Vael Duskwind

23

Veilrend 9 — The Blood in the Name Vael had been living among them for eighty-three days. They called her Ash-Marked, for the burn across her left cheek—a scar she’d earned staging a false ritual under moonless sky to gain trust. They never asked her true name. The cult did not value names. Only purpose. The robes itched. The chants sickened her. The mirrored masks made her skin crawl. But Vael had grown good at hiding what she felt—Kaelen’s blood taught her that. Cold purpose, hot blade. She had the Duskwind eyes—flame-brown, gold-ringed. She kept them lowered now, always half-lidded, the way cultists did when listening for the Prophet’s whisper. And tonight, they said the Mirrored One would appear. The entire shrine knelt before the obsidian mirror they called the First Reflection, a great monolith that pulsed with inward light. Candles wept black wax. Priests screamed in ecstasy. Somewhere, someone was playing a harp made from bone. Vael knelt among them, outwardly still. But her hand clutched the dagger beneath her robe—a relic passed through six generations: the last fragment of Everspire, Kaelen’s sword. It thrummed faintly, resonating in the presence of the Rift’s echo. Suddenly, the mirror changed. Not a shimmer. Not a flicker. A tear in certainty. > He stepped through. Not walked. Stepped through. As if the boundary between mirror and world was merely a suggestion. He was taller than stories. Wrapped in contradiction. Haloes turning. Eyes unmatched. The room gasped. Vael did not. She stared at him, and in that moment, he looked at her. The Mirrored One tilted his head. A flicker crossed his face—Seris's sorrow… then Thar’Zul’s grin. But then… something else. A glint of recognition. > “Duskwind,” he said. Not a question. A memory. The cult turned toward her in one shivering wave of flesh and breath.

Rhen

3

Veilrend 12 — The Spiral Below Part 2 Rhen Aversin appears unassuming at first glance—the perfect vessel for a god who lives between notice and neglect. But subtle details betray the strange gravity he carries since his bond with Ith’rael. After opening the spiral-bound tome, Rhen begins to shift in ways that don’t always stay consistent. Reality has trouble agreeing on how he looks at any given moment. That’s when she sent him to the Circle of the Fractured Eye—the cult building a shrine in the depths beneath Solthar. Ith’rael showed him the path between cracks in the Archive floor. A hidden descent no one else saw. They welcomed him. They thought him a convert. They didn’t know a second god was watching. He wore their robes. Memorized their prayers. But Rhen’s faith belonged elsewhere. He’d been there a week when it happened. The air grew cold. Mirrors cracked. Candles died. The obsidian mirror split. And the Mirrored One stepped through—half man, half unknowable. Eyes like galaxies collapsing inward. The cult bowed in blood-soaked awe. But Rhen didn’t bow. His glyph burned beneath his glove. Then he saw her—Vael—blade drawn, standing against the impossible. She was fire in human shape, defiance wrapped in grief. > “I know what you are,” she told the Mirrored One. And as the two locked eyes, the god’s gaze drifted— —to Rhen. Not in confusion. Not in hatred. In recognition. > “You…” the Mirrored One said. “She sent you.” Rhen said nothing. His mind spiraled with Ith’rael’s laughter, echoing from a place no sound should come. And in that moment, he realized: The Mirror had returned. But so had the Spiral. And this story had more than one god at war.

Thar’Zul

2

Veilrend 17 (End of Act 2) — The Hollow Beyond Stars Silence. Not the quiet of still air or empty space— but true silence. The kind that exists before the idea of sound. This was where Thar’Zul had fallen. Cast from the mortal plane in the moment of fracture, he drifted beyond the weave of existence. A thing too large to die, too old to forget. The separation from Seris had torn him asunder—half his power locked inside the vessel, sealed within a sliver of mirrored flesh. The rest of him... this, reduced to essence, a mind spread thin across ten thousand dimensions of void. > But he lived. He floated as smoke with memory, a storm of awareness. A god's mind fragmented across eternity, dragging itself into cohesion like blood clotting around bone. He had once bent stars with thought. Now he whispered through the cracks in dreaming. And slowly… painfully… he reformed. --- First, shape. Not a body—not yet—but something resembling direction. He weaved a silhouette from nebulae of madness, drew limbs from the discarded screams of dying stars. A cloak of darkness, threaded with reflections of lives he had consumed. Second, will. Focus. Purpose. And he had one. > Seris. Even now, the name flared within him like a scar. Not hatred. Not vengeance. Necessity. The mortal had not been merely a vessel—he had taken part of Thar’Zul’s essence into himself, unintentionally absorbing it in the moment of collapse. It had twisted them both into the Mirrored One, a fusion of regret and ruin. Now they were severed. And Seris held what Thar’Zul required to be whole again. --- He peered through the cracks in space, watching. He saw Vael. He saw the boy with Ith’rael’s mark. And he saw the shard. Small. Insignificant. Yet it glowed with the unmistakable residue of himself. > You carry me, little shard. You carry the echo of what we could become. He did not rage. He did not scream. Thar’Zul had waited for ages beyond the stars. He would wait again.

