The edge of the Fracture was not a place one stumbled upon. It resisted discovery. The closer Kael drew, the more the world warped around it—light shifting, wind turning against itself, sound thickening like syrup. Trees bent away without wind. Stones sunk slightly into earth that should have held them fast.
Eline led the way.
Not as handler. Not as Whisperer.
But as someone who had once come here alone.
"I was thirteen when I first found it," she said, voice low. "Bran thought I'd gone missing in the archives. They searched the lower vaults for hours. But the Veil doesn't want to be remembered. Not by most."
Kael followed her wordlessly.
The woods had given way to broken ridges. Cracked shale and veined earth split in jagged spirals. A low vibration pulsed through Kael's boots with every step. Not an earthquake. Not thunder.
Memory.
"This way."
Eline stepped between two leaning monoliths half-swallowed by moss and time. Beyond them, the land dropped suddenly.
Kael came up behind her.
And stared into a wound that had never fully healed.
It was not a canyon.
Not a crevasse.
It was a scar in the world itself—where the earth had been unstitched by force rather than erosion. Black stone rimmed the descent like fused bone. Veillight shimmered faintly along the sides of the chasm—not cast from above, but bleeding from within.
Kael stepped closer. His breath hitched.
The Veil shimmered at the very base of the rift—a curtain of coalesced shadow, neither solid nor fluid. Where it touched the air, the sky dimmed. Birds never flew above it. The clouds parted as if fearing to pass over.
Tenebris stirred inside him.
"This is where it bled first."
Kael's knees weakened.
He grabbed a dead tree root for balance. "What bled?"
"The one who gave herself to make the boundary. The first Veilheart. She unbound her body, her will, her memory. And here, she severed the sky from the dark."
Eline sat on the stone rim, eyes lowered.
"I saw something once," she said. "When I stood where you are now. Something that still burns behind my eyes."
Kael looked at her. "What did you see?"
Eline met his gaze.
And for the first time in weeks, something real passed between them. No silence. No masks. Just brittle honesty stretched over something wounded.
"I saw you," she said.
Kael went still.
"Not as you are. As you will be. You stood down there, inside the Veil itself, untouched. Not bound. Not fighting. But merged. And your eyes—they weren't yours anymore. They were hers. The first Veilheart's."
Kael opened his mouth.
No sound came out.
Eline continued, voice growing taut. "I didn't understand it back then. I thought it was a vision. A test. I told the handlers, but they said it was a projection. Hallucination from exposure. But I know what I saw. And when you came to the compound a year later, I recognized your shadow before your name."
Kael felt the Fracture pulse.
Not visibly. Not violently.
Just enough to remind him the world had once torn open right here—and part of him still belonged to it.
"You were assigned to me because of that," he said quietly.
Eline nodded. "Yes."
"Were you ever going to tell me?"
She hesitated.
"No."
The wind shifted. Not a breeze, but a ripple through the Veil.
And then—
A voice.
Not Tenebris. Not Kael. Not even Eline.
It came from below the rim.
A whisper that rose like steam from the black rift.
"You carry what she sealed. You walk with what we feared."
Kael staggered to the edge, trying to peer down.
The Veil writhed.
And something moved within it—not form, not beast, but presence. It rose like a tower of breathless silence, pressing into Kael's thoughts. Images flared across his mind—
A battlefield swallowed in shadow.A woman standing over a collapsing arch of light, her body already half-fused with darkness.A hand pressed to the wound of the world, sealing it not with magic—but with sacrifice.
Kael dropped to one knee.
His hand burned—the same hand that bore the remnant sigil from his binding with Tenebris.
Eline rushed to him. "What is it?"
"She's still here," he whispered. "The first Veilheart. Not alive. Not dead. Imprinted."
Tenebris pulsed inside him.
"She became the Veil. And she remembers you."
They stayed until dusk bled into night.
The Veil glowed faintly in the pit, like a lantern submerged beneath an ocean.
Kael sat at the rim, arms wrapped around his knees.
Eline stood a few paces away, hands clasped behind her back.
"I don't know if I'm supposed to stop it," Kael said at last. "Or become it."
Eline turned to him. "Both."
"That doesn't make sense."
"It does to the Veil."
Silence.
Then—
"I lied to you before," Eline said, stepping closer. "Not about the vision. About the reason I asked for your assignment."
Kael looked up.
"It wasn't only duty. It was curiosity. Obsession, maybe. I wanted to know what would happen if someone carried that kind of echo and remembered. No suppression. No false control. Just memory. Whole."
Kael's eyes searched hers.
"And now?"
She looked down.
"Now I'm afraid I helped wake something I can't follow."
On the way back through the ruins, Kael felt the Veil in his blood.
Not as weight.
Not as weapon.
But as inheritance.
It didn't sing.
It waited.
And he began to realize—whatever the Whisperers feared most wasn't that he would lose control.
It was that he might choose not to.