Kael should have been resting.
Instead, he moved through the bowels of the Whisperers' compound like a whisper himself—Tenebris wrapped tightly around his skin, dimming footfalls and hiding his breath.
The Archives were sealed at night. Officially. But the hallway runes flickered like dying embers as he approached, and he'd learned enough in the stables as a child to know when guards pretended not to look.
The Whisperers liked rules. They liked breaking them more.
At the base of the stairs stood a stone door veined with silvery sigils—faint, old, almost dead. He placed the coin Ser Whitmer had quietly left in his bunk that morning into the centre keyhole. The eye etched into it blinked.
The door opened with a groan like a grave exhaling.
Inside
The Archive wasn't a library. It was a tomb.
Rows of scrolls, tablets, sealed memory flasks, and book-vaults stretched along the curved walls. Most shelves were tagged in coded glyphs—not language, but emotion: grief, fire, hunger, silence.
Tenebris shivered.
Here, truths sleep badly.
Kael wandered deeper. Dust hung in webs. Something heavy watched.
He stopped at a row marked by a broken crescent.
These records weren't in the official catechisms.
"Veilbound: Early Manifestations."
He pulled a thin leather ledger free. The ink was faded, but legible enough. Birth records, bonded initiates, symptoms. Madness. Disappearances. Internal purges by the Crown.
One passage stood out.
"Of those born with Veilmarks—there is no pattern. Only the scent of trauma and shadow. But some pass the Duskveil untouched, seen not as prey... but as kin. These we destroy. Or lose control of."
Kael's breath quickened.
Kin?
He remembered the Cultist from the mission. "Little Kin," they'd called him.
He kept reading.
"The Veil was once a boundary of grace—a seal laid over the land to protect from chaos. Something broke it. Something fed on it. Now, it draws the like-minded to itself. Bonded shadows. Dream-eaters. Children born screaming with no light in their eyes."
"We whisper them away. For the Crown. For Order."
He turned the page.
Someone had blacked out entire names—crossed in blood-coloured ink. But one name survived, barely.
Mira Veyne.
His mother.
His hands trembled. The page curled inward like it was recoiling from itself.
Behind him, footsteps.
Kael whipped around—shadow flaring—
Only to find Bran, hands raised, eyes wide. "Light damn it, Kael! What are you doing here?"
Kael lowered his stance, barely.
"I could ask you the same."
Bran huffed. "I work here, idiot. My shift's up top. But the Wardstone caught movement. You're lucky it was me and not a scribe."
Kael shut the ledger. "I needed answers."
Bran hesitated, glancing down at the blood-inked pages. "You looking for your mother?"
Kael nodded once. "You know something?"
Bran scratched his neck. "Only what everyone whispers behind your back. That you're... marked. Too strong for a novice. Too empty-eyed sometimes."
He didn't say the word, but it hung between them like smoke.
Veilbound.
Kael stared down at the book in his hand. "They killed her. Or buried her in here."
Bran frowned. "Not just her. There's more redacted names. Whole lineages."
They erase bloodlines the Dusk likes, Kael realized. Because it remembers.
The thought felt like biting into ice.
Tenebris curled inward.
You are not the first. But you might be the last who chooses.
Later
Back in his bunk, Kael lay awake.
Others whispered about him now. He saw it in glances. In the way Eline ignored him completely at meals, as if that itself were the safest form of contact.
Only Ser Whitmer spoke freely—and even he had warned: "The more you know, the fewer allies you'll have."
He pulled the coin out from under his pillow and turned it over in his fingers. It pulsed faintly—an old magic. A Veilbound key.
He wasn't the first. He wasn't even unique.
But someone, somewhere, had hidden the records and erased the names—not to destroy the legacy, but to protect it.
Which meant...
Someone wanted it back.