Aelric

Intro 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.