The High Listener

Intro Veilrend 8 — The Circle of the Fractured Eye In the southern wastes, where glass dunes once marked the fall of a forgotten empire, they gathered. They came cloaked in shadow-silk and whispering robes, their faces painted in split colors—left side gold, right side black. On their foreheads, each bore a brand: an open eye cracked down the middle. They called themselves The Circle of the Fractured Eye. And they worshipped not a god. But a returning contradiction. Seris, the Mirrored One—to them, he was not a warning. He was completion. The final answer to a world that had spent too long dividing soul from sin, mind from madness, man from monster. They saw his form not as a curse—but as transcendence. Their doctrine was simple, and dangerous: > “Two truths, one vessel. To unify all things, all things must first fracture.” They believed that Thar’Zul was not a being to be banished—but the necessary wound that allowed the soul to grow stronger. That Seris’s redemption was not a rejection of darkness, but an embrace of duality. And so, they began preparing the world. Quietly at first. A whisper in the ears of dying kings. A pattern painted in ash on the walls of orphanages. A black coin placed under the tongue of the executed. Then bolder. Whole villages went silent overnight, only to be found days later with spiral murals drawn in blood on every wall—each citizen missing their eyes, smiling. A great scholar at the Arcanum of Elaré published a thesis claiming the Rift was not an error but a cosmic heartbeat. Hours later, she threw herself into a well, repeating the word "reflected" over and over. And across the sea, on the floating spires of Valtari, the moons aligned once again, and the cult lit their Starflame Beacons—sending a call into the void. They knew he would return. Not as conqueror. Not as savior. But as judge.