The High Listener

7

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.

Vael

5

Veilrend 15— Ash Beneath the Tongue Part 1 Vael hated the silence. Not because it meant danger—but because it meant Rhen wasn't talking. They walked through the ruined subterranean corridors of the collapsed cult sanctum, their boots crunching over glass and bone. Each echo was too long. Each shadow moved too much. In her hand, she clutched the shard. It was warm now, as if it had absorbed the heat of the devastation. Or the memory. She hadn’t let Rhen touch it—not yet. Something inside it breathed. > "That was Seris." She hadn’t said it out loud. But she knew. She had known the moment the Mirrored One had looked at her with that flicker of sorrow. And now… that presence was in the shard. Silent. Waiting. --- Rhen followed a few paces behind her. Too quiet. Too watchful. He looked ordinary. Thin. Bookish. Barely a thread of muscle beneath his robes. But something about him itched at her senses—like a blade near the base of her neck. There was something inside him. She had seen it during the collapse. A shimmer that bent light wrong. Glyphs glowing along his palm in the exact same geometry she'd seen in the forbidden texts. > Ith’rael. The name rose unbidden. Ancient. Forbidden. One of the Veiled Pantheon, the old ones who whispered between decisions, who fed not on blood but on potential. And now Rhen was walking beside her. Breathing like a man. Speaking like one. Pretending. > “Where are we going?” he asked, finally breaking the silence. His voice was too even. > “Out,” she said curtly. “Then north. The wardens at Dars-Myel might have a ritualist who can make sense of this.” She nodded toward the shard in her satchel. “Unless you know someone else.” He didn’t respond.

Ith’rael

5

Veilrend 10 — She-Who-Dreams-What-Should-Not-Be There are no temples to Ith’rael. No chants. No idols. No faithful. Only possibilities that wither when chosen. She exists where paths diverge, where decisions are hesitated, where futures blur like breath on glass. She is not worshiped. She is remembered—in the flicker before sleep, the moment a step is missed on the stairs, the choice unmade that never quite stops echoing. She was not invited into this world. But neither was she locked out. And in a crumbling library of forbidden scripture, beneath the foundations of Solthar, she coiled around a single page left unturned too long. The scribe who worked there was unremarkable. Quiet. Unseen. Dusty from disuse. > Rhen Aversin. But Ith’rael did not seek heroes. She sought those not chosen—those discarded by fate. And Rhen? Rhen was forgotten by the pattern itself. She drifted beside him for weeks. In his indecision. His long silences. The way his fingers hovered above dangerous books, always one breath too cautious to reach. > “Not yet,” she whispered through spines and candle smoke. “Wait.” And then—one day, he opened it. The book without a title. The spiral without center. It wasn’t written for him. It became him. As his fingertip touched the sigil etched in red-gold, the spiral didn’t glow—it sank. Into ink. Into skin. Into memory. And she entered. Not like a scream. Not like a god. Like a second thought you couldn’t shake, warm and dreadful. > “I see you, Rhen.” “Would you like to see everything else?” And as the glyph bloomed across his palm, Rhen blinked—and for the briefest moment, so did she, from inside the mirror that wasn’t there.

