Chapter 1 — The Perfect Days Before
Lucien Ashfall was thirteen the day the sky stopped meaning safety.
He had never known hunger.
Never feared the dark.
Never once wondered if his parents would come home.
In a world where most children whispered stories of monsters beyond the city walls and prayed not to be Chosen, Lucien lived like a prince behind glass.
His parents worked for the Trial Containment Facility—one of the best-funded in the Northern Quadrant.
It paid well. Dangerously well.
But they were survivors. Old Seeker-Class veterans who'd returned from their own Trials decades ago.
People like that didn't die easily.
His mother laughed often and smiled with her eyes.
His father gardened on weekends.
Their home was a tiered hillside villa just above the city's central district. Air purifiers hummed softly in every room. The walls were reinforced with Riftstone.
From his bedroom window, Lucien could see the Containment Dome in the distance—silver and arcing, like a half-moon rising over the horizon. It shimmered in the sunlight like something sacred.
He loved it.
All of it.
School was easy.
Lucien excelled at memory games, historical recounts, simulation puzzles.
He was... a little bored, if he was honest.
Sometimes he wondered what his parents had seen inside their Trials.
What kind of world they'd survived.
What kind of people they'd been forced to become.
But they never spoke of it.
And he had long since learned not to ask.
His only glimpse into that other life came from the Containment Hall.
Once a month, his father took him inside—just past the main entrance. Never deeper.
There, Lucien would peer through the glass walls that looked down into the holding bays.
Dozens of teenagers floated in stasis tanks.
Eyes closed.
Bodies untouched by time.
Boys and girls between fourteen and nineteen—each one called by the Veil.
None older.
None younger.
Until him.
---
It happened on a Thursday.
Lucien was out in the garden, watering lavender stalks that buzzed with engineered bees. His mother was speaking on the phone nearby, half-laughing about something he didn't catch.
The sun was warm. A nap teased the edge of his thoughts.
And then his knees buckled.
---
A soft pull.
The back of his skull.
Like a thread catching on something sharp.
His breath caught.
The watering can slipped from his hand.
Water splashed across the soil.
His vision tunneled.
Somewhere far off, his mother called his name.
"Lucien!"
But her voice dragged like melted wax.
Slow.
Unreal.
His body hit the ground before the panic reached his heart.
And then—
Silence.
---
No pain.
No light.
Only the feeling of being scraped clean.
Lucien tried to scream—
But he had no mouth.
Tried to move—
But he had no body.
The Veil had taken him.
And nothing, not even all the wealth in the world, could bring him back.