Night draped over the compound like a heavy cloak, muffling footsteps and dragging shadows long across stone. Kael moved through corridors with careful steps, his senses alive to every flicker of torchlight and every shift in the hush. He could feel it now—watchers hidden just beyond sight, tethered threads that pulsed when he passed, and the faint tang of scry-light used to track.
The watchers were real.
He wasn't paranoid.
Inside the archive wing, Kael paused beneath an archway. A half-hidden tether dangled from the ceiling—thin strand of shadow-thread that glowed dim silver under the torchlight. It wound toward his door, a silent spiderweb meant to capture breaths, movements… and secrets.
He stood still. Tenebris pulsed, low in his chest.
Not yet.
Kael followed the thread back to a grate above the corridor. It vanished, snaked into ancient stone.
He traced it only briefly, unwilling to provoke alarm. Instead, he ducked into a side alcove, pulled the tether closer, touched it—and felt cold.
A reminder: he was being watched by forces he could not name.
He'd crossed a line.
Sleep was a luxury now. Yet when Kael did drift, it was the dreams that found him.
He stood in a battlefield drenched by eerie dawn. The sky cracked open in veillight—silver shards drifting downward like broken stars. Dozens lay amid the blood-red grass: warriors cloaked in sigil armor, their blades crackling with blue energy. Smoke curled into black tendrils that whispered across the field.
In the center stood two figures.
One: familiar, yet ancient—Tenebris, his bond-symbiote, manifesting in spectral form. It wore wings like fraying cloth, eyes bright embers.
Beside it: a woman etched in memory's ghostlight. Circa a hundred years past. Long hair the color of shattered moonlight. Wreathed in robes of Veil-sigil runelight, a crown shaped like broken eclipses.
A leader. The original Veilheart.
She spoke without sound, each word tumbling in Kael's mind:
"We made the Veil to hold the world. But we bound ourselves first."
Tenebris moved as if uncertain. Its voice resonated softly, visceral.
"When they shattered the Veil, they broke us. All of us."
The Veilheart looked at Kael, her face compassionate and dimly furious.
"Your blood remembers, child. You bear our choice now."
Kael wanted to speak.
But Tenebris did instead:
"He's ready to remember."
The Veilheart shook her head.
"Not ready enough."
The battlefield trembled.
The sigil-armored figures stirred, blades raising.
They advanced.
Kael and Tenebris stood back to back —his heart racing with fear and purpose.
Then the world fractured.
He woke with a start, chest tight, the candle by his bedside guttering. The dream hung like smoke in the air, words echoing against his ribs.
Kael lay still, listening.
He could hear watchers outside: a whispered footstep, the scrape of a blade in its sheath, faint breath.
He sat up, grabbed the mirror shard. It lay broken into two pieces now.
He pressed them together.
For a heartbeat, the blade's fractured lines fell into alignment, forming a sharp crescent once more—bright white against blackened glass. Then they slipped apart.
Morning found Kael at the mercy of his own awareness. Every corridor had watchers. Every meal shared in silence. Instructor after instructor looking past him or through him, their gazes glancing off just before acknowledging that he was watching back.
He made no effort to stop them. He'd been tailed before. Tonight, he'd slip away again.
That night, he returned to the relic room—a burial vault deep under the compound, where pre-Sundering fragments were kept behind scry-glass. The Gloamkin mirror shard lay on the relic slab beside him. He hovered a hand above it.
"Tell me," he whispered to Tenebris. "Tell me what they don't want me to know."
Tenebris's voice stirred in his mind, low as storm-wind on water:
"We were soldiers of the first Veilheart. Not her choice—but ours. We bound ourselves to protect. But in the binding, we gave our souls as well."
The shadow stirred, wings unfurling in silent torment.
"When they shattered the Veil, they shattered us. We fractured… splintered."
Kael closed his eyes.
"And I… am one of the splinters. But in me—the memory revives."
A pulse of silvery light spread across the shard in his hand.
"In the Veilheart's reflection… I remember. I remember the first fracture. And the choice we must make."
The shard glowed.
Kael opened his eyes.
It was bright as dawn for a second.
Then it went black.
He heard it again.
Not in dreams.
A footstep behind a stone door.
A breath in the vault's echoless hush.
Someone watched him.
And the watchers were frightened—not by rumors, but by truth.
Kael stepped away.
The watchers mustn't find him.
Not now.