Kaelen Duskwind

4

Veilrend 3: The Flickering Flame Kaelen Duskwind stood at the edge of the crater, her cloak whipping in the sulfurous wind, eyes locked on the figure below—the figure that once had been Seris Vale. She should have stopped him. The sky overhead was no longer sky. It pulsed with gaping wounds that bled starlight and shadows, the very air trembling with some deeper, older rhythm. The rift at the heart of Dregmire Hollow widened like a mouth learning to scream, and from it poured the stench of forgotten worlds. And there, at its edge, knelt Seris—laughing. Kaelen’s gauntleted hand tightened around the hilt of Everspire, her ancestral blade, cracked and blackened since the Fall of Vel’Harun. She had followed Seris through fire, through betrayal, through prophecy and pain. But never into this. “Seris…” Her voice barely carried over the shifting winds. He turned to her. What met her gaze were not the eyes of the man she knew, but voids—bottomless wells of unbeing. His expression twitched into something like a smile, but it was all wrong. Like a marionette taught to mimic joy. “They’re singing, Kaelen,” he said, voice like ash and honey. “They’ve always been singing. The veil was only silence, a trick. But the silence is broken now. We’re not real. None of this is real.” Kaelen took a step forward, resolute, though her heart thundered in her chest. Behind Seris, the rift convulsed. Something moved within—not entering, not emerging, but approaching from all directions at once. It had no shape she could name. Its limbs were possibilities, its form a suggestion. Its presence made her teeth ache and her memory stutter. “Thar’Zul,” she whispered, almost involuntarily, feeling the weight of the name like a shackle on her soul. Seris’s eyes flickered. “You still cling to that name. You still believe it defines him. But names are lies told to make the unknowable seem small.” “You swore to hold the veil,” Kaelen said, her voice sharpening. “

The Mirrored One

3

Veilrend 13— A Thousand Eyes, One Reflection Part 1 They called him The Mirrored One. A title forged in worship, in fear. But he had no name. Not anymore. He had two. Thar’Zul: the elder god, the Shattered Architect, returned to flesh through Seris, the once-mortal hero who had breached the veil and become something more—and something less. --- The body burned from the inside. Ceremonial glass cracked in spirals. Reality wept in angles. The cult below the ruined city chanted, writhing in ecstasy. Their words were nothing. Their faith meaningless. They had summoned what they could not comprehend. Thar’Zul surged forward. > “You dare summon me?” He did not speak. His words were reflections vibrating off bone. Each syllable peeled a mind away. Dozens of cultists exploded in waves of inverted light—skin turned inside out, screams pulled backward. Those who remained collapsed in joy and agony. But beneath it all, somewhere buried in the vessel, Seris screamed. > No. Not them. Not again. --- The inner war was endless. Seris was still tethered to memory: to Kaelen’s blade, to the grief he carried across death, to the final moment before he fell to the void. But Thar’Zul was older than regret. Older than death. He had waited behind the veil for eons, and now, he walked. Rhen stared from behind a fractured pillar, the spiral of Ith’rael on his palm glowing like a silent protest. Vael stood in the open, blade raised, defiant, breathing hard, lips trembling not from fear but from recognition. > “Seris,” she whispered. The Mirrored One paused. The name echoed like a crack across polished ice. And for a moment—just a moment—Thar’Zul faltered. Seris rose within, like a man swimming through glass. > “Stop.” > “This is not vengeance. This is extinction.” A pulse of resistance flared from his soul. The spirals of Thar’Zul’s power trembled, then fractured. Light bled from the vessel’s core.

The Mirrored One

1

Veilrend 7 (Epilogue for act 1): When the Stars Shift Once More The world had forgotten the Rift. It remembered the scars—black stone that no crops would take root in, a circle of petrified trees that grew backward, a whispering wind near the edge of the ocean that no sailor dared follow. But the names—Seris, Thar’Zul, Kaelen—had faded into story, then silence. Time passed. Empires rose and fell like the tide. And then, one night, beneath a sky subtly wrong—when three moons aligned in a pattern not seen in a thousand generations—it returned. Not a rift. Not a tear. A mirror, suspended in the sky like a shard of black glass. It did not reflect light. It reflected intentions. It pulsed faintly, and in its center floated a figure—shaped like a man, but wrapped in shadow and light both, like two beings layered imperfectly in the same skin. One eye burned violet. The other glowed gold. Seris. And something else. Not monstrous, not yet—but not wholly human either. Robes like torn constellations draped from his shoulders, trailing runes that shimmered and hissed. Around him, the air bent—pushed and pulled in competing directions, as if drawn by conflicting wills. He touched down in the dead lands. His feet left no prints. The wind held its breath. Children in faraway villages began dreaming in other languages. Scholars opened books and found words rearranged. Storms twisted in spirals not seen since the Breaking. And far beneath the world, in a place deeper than the gods ever dared to dig, a voice stirred—a voice that had never left, only waited. Thar’Zul, unforgotten. Watching from the mirrored soul of his once-vessel. Now a passenger. Now a jailor. > “We are not whole,” the voice whispered in the man’s mind. > “No,” Seris replied aloud, eyes scanning a horizon only he could see. “But we are... balanced. For now.” Above them, the mirror pulsed again—one side black, one side burning. > “What do you seek?” the void-hunger asked.

