The air in the upper compound tasted of copper and cold stone.
Kael walked its halls like a shadow with skin, aware now of every turn, every glance too swift, every doorway that yawned wider than necessary before closing behind him. The Whisperers had changed nothing on the surface. Protocols continued. Meals served. Bells rang. Lessons resumed.
But something beneath had shifted.
They were watching him.
Not just overtly—with handlers perched above the training courts or positioned near the Archive entrances—but beneath the fabric of daily life. Like mold under lacquer. Listening. Judging.
And Tenebris was stirring.
Not in violence. Not yet.
But in memory.
On the fourth night after the silver shard appeared, Kael wandered the restricted north corridor, where the air turned too cold for fire to hold. Torches lined the stone walls, but none were lit. The flame refused the space, retreating from the veiled inscriptions etched along the edges of each tile.
This was the Hall of Silent Voices.
And it had called to him.
He shouldn't have been here. Only full Whisperers—initiated, bound, branded—were permitted entry. But Kael no longer listened to permissions.
Not when the shadows beckoned.
Not when his own blood burned against his bones with hunger for the truth.
As he passed the third arch, the silence turned thick. Not just quiet. Dense. Each step echoed too long, like the stones remembered other footfalls—older, heavier, less human.
Tenebris whispered: "You've been here before."
Kael froze.
"No," he said aloud. "I haven't."
"Not as you are."
A pulse rippled through the walls, and the sigils—dead for centuries—flickered faintly with old light. Not golden. Not silver. Something in between. Something bruised.
At the far end, he found a sealed door marked only with a single rune: a ring bisected by a downward-pointing blade. It was Veilbound.
And alive.
Kael reached out. Not with his hands—but with his presence. His blood, heated and resonant, thrummed beneath his skin.
The rune pulsed once.
And opened.
Inside was no chamber.
Just a memory.
The world shuddered, and Kael stood beneath two suns. One real. One broken.
He did not know how.
He did not remember his body—only sensation. The wind of ash. The taste of old power. The presence beside him.
Tenebris stood to his left.
Not a creature. Not a shadow. A figure of light turned inward, wearing blackness like armor. Not monstrous—but wrong in a way that a mirror might be if it reflected someone else's life.
Before them, the sky burned.
Cities—veiled and bright—fell from floating heights, crumbling into the dust of a fractured world. Screams did not reach Kael's ears, but he felt them in the back of his mind, like distant prayers refused.
"You were here," Tenebris said beside him. Its voice did not echo now. It sounded… familiar.
"I wasn't born yet."
"No," Tenebris replied. "But you were made."
The sky cracked. A wound of darkness opened across the heavens, and something fell through—screaming not in sound, but in memory. A god unformed. A name erased.
"You were the Veil's last heir," Tenebris whispered. "Its final breath made flesh."
Kael turned to the figure. "Why me?"
Tenebris didn't answer.
Because it didn't have to.
Kael jolted awake in the compound's garden.
He had no memory of walking there. The moon was high, casting silver shadows across the stone paths. Eline's scarf lay abandoned on the ground near the blackthorn trees.
He picked it up.
It smelled of fire and winter rain.
She had been here.
And she had left in haste.
Footsteps echoed behind him.
Handler Vess.
"You're dreaming more often," she said without preamble.
Kael didn't respond.
"Is Tenebris showing you?" she pressed.
Still, no reply.
Vess stepped closer, lowering her voice. "Tell me what you saw, and I can help you."
He turned.
And for the first time, he looked at her like a handler.
"Have you ever heard your own name from a thousand years ago?" Kael asked.
Vess blinked. Hesitated.
"Because I just did," he whispered. "And it didn't sound like Kael."
They left him alone after that.
For three days.
No summons. No watchers. No trials. Even Liris avoided his path.
It wasn't peace.
It was the silence before war.
Eline appeared at the edge of the training field during dusk drills, her arms crossed, face half-lit by the sun's retreat.
She said nothing.
He didn't ask.
But when the students paired off and began sparring, Kael noticed how Eline turned ever so slightly—angled not toward the fighters, but toward the shadows behind them.
Toward him.
Tenebris spoke again: "She knows where the first wound lies."
Later that night, Kael found her seated on the rooftop where they'd once exchanged laughter and apples beneath the rain. Now the stone was dry. The moon hung behind wisps of moving cloud. A hunter's moon. Hungry.
"I remember something," Kael said.
Eline didn't turn.
"What?" she asked after a long silence.
"I was something else. Not someone. Something."
"I know."
That struck him harder than any accusation.
"You knew?"
"I knew enough," she said softly.
"And you still trained me?"
"You don't train a Veilbound. You temper them. Or you fail to."
"Which am I?"
She stood.
Faced him.
"I haven't decided yet."
Then she left, her scarf once again fluttering in her wake like a flag of surrender—or warning.