Stillness Between Storms
The wind was too quiet.
Not peace, pause. Like the world itself had inhaled, uncertain whether to scream or sigh.
The Veilwalker stood at the edge of the Drowned Vale, where water once flowed pure. Now it shimmered with corrupted Veil-essence, black, iridescent, grieving. Aether-twisted trees swayed against logic. Above, a cracked sky shed fragments of light that did not belong to this timeline.
Behind him, Kyra flicked a pebble into the water.
It hovered.
"Well, gravity's drunk again."
Caelith crouched beside an obsidian root, tracing its pulse with her fingertips. "No. It's mourning. The threads here remember something they weren't supposed to forget."
Kyra raised a brow. "Mourning has physics now?"
The Veilwalker remained silent. But his hand hovered near his blade, not out of caution, but memory.
---
A Place That Remembers
They descended slowly, careful not to disturb the aetherlines threading the valley.
No one spoke.
This place felt watched, as if the stones themselves were listening.
Then a ruined obelisk flared to life as they passed, pulsing with a rune older than language. A single symbol, recognition.
Kyra stepped back. "That's not just Veil script. That's relational binding... tethered to a person."
Caelith turned to the Veilwalker. "This place knows you."
He nodded, slow. "It should. This is where I lost her."
Caelith's breath caught. "Her?"
"She was called Lareth."
The name cracked the silence.
Kyra blinked. "You spoke. You..."
He turned to them fully for the first time. "You deserve the truth."
---
The Circle of Breaths
At the heart of the valley lay a broken ring of stone, ancient, buried in moss, but still humming faintly.
They camped within it.
Veilwalker knelt at its center, hand pressed to the cracked keystone. The air around them trembled, not with power, but memory.
"She and I stood here once. Lareth and I. We were closer than bonded spirits. Together we tried to heal a growing wound between worlds. Not by sealing it, but by understanding it."
He paused.
"I faltered. I feared the crossing. I pulled back."
Kyra whispered, "And she didn't make it out."
"No. The Veil took her. Or... became her. I'm not sure anymore."
Caelith knelt beside him. "She became part of the Veil's rhythm."
He looked at her. "And I became its regret."
---
Fragments of Light
Later, Kyra returned holding a rune-sealed vial. "It's not resurrection. But it may echo her final imprint."
Veilwalker accepted it, hesitating… then uncorked the seal.
A whisper stirred the Veil around him.
Not in words, but in feeling.
Warmth. Hope. The shimmer of someone who once laughed in the rain and danced between breaches.
"You were never the wound. You were the bridge. Find the other side again."
Tears slipped beneath his mask.
Caelith touched his arm. "Let us walk it with you."
Kyra leaned in with a grin both mischievous and kind. "You're stuck with us now, starlight. Sorry not sorry."
He gave no answer.
But for the first time in years, his mask shifted.
Not a smile exactly.
But something close.
---
When the Veil Breathes
Dawn shimmered wrong, rising sideways across the Vale.
The Veil stirred… but did not resist.
It breathed. Welcomed.
Three souls walked from the Circle of Breaths.
And elsewhere, far beyond reach…
A watcher stirred in a throne made of fractured timelines.
"Ah", it whispered. "The bridge remembers."
---