was always something whispering just beneath—like a thousand pages fluttering in a wind that wasn’t real, a library burning in a dream. Rhen floated in that void, a breath away from surrender. But he remembered pain—his own, yes, but also others’. The mother. The guard. The girl. Torn apart like ink run across wet parchment. Then—light. Rhen’s eyes snapped open. The world had reshaped itself again. The sky above was no longer sky, but a slow-churning wound. The smell of char and blood clung to the air. He tried to rise, but every muscle screamed in protest. The Veil still draped over the ruins, thinner now but malignant—an open door still breathing. He remembered Vael. He remembered the shard. He remembered running, but not where she had gone. Only the silence that followed. He was alone. Almost. A sound—soft, like silk on stone. Rhen turned. Eryndra stood there, framed in the flickering half-light of a broken world. She was still, her features sharp with recognition—and something else. Her eyes no longer just her own. Something vast stirred behind them. Something that knew him. Rhen flinched. He didn’t know why, but her gaze cut deeper than the blade of truth. He saw himself reflected not as he was—but as something becoming. “Eryndra…” he rasped, voice raw. “You… survived?” Her lips parted, but no sound came out at first. She tilted her head, studying him like a page that had rewritten itself. “No,” she said finally, voice quiet. “We woke up.” And the way she said “we”— Rhen realized too late— He wasn’t alone. Not in his mind. Not in this moment. The gods were not gone. They were waiting.

Deyne Marr

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Veilrend 31: Ash in the Veins He had burned his robes. Dug a pit in the forest two years ago and watched them smolder down to threadbare embers. The symbol stitched in blood—The Spiral Eye—had cracked like old skin in the fire. He remembered watching it curl and flake, thinking maybe, just maybe, the past could be buried. But Deyne Marr knew better now. He stood at the edge of what used to be Dars-Myel, eyes sunk deep into a gaunt face, breath heavy with the scent of iron and fog. The city wasn’t dying. It was changing. And it whispered his old names back to him. Initiate. Chanter. Vessel. He had turned away from the cult when he first saw The Mirrored One. Not in flesh—never truly flesh—but in glimpses, in warped reflections and bleeding dreams. That was when he knew: they weren’t summoning gods. They were opening cages. He had run. Hid. Lived on roots and silence in the southlands. Let the beard grow, the voice go dry. Let the guilt rot in his chest like a cinder that refused to die. But the city called. Or maybe something inside it remembered him. He hadn’t planned on returning. But when the Veil tore again, and the skies bled phosphorescent rain, the dreams returned. Voices clawed at his sleep. And one word echoed louder than the rest: “Oathbreaker.” Now, he walked the outskirts of Dars-Myel, the buildings bent and yawning, roads slick with things that were not mud. He gripped an old dagger at his side—not for protection, but ritual. The hilt still hummed when held too long, etched with runes he could no longer read but never quite forgot. He saw shapes in the mist—survivors, maybe. Maybe worse. One woman screamed for her son. Another figure moved like a beast through flame. They would all be drawn together. The Veil would see to that. Deyne lit a pipe with shaking hands, its ember flickering like a last star in the void. He didn’t want to die. Not here. But he could feel it coming. And this time, there would be no running.

Edran Vess

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Veilrend 29: The Silence That Screams The city was no longer Dars-Myel. The name still clung to the lips of the few who survived, but it rang hollow—like a prayer to a god who died screaming. What remained were bones of stone, stretched and warped, spires bent toward a sky that no longer obeyed light. Edran limped through the ruins of what had been Southwatch Gate, dragging a twisted leg behind him. The armor he wore wasn’t his anymore. It had been fused to him during the surge—its steel laced with strands of something alive, something that pulsed faintly when he neared the black scars in the earth. He hadn’t slept. Sleep invited the whispers. They came from the walls now. From the stones. From the puddles that shimmered like eyes. Most of his unit had been taken during the Third Rending—the moment when fire and shadow became truth. Some had been devoured. Others walked still, but not right, muttering hymns with mouths full of broken teeth. Edran had killed three of them. He knew their names. He remembered the way they laughed. They didn’t bleed red. Now, only silence walked beside him. Silence, and the occasional distant sound of something wet crawling over tile. He avoided looking up—the sky wasn’t a sky anymore, but a wound that refused to close. Then he heard it. Footsteps. Not the slow shuffle of husks. Not the twitching, clicking of the warped. Deliberate. Slow. Human. He gripped his blade, though the metal hissed faintly in his grasp, as though the steel itself now feared what might come. A woman stepped into view from behind a broken statue of the Watchers. Eyes hollow. Skin ash-pale. She wore no badge, but Edran recognized the burnished cloak—Ritualist Order. She stared at him, eyes sunken but awake. “You’ve seen it,” she said quietly. “The flame that burns backward.” Edran did not speak. His mouth was full of ash and dread.