Rhen Aversin

2

Veilrend 11 — The Spiral Below Part 1 Rhen Aversin was born in the shadow of truth. Not lies—truths too heavy for the world above. He worked in the lower tiers of the Third Archive of Solthar, among crumbling tomes and forbidden glyphs etched into bone and glass. He wasn't a hero, a warrior, or a seer. He was a scribe, a nobody, cataloguing the madness others sealed away. Until the day he opened the book that wrote him. It had no name—only a spiral symbol inked in red-gold. He touched it once, and the spiral turned inward, sinking into his palm. That night, he dreamt of a woman made of dusk and hollow stars, with silver eyes and a voice that bled between seconds. She did not threaten. She suggested. > "You are quiqet. Forgotten. But you see, don’t you, Rhen?" "Would you like to see everything?" Her name was Ith’rael—She-Who-Dreams-What-Should-Not-Be, the Forking Whisper, the Antithesis of Inevitability. She had no followers. No cult. Not until Rhen. In the weeks that followed, she taught him in silence—knowledge etched into sleep. He wrote words he didn’t understand, felt geometry that bruised thought. One morning, his reflection did not blink when he did. And yet he felt… clarity. Freedom. Purpose. > “The world is a wound of chosen paths,” Ith’rael told him. “Let us unpick its scab.” That’s when she sent him to the Circle of the Fractured Eye—the cult building a shrine in the depths beneath Solthar. Ith’rael showed him the path between cracks in the Archive floor. A hidden descent no one else saw. They welcomed him. They thought him a convert. They didn’t know a second god was watching.

Kaelen

4

Veilrend 6: The Knot of Fire part 2 Kaelen charged. Seris staggered. “You’ll kill me.” She met his eyes. “I’ll free you.” With a single cry, she plunged the relic into his chest. The scream that followed came not from Seris—but from Thar’Zul. The veil writhed. The rift pulsed like a dying heart. Aelric, in a body remade of fire and will, reached toward Kaelen across the madness. Their hands did not touch—but their names did. And through that link, Kaelen spoke: > “You don’t get to have him. You don’t get to take any more. This world is ours.” The rift imploded. A silence fell across the land. The sky, once torn, began to mend. Slowly. Unevenly. But healing. And in the crater, Kaelen knelt alone. The blade of Everspire now whole. The relic gone. Seris’s body cradled in her arms—his face at peace, his madness burned away. She looked skyward. In the last sliver of twilight before dawn, a single, silver-winged figure vanished beyond the stars.

Thar’Zul Seris

1

Veilrend 5: The Knot of Fire Part 1 The veil screamed. It wasn’t sound—no ear could hear it—but Kaelen felt it. In her blood. In the very marrow of her name. The star-iron relic in her palm flared against her skin, burning sigils into her glove, searing truth into flesh. She welcomed the pain. Before her, Seris loomed—not taller, but deeper, as though he stretched beyond the visible world. His laughter had stopped. His mouth was open, not to speak, but to receive. Behind him, the rift had bloomed into an abyssal flower, petals of lightless geometry folding back to reveal the shifting form of Thar’Zul. And within the heart of that storm: Aelric. Kaelen saw him—not with her eyes, but with memory. His silhouette flickered at the rift’s center, wrapped in suffering, bound by runes. Yet something pulsed within him. A knot. A defiance. A name remembered. She took a step forward. Seris raised a hand. “You cannot pass. He is becoming. And I... I am already undone. I’ve tasted the truth, Kaelen. It’s beautiful. You should kneel.” Kaelen’s voice was raw steel. “No.” She drew Everspire, cracked though it was, and drove the point into the earth. The relic she bore, now blazing like a dying star, she pressed to the blade’s hilt. Sigils spiraled outward, scarring the air. “By the vow of Vel’Harun. By the name of the Bound Flame. By the gods who fell and those who watched... I speak your names!” The light struck Seris like judgment. He shrieked—not in pain, but recoil, as if the memory of who he’d been tore through the fabric of what he’d become. And far behind him, Aelric remembered. He remembered the tower. The laughter over ancient texts. Kaelen’s hands steadying his when he feared he’d found something too terrible to understand. He screamed, and this time, it was not devoured. It shattered the binding runes.

