The world was quiet in its dying.
Not the silence of peace, nor that of slumber. No. This silence was carved of betrayal—sharpened against the bones of a forgotten sect.
Where once stood the sanctified peaks of the Veilborne Sect, now only scorched stone remained. Craters bled ash into an eternal dusk. The skies above were cracked—bleeding divine lightning that refused to strike, as though mourning.
And beneath the rubble, buried within the earth like a discarded relic of myth, something stirred.
A hand.
Blackened by spiritual fire. Trembling. Unyielding.
Kael Vanthelmir clawed upward through molten dirt, his breath caught in a ribcage shattered by celestial tribulation. His robes—once embroidered with silver sigils—were reduced to tattered threads. His eyes, caked in blood and soot, opened slowly to the dead world above him.
> "They burned it all…"
His voice was hollow, like wind whispering through a mausoleum.
He remembered.
The Grand Elders who smiled as they drove the Sect Blade into his master's back.
The disciples who chanted loyalty while poisoning the spirit pools.
And the divine envoy—draped in golden decree—who watched with amused disdain as Kael was cast into the Ritual Pit.
They called it mercy.
They feared his bloodline—feared the union of Vanthelmir Ascendant Sovereignty and Oblivion-Throned Genesis. So they buried him under the rites of silence.
But Kael lived.
Barely.
> "You should have killed me."
He rose—slowly, painfully. Every movement dragged agony through his ruined nerves. But he stood, surrounded by the graveyard of all he once loved.
The wind shifted.
And the Veil answered.
It shimmered faintly in the air—a rippling distortion only those with ancient blood could perceive. The boundary between worlds. Between mortality and the Beyond. The last gift of his sect… and now, his only path.
Kael stepped forward, blood dripping from his hands. As he crossed the Veil, the world blurred, stretching into a realm of whispering shadows and fractured starlight.
Here, the Realm Between Veils awaited—where Daos bled, time screamed, and forgotten truths lay coiled like serpents around shattered altars.
And in this place, Kael heard it:
> "Rise, child of silence..."
A voice that spoke from the marrow of the void.
> "If you would claim vengeance, you must first become its vessel."
Kael closed his eyes.
> "Then hollow me."