Seren stood atop the western watchtower of Outpost Virel, a lone spire nestled into the mountains near the Rift's edge. From here, she could see the horizon fade into stormlight and stone. The Rift shimmered below like a scar filled with stars—vast, ancient, and quiet in a way that wasn't peace.
She hadn't slept in two nights.
Each time her eyes shut, the creature returned. The one from the ruins—no eyes, only a mouth like a wound in the world. It hadn't attacked her directly. It had merely looked. And in that moment, she had felt seen. Not as a soldier. Not as Velmoran.
But as prey.
She remembered another silence.
She'd been twelve. A border village girl, living just close enough to the Rift to smell its frost, hear its wind. Her mother was a healer. Her father, a sword instructor. They were disciplined, dutiful—Velmoran in every sense.
Then the screaming began.
It wasn't Kael'Thari. Not then. The war hadn't reached their doorstep. But the Rift had. Something stirred from the depths. The ground shook. The sky wept flame. And people disappeared—dragged into the blackness of a fissure no one could explain.
Her father had stood at the edge and said only:
"We cannot reason with storms. We prepare for them."
That night, he placed a sword in her hands. She remembered its weight more than its shape.
Now, the Rift stirred again.
And her blade wasn't enough.
Elen found her still watching the chasm as morning broke.
"You haven't slept."
"I don't need to," Seren replied, voice low.
"That's not true."
"Neither is the quiet," Seren said, gesturing toward the Rift. "Something's changing. We pretend it's about territory or relics. But that thing I saw—it wasn't Kael'Thari magic. It was older."
Elen shifted uncomfortably. "You think the Dominion summoned it?"
"I don't know," Seren said. "But I know this: I've seen their scouts. They're just as wary as we are. Just as confused. And the Rift doesn't care which side you kneel to."
There was a pause, and then Seren added, voice iron:
"But mercy was a mistake. We were trained better than that."
Elen blinked. "You mean the one you spared?"
Seren didn't answer.
She withdrew a scroll from her satchel—not a sanctioned report, but her own notes: diagrams of the ruins, sketches of footprints not quite human, markings half-familiar from forbidden texts.
"They aren't sending me back," she said. "But I'm going anyway."
Elen's eyes widened. "You'll be marked a rogue."
Seren's jaw tightened. "Let them."
That evening, she descended into the shrine beneath the barracks—where the names of the dead glowed softly on cold stone. Her father's was there. Her mother's was never recovered.
She lit a single rune-flame and knelt.
Velmora does not fight for conquest, she whispered. We fight for order. For the silence that must remain.
But the silence now felt wrong. Complicit.
The Rift did not want silence. It wanted something else.
Witnesses, maybe.
Victims.
She didn't know.
But she would find out.
And next time she met one of them—Dominion or otherwise—they would not be spared. Not if they stood between her and the truth.
She donned her armor with no ceremony. No approval. Just purpose.
She left a note with Elen:
If I fall, tell them I followed the silence to its source—not to question it, but to end it.
And beneath that:
No more mercy.
She left before dawn.
Westward, toward the Rift.
And if a Kael'Thari crossed her path again—
They would not leave breathing.