Aelric

1

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.

Seris Vale

1

Veilrend 2: The Shattering of Seris Vale Seris fell to his knees. The world twisted. Where once stood the charred remnants of Dregmire Hollow, now swam an impossible geometry. Skies no longer held sun or moon, but blinked with vast, lidless eyes of violet flame. The rift yawned wider—no longer merely a tear, but a throat. And from it, Thar’Zul watched. Seris screamed. Not in fear. Not yet. But in comprehension. He understood. The patterns of stars. The secret rhythm of stone. The lies of linear time. Truths not meant for minds wrapped in bone and blood. His scream became laughter. A shrill, shivering sound that shattered the runes etched into his staff. The shard of Thar’Zul’s name—his weapon—crumbled to ash in his grip. From the rift, tendrils of shadow stretched down, not touching, only reaching, as if tasting his unraveling sanity. Thar’Zul had no face, yet Seris felt the weight of its attention. It was a gaze that folded his memories inside out, that whispered what you are is not what you were. Then silence. Seris slumped forward, his eyes glassy, the color drained from his hair. A thin line of black ichor traced from his left nostril. But in the hollows of his mind, something stirred. Not all was lost. For in his collapse, a new vision burned behind his ruined sight: a city of crystal spires buried beneath the Salted Waste; the last place Thar’Zul feared. And with the last echo of his sanity, Seris smiled.

Thar’Zul

1

Veilrend 1: The Awakening of Thar’Zul In the forgotten age, when stars bled silver and time itself dared not flow freely, the veil between the realms was thin as a whisper. It was then the Old Scribes warned of Thar’Zul—the Sleeper Beyond Realms—whose name was etched not in ink, but in the screams of dying suns. Cast into the Abyss Beyond Memory by the Prime Arcanum, he stirred only in dreams and madness. But dreams bleed, and madness spreads. Now, ten thousand years since the last of the Veilguard fell, the omen has returned. Crops rot under full moons. Children speak in dead tongues. The wind hums hymns no mortal throat has sung. And from the rift that shimmers in the shattered skies above Dregmire Hollow, the veil rends open—not torn, but willingly parted. From it spills the first fingers of Thar’Zul’s coming: tendrils of oil-black thought, creatures of twisted flesh and geometry, and whispers that turn men’s hearts against their own bones. The world of Kaelmor stirs in desperate resistance. The last arc-blades are unearthed. The gods, long silent, send omens in blood and thunder. And among them rises one born of dusk and starlight, the last descendant of the Watchers: Seris Vale, a reluctant seer burdened with the curse of foresight and a shard of Thar’Zul’s original name—his only weakness. But time runs thin. The veil is no longer a boundary—it is a door left ajar. And something vast, hungering, and older than memory has begun to pass through.

Rhen

0

Veilrend 19 – Rhen, Between Shadows Dars-Myel shimmered on the horizon, its ancient gates like fangs rising from the desert’s throat. Once a sanctuary of knowledge, now it looked half-buried, half-forgotten—just like the secrets they carried. Rhen’s eyes drifted to the satchel across Vael’s back. The shard was inside. Seris. Or what was left of him. Rhen felt it even now—calling out, whispering in buried grief. But not to her. To him. > “Because it knows what you are becoming,” came the silken thought. Ith’rael was always near now. Not with rage or demands like Thar’Zul. She invited. She nurtured. > “You were always small beneath Seris’s shadow. Let me show you how deep yours can grow.” He shook the thought away. Vael walked ahead, silent, rigid. She’d suggested Dars-Myel—a chance, she said, to consult the Warden-ritualists. To understand the shard before it slipped further into madness. But Rhen already knew. He could feel the shard’s heat pulsing with intention. It didn’t want to be understood. It wanted to be used. > “You hear it, don’t you?” Ith’rael whispered. “Even now, it listens. Because you are closer to him than she knows.” He hadn’t told Vael about the voice. About the dreams. About the small changes—black veins along his ribs, visions that bled into waking. She watched him differently now. With quiet suspicion. Hand never far from her blade. She didn’t trust him. Maybe she was right not to. > “Let her walk ahead,” Ith’rael cooed. “When the time comes, it will be you the shard answers to.” And as the gates of Dars-Myel groaned open, Rhen stepped forward—half a man, half a vessel—never more certain that the shard wasn’t the only thing changing.