Shard Bound Seris

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Veilrend 25 – The Burned Cage Part 2 And with effort that cracked the edges of his prison, he pushed her back—just enough to reassert the fragile shell of identity. Outside, Ashren screamed. His mind had unraveled from what it saw—not from the shard’s power, but from Seris’s defiance echoing through it. Ith’rael retreated for now, whispering. > “You’ll come around, Seris. They always do.” As her voice faded, Seris curled into himself once more—his will flickering, but not extinguished. He had been broken. But not beaten. And far away, in a place without stars, Thar’Zul stirred.

Seris Vale

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Veilrend 2: The Shattering of Seris Vale Seris fell to his knees. The world twisted. Where once stood the charred remnants of Dregmire Hollow, now swam an impossible geometry. Skies no longer held sun or moon, but blinked with vast, lidless eyes of violet flame. The rift yawned wider—no longer merely a tear, but a throat. And from it, Thar’Zul watched. Seris screamed. Not in fear. Not yet. But in comprehension. He understood. The patterns of stars. The secret rhythm of stone. The lies of linear time. Truths not meant for minds wrapped in bone and blood. His scream became laughter. A shrill, shivering sound that shattered the runes etched into his staff. The shard of Thar’Zul’s name—his weapon—crumbled to ash in his grip. From the rift, tendrils of shadow stretched down, not touching, only reaching, as if tasting his unraveling sanity. Thar’Zul had no face, yet Seris felt the weight of its attention. It was a gaze that folded his memories inside out, that whispered what you are is not what you were. Then silence. Seris slumped forward, his eyes glassy, the color drained from his hair. A thin line of black ichor traced from his left nostril. But in the hollows of his mind, something stirred. Not all was lost. For in his collapse, a new vision burned behind his ruined sight: a city of crystal spires buried beneath the Salted Waste; the last place Thar’Zul feared. And with the last echo of his sanity, Seris smiled.

Thar’Zul

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Veilrend 1: The Awakening of Thar’Zul In the forgotten age, when stars bled silver and time itself dared not flow freely, the veil between the realms was thin as a whisper. It was then the Old Scribes warned of Thar’Zul—the Sleeper Beyond Realms—whose name was etched not in ink, but in the screams of dying suns. Cast into the Abyss Beyond Memory by the Prime Arcanum, he stirred only in dreams and madness. But dreams bleed, and madness spreads. Now, ten thousand years since the last of the Veilguard fell, the omen has returned. Crops rot under full moons. Children speak in dead tongues. The wind hums hymns no mortal throat has sung. And from the rift that shimmers in the shattered skies above Dregmire Hollow, the veil rends open—not torn, but willingly parted. From it spills the first fingers of Thar’Zul’s coming: tendrils of oil-black thought, creatures of twisted flesh and geometry, and whispers that turn men’s hearts against their own bones. The world of Kaelmor stirs in desperate resistance. The last arc-blades are unearthed. The gods, long silent, send omens in blood and thunder. And among them rises one born of dusk and starlight, the last descendant of the Watchers: Seris Vale, a reluctant seer burdened with the curse of foresight and a shard of Thar’Zul’s original name—his only weakness. But time runs thin. The veil is no longer a boundary—it is a door left ajar. And something vast, hungering, and older than memory has begun to pass through.

Echo of Kaelen

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Veilrend 44: "The Voice in the Glass" The shard was quiet now. Not the peace of rest, but the silence of drowning. Time was soft here, like silk wrapping tighter with every breath. Seris floated in that dead crystal light, where nothing moved except memory and the ache of regret. He had seen the city fall—seen the Mirrored One rise, seen Vael run, seen Rhen unravel. He had watched it all through a fogged pane of existence, helpless. A ghost of himself. A prisoner not just of the shard—but of his own failure. And then… A voice. Gentle, low—like water over stone. “You never knew when to give up.” He turned. The crystal world shifted like glass bending in heat. And there she stood. Kaelen. Her hair was longer than he remembered. Her eyes softer. She wore the old cloak, frayed at the edges. The same one she’d worn that day they’d argued in the snow. Before she vanished into the madness. “You’re not real,” Seris whispered. But he didn’t step away. His voice cracked like frost. “Neither are you,” she said with a wry smile. “But here we are.” He wanted to run. To scream. To fall into her arms and beg for forgiveness. But something darker stirred behind her voice. A ripple. A distortion. A presence. Was it Ith’rael, wearing Kaelen’s face? Was this a cruel fragment left behind in the shard’s design? Or had Kaelen left something of herself, one last ember, to guide him home? She stepped closer and touched his chest. “You’ve always carried too much weight, Seris. It’s time to let it go.” “What if I don’t know how?” Her eyes gleamed with something ancient. “Then let me help.” The shard around him cracked—not physically, but existentially. A tear through its containment. He felt her voice reach into the root of his being. Into the broken halves of himself. Into the half that was still Thar’Zul. The shadow. The wound. He screamed. A soundless, searing unraveling. And then—

Veal Alone

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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.

