"Leaving isn't the hardest part—it's knowing the world you're returning to will never love you the same."
A Village Holding Its Breath
The aftermath of Echo Fields still pulsed like an open wound beneath Vaelcrest's soil.
In the days following their awakening, the twins were no longer embraced by the village—they were observed, as if wild gods had chosen mortal skin and walked too close. Children stopped whispering their names. Elders bowed lower than needed. Even the veilweaver trees bent their boughs away from the twins' steps, as though swayed by ancient instinct.
Kaizen stood at the cliff's edge, gauntlets of cracked stone still gripping his forearms. His gaze was locked not on the horizon, but on the spiral-shaped scar etched into the valley below—a relic left by the explosion of Veil Resonance.
Behind him, Yvonne emerged from the shrine path, her dark blue cloak tattered and soot-kissed. Her flame no longer flickered—it flowed, low and slow like lava through her veins. Even her shadow no longer moved in rhythm with her body.
"They're afraid of us now," she said.
"Good," Kaizen muttered, his voice like gravel grinding against steel. "That means they won't try to use us."
Yvonne turned her eyes to the sky—where the Black Moon had begun to form again, its red edge brighter than before.
"The Veils are thinning faster than we thought," she whispered. "The next one's near. I can feel it in my ribs. In my spine."
Kaizen unrolled the spiral-marked map—inked on animal hide that no longer existed in the natural world. As his finger traced the faded symbols, the parchment responded—flaring briefly with red and silver.
"The Bloomfields are next," he said. "And beyond them, the Desolight Wastes."
"Then we leave."
"Tonight."
The Departure of the Veilborn
There was no farewell.
No feast. No flame-lit prayers. Not even a nod from the elder council.
Only silence.
Kaizen and Yvonne walked through the village under starlight, cloaked and quiet. The veilweaver tree—a silent witness to their oaths, their tears, their first fracture—watched them pass. Its bark split slightly as they crossed the threshold, as if trying to cry out and failing.
And from behind closed windows, villagers watched through cracks and candlelight, whispering the words they dared not say aloud:
"They were born to end the balance."
"They were not meant to live among us."
"They're becoming what the world once feared."
But the twins said nothing. They didn't look back.
Because something inside them already knew
They couldn't return. Not as they were.
The Bloomfields Twist
By morning, they had crossed into the forgotten territories once called the Withered Bloomfields—a realm where nature had not died, but been twisted by centuries of suppressed emotion.
Here, flowers did not bloom—they bled. Thorns grew backward into the soil, and petals curled like screaming mouths. The grass was silvered and soft, but it hummed with voices from the past.
Kaizen paused beside a broken altar wrapped in thorn-vines. An old spiral glyph had been carved deep into the stone, but it was scratched out—violently, as if someone had tried to erase a god's name.
"Something happened here," he muttered.
"Something that still remembers," Yvonne whispered.
Suddenly, the air turned still. And from the windless silence, a figure emerged.
The Ribboned Woman
A woman cloaked in flowing silk—ashen ribbons that floated unnaturally behind her—stepped from the edge of a thorn-blighted tree.
Her face was obscured by a veil stitched with spirals, each one humming like a tuning fork too low to hear.
"I've waited a long time," she said.
Yvonne drew flame into her palm, ready to strike.
Kaizen stepped forward, voice like a hammer dropped on stone.
"Who are you?"
The woman bowed.
"I am Lira. Spiral-listener. Threadweaver of the Fourth Veil."
The ground beneath her feet bloomed in spirals of fading violet petals. Her presence warped the land slightly—like the Veils around her resisted her existence.
She held out a relic: a spiral-shaped mirror, its surface cracked, edges burnt.
"You seek the next Veil. But what you truly seek… is what it took from you. Sorrow. Regret. Memory. The fourth does not fracture by fury, like the first. It fractures by remembrance."
A Dream that Burns
That night, Kaizen sat in a crater where the fire refused to die.
Yvonne sat nearby, motionless, watching her flame reflect images in the mirror Lira gave them.
She saw herself—older, colder, covered in ash. She saw Kael'Vorr bleeding beneath her hands. She saw the Spiral Thrones—empty, abandoned, shattered by her past decision.
Then a voice whispered—not hers, not Lira's, but something inside her:
"You gave up everything to protect him. And he forgot."
She jolted awake, breath shallow.
Kaizen was already staring at her.
"You saw it too?" she asked.
He nodded.
"It's time," he said. "The Fourth Veil is near. And it's not just a wall. It's a wound."