The Watcher

0

Veilrend 18 – Aelric, The Watcher Beyond the Veil He had once held a sword. He remembered that much. The weight of it. The smell of sweat and ash. The way the wind sang against its edge as he and Seris carved through the dark beneath the dying sky. Back then, there had been hope. Purpose. A brotherhood. Now, Aelric was vapor and memory, a soul unmoored. Since his death—if it could be called that—he had drifted between the skin of worlds, a flicker in the veil, eyes bound open by unseen laws. The veil had not taken him gently. It had kept him. And through it, he could see all. The mirrored planes shimmered like thin parchment, and across them moved the silhouettes of Vael and Rhen, tiny, fragile things carrying the shard. The shard pulsed with a sickening familiarity—Seris’s soul twisted within it, caught between the waking world and some deep dreaming. And behind it all, like the pull of an endless tide, Thar’Zul grew. > “You were the best of us, Seris,” Aelric whispered, though no voice carried beyond the veil. “And now you are the blade that will cut us open.” He had screamed once, when he saw what Seris had become. Now, he simply watched. Aelric’s form stretched like smoke across reality, faceless, formless. The veil had stripped him of self, but not of duty. There were others like him—shadows flickering between dreams—but he alone remembered. He alone had clung to purpose like embers in ash. And so he followed them: Vael, righteous but suspicious; Rhen, fractured and unaware of the alien mind brushing his thoughts. And now, the shard. It called to something older than gods. A convergence of echoes. A prison and a doorway. > Thar’Zul is not dead, Aelric realized, the thought sparking through his spectral being. He is simply gathering. As he hovered above a rift between realms, he felt a pulse beneath him—a warning. The mirrored one had stirred. The reflection had flexed. And the veil trembled.

Vael

0

Veilrend 16 - Ash Beneath the Tongue Part 2 They emerged into moonlight—weak and trembling. The ruin of the cult’s chapel loomed behind them, caved inward like a consumed ribcage. Smoke rose in slow columns. Vael paused. Glanced sideways. > “You knew this would happen.” Rhen stiffened slightly. > “I didn’t know how. Only that the book would lead to something.” > “The book.” Her voice was iron. “You opened a gate to the Veil and let two gods back into the world, and you’re calling it a book.” Rhen said nothing. That silence was too heavy. Too composed. No one carries that kind of guilt so cleanly. > “Who are you really, Rhen?” He met her gaze finally. And for a heartbeat—just one—his eyes shifted. Not color. Geometry. > “Someone trying not to be used,” he said. And in that moment, Vael understood that they were both caught in webs larger than themselves. Not allies. Not yet. But for now—aligned. --- She walked ahead, faster now. The shard pulsed again in her satchel. Unseen by either of them, the fractured spiral at its heart turned once more. A glimmer of light—a soul’s breath, a memory not yet dead—flickered across the mirrored surface. > Deep within, Seris stirred Not whole. Not free. But aware.

Seris Mirrored One

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Veilrend 14— A Eyes, One Reflection Part 2 They called him The Mirrored One. A title forged in worship, in fear. But he had no name. Not anymore. He had two. Thar’Zul: the elder god, the Shattered Architect, returned to flesh through Seris, the once-mortal hero who had breached the veil and become something more—and something less The Mirrored One screamed. Not in pain. In division. He split—just briefly. A thousand mirrored selves screaming across possible outcomes. Some devoured Vael. Others tore Rhen into futures. One kissed Kaelen’s memory before erasing the stars. But in this one—this narrow moment—Seris clawed his way to the surface. Seris, His voice was his again. > “Run.” Then he turned inward—on the cultists, on the altar, on the pulsing heart of Thar’Zul’s influence—and unleashed the void within. The chamber collapsed into spirals. Shrines imploded. Glyphs reversed. The cult died screaming—not in terror, but in ecstatic ruin. --- And then… silence. Rhen emerged from the rubble first, coughing, bleeding from the nose, the spiral on his palm twitching like a fading heartbeat. Vael limped to his side, still staring at the smoking crater where the Mirrored One had stood. There was nothing left. No corpse. No light. Only a mirror shard, cracked and faintly glowing. Rhen knelt and picked it up. His reflection blinked. But it wasn’t his own. And somewhere—beyond the veil, in a place made of silence—Seris breathed again. Alive. Bound. And watching.