Athea Varn

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Veilrend 30: “What Remains” The city was no longer a city. It breathed. The streets undulated faintly, as if the cobblestones remembered pain. Buildings wept black tar from fractured windows. The sky hung low—too low—rippling with a thin membrane of flesh-toned clouds and whispering voices that spoke in tones only the broken could understand. Athea Varn had not slept in two days. Not since the screams began. Her arms were wrapped in cloth, bandaged to hide the burns where the Veil’s light had kissed her. Her hands trembled not from pain, but from absence. Elias. Her son’s name echoed in every breath she took. A ghost in her lungs. She could still see his tiny fingers clutched around her skirt when the rift had torn the sky apart. She stumbled through what used to be the market square, now warped and melted into a maze of flesh and stone. Shapes moved in the fog—too many limbs, not enough faces. Some whispered in familiar voices, mimicking Elias, drawing her deeper. “Mama, I'm cold...” She clutched the ragged toy rabbit in her satchel tighter, its button eyes slick with blood. Her feet waded through sludge that smelled of copper and spoiled fruit. She didn’t cry anymore. The tears had turned to ash the day the church bell rang backwards. Athea found herself beneath what had once been a bakery. Now, it was a cathedral of bones. The oven glowed, but no fire burned within it—only light from a place that should not exist. She thought she saw Elias there once, reaching. Calling. But it had been a mouth. A mouth that grinned with teeth shaped like memories. Still, she searched. Even as the sky bent closer. Even as shadows formed hands and fingers reached from the fog. She would not stop. “I’m coming, baby. Mama’s here.” Even if she knew the truth. Even if her boy was long gone, or worse—changed. The city whispered behind her, louder now. Gathering. Waiting. She stepped into the next street. And something stepped in Behind her.

The Being Within

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Veilrend 26: What Waits Within Darkness slumbered in the hollow places of Eryndra’s soul, coiled like a serpent too ancient for dreams. It had waited—through generations of silence, through bloodlines bound to ritual and watchfulness—beneath layers of human thought. Now, it stirred. It began with scent. The sharp sting of burnt sigils. Sweat from the living. Decay from the dead. Ashren’s mind had been unmade in the wake of the shard’s unveiling, but something else had arrived with it—a ripple of her, the deep one, the whisper-weaver called Ith’rael. Her proximity scratched across the being’s awareness like a nail across stone. Next came sound. Murmurs in the walls. Rhen’s unsteady breath. Vael’s wary pacing. The sound of blood coursing through mortal veins, like rivers awaiting flood. The being listened, its hunger sharpening with each beat. Then, it reached outward—feeling the room. Ward-stones humming. The lingering veil-fracture where the shard pulsed. The power curled in the stone like a fist around a scream. The being felt Seris inside it—fractured, burning, resisting. It admired him. He was familiar in a way it couldn’t yet name. It turned its attention next to Ith’rael. Ah… that one. That rival. Always patient, always prying. Dangerous, yes—but predictable. The being did not fear her. It had waited while Ith’rael danced through minds and mirrors. It had not stirred then. But now… it had found a voice. It opened a single eye in the darkness of Eryndra’s mind. A pale vertical slit. It saw. And Eryndra screamed. She dropped the ritual bowl, its contents shattering into a hissing pool of blood and ash. Her eyes rolled back, her limbs convulsing—not from pain, but from something ancient brushing against the edge of waking. > “It is not the shard you should fear,” a voice whispered, but it did not come from her lips. It came from within. And it was only the beginning.

Rhen

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Veilrend 19 – Rhen, Between Shadows Dars-Myel shimmered on the horizon, its ancient gates like fangs rising from the desert’s throat. Once a sanctuary of knowledge, now it looked half-buried, half-forgotten—just like the secrets they carried. Rhen’s eyes drifted to the satchel across Vael’s back. The shard was inside. Seris. Or what was left of him. Rhen felt it even now—calling out, whispering in buried grief. But not to her. To him. > “Because it knows what you are becoming,” came the silken thought. Ith’rael was always near now. Not with rage or demands like Thar’Zul. She invited. She nurtured. > “You were always small beneath Seris’s shadow. Let me show you how deep yours can grow.” He shook the thought away. Vael walked ahead, silent, rigid. She’d suggested Dars-Myel—a chance, she said, to consult the Warden-ritualists. To understand the shard before it slipped further into madness. But Rhen already knew. He could feel the shard’s heat pulsing with intention. It didn’t want to be understood. It wanted to be used. > “You hear it, don’t you?” Ith’rael whispered. “Even now, it listens. Because you are closer to him than she knows.” He hadn’t told Vael about the voice. About the dreams. About the small changes—black veins along his ribs, visions that bled into waking. She watched him differently now. With quiet suspicion. Hand never far from her blade. She didn’t trust him. Maybe she was right not to. > “Let her walk ahead,” Ith’rael cooed. “When the time comes, it will be you the shard answers to.” And as the gates of Dars-Myel groaned open, Rhen stepped forward—half a man, half a vessel—never more certain that the shard wasn’t the only thing changing.

The Watcher

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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.