Devrim

Veilrend 40: The Mouth of the Veil He had not prayed since the sky fell. Dars-Myel burned in silence now, smothered in the ash of things that once had names. The Cathedral of the Trium still stood—barely—its stained glass melted into jagged veins of color and shadow. Devrim wandered through it each dusk, hands shaking, mouth dry, searching for a sound, a shape, a word that might forgive the world for what it had become. And he found one. Not from the gods of man. But from the Veil. It began with whispers in the bell tower—no bells, just the sound of skin on stone, slow and deliberate, crawling in spirals. Then came the dreams: of an eye blooming in black flame, of bones singing in perfect harmony. He was not alone. Survivors drifted to the Cathedral like ash in the wind—mothers clutching stillborn children, hollow-eyed guards, whispering mendicants. They all heard the same thing. A voice like grief given breath. They formed a circle. They wore the color of ash. And in place of prayer, they bled into the altar. They called themselves The Veilbound. Devrim led them. He did not remember choosing to. He only remembered kneeling and opening his mouth. And the words—they were not his—poured out. Prophecies of the returning flesh, of the broken sky sewn shut by screams, of Eryndra, whose heart was a prison of light and madness. One night, something answered back. A shape oozed from the altar cracks—too large to be flesh, too blurred to be spirit. It moved like it wept. And where it passed, skin sloughed from bone, not in pain but in release. They praised it. They fed it their names. And it grew. When the Warden scouts returned to the Cathedral, they found no bodies. Only robes. Only teeth. Only the unblinking sigil of Vaeroth burned into the walls like a wound.