Kael stood at the edge of Rellmoor's remains as the sun began to set, its red light smeared like blood across the broken rooftops.
Around him, the survivors moved like ghosts—silent, dazed. Lyra organized triage. Darric barked orders. Scouts rode out to warn neighboring villages.
But Kael remained still, eyes fixed on the blackened circle where the Voice-Eater had stood.
The silence still lingered.
A scar across reality.
Kael turned to the gathered commanders—his warband leaders, glyph-knights, and Veil-scouts.
"This wasn't a raid. It was a message."
"Malrik wants us to believe there's no defense. That there's no memory once they come."
"We prove him wrong."
He knelt and sketched a sigil into the dirt—an old pattern, not often used.
A binding ward drawn from ancient Veil-lore. Not a shield. A trap.
"We set lures. Veil-bait in the valley ruins. The next Voice-Eater will come—and when it does, we cage it. Study it."
One scout stepped forward, hesitant. "My lord… even caged, it might unmake the minds nearby."
Kael looked up, eyes flickering red.
"Then I'll be the one to stand in the circle."
Later that night, Kael stood alone in the shattered remains of Rellmoor's old shrine. His sword, Veyrath, lay on the altar, glowing faintly.
The blade pulsed with something deep—Veil-touched metal forged in silence and sealed in fire. It was not just a weapon. It was a bond. A pact.
He pressed his hand to it.
The Veil stirred.
They are coming.
Your fire is not enough.
You must become more.
Kael's voice was calm. Cold.
"No. I don't serve the Veil. I use it."
The sword flared crimson for a heartbeat, then dimmed.
The Veil did not argue.
Lyra entered the shrine, arms crossed, face smeared with ash.
"The villagers are safe. Most, anyway. Darric's moving them east."
She looked at him for a long moment.
"You going to tell me your plan, or are you just going to bleed quietly like usual?"
Kael allowed a faint smile—brief, bitter.
"I plan to bait a god-eater, trap it with old magic, and tear a secret out of its throat."
Lyra whistled softly.
"Simple, then."
"Want company?"
He turned to her fully. There was a flicker in his eyes—not just power, but strain. Beneath the surface, something was burning low and steady.
"If I start to change," he said quietly.
"If the Veil starts to take more than I give—"
Lyra stepped closer, placing a hand over his.
"Then I'll remind you who you are."
"Kael. Rivenhart. Flameborn. Brother to ruin."
"And ours."
The traps were laid.
The bait would be placed in a ruined chapel known to echo with Veil resonance—enough to draw the attention of the next Voice-Eater.
Kael mounted his steed at dawn, Veyrath on his back, Lyra and Darric at his flanks.
They rode out from Rellmoor—not as survivors, but as hunters.
Behind them, the ashes cooled.
Ahead of them, the war of voices had only just begun.
The chapel at Grey Hollow was older than Velaryn's founding. Built before the Godfall. Before language was carved into stone.
Now, it was a carcass of blackened pillars and collapsed walls, wrapped in creeping Veilvine that pulsed faintly at dusk.
Kael and his strike team arrived under cover of a blood-hued moon. The air was brittle. Still. The kind of stillness that made every breath feel like a trespass.
"This place stinks of forgotten things," Darric muttered, sword half-drawn.
Kael said nothing. His eyes flicked between the broken archways, already reading the patterns in the stones—the Veil echoes buried beneath mortar and dust.
They had chosen this site for a reason.
This place had called to something before.
Lyra unrolled a scroll soaked in glyph-oil. Veil-ink shimmered as she spoke the binding tongues, careful not to mispronounce a single syllable.
Each sigil carved into the chapel floor would act as a containment prism—not strong enough to imprison the Voice-Eater forever, but long enough to extract truth.
Kael walked to the center.
He unsheathed Veyrath, drove the blade into the stone, and whispered a phrase older than language.
The blade drank the echo. The Veil stirred.
"It'll come," he said.
"It can't resist the call of a broken voice."
The bait was a Veil mimic—a forged presence built from old screams, stolen memories, and carefully harvested fragments of fear.
Kael had taken the final ingredient from Rellmoor's ashes: the voice of the tongueless priest, preserved in sound-ink.
As Lyra activated the mimic, a sound echoed through the chapel:
A child's voice, soft, lost: "Mama?"
The same voice the Voice-Eater had used.
The same one that had ended Rellmoor.
They hid.
Kael in the rafters, shrouded in a hushward cloak.
Lyra behind the broken altar, Veil-daggers ready.
Darric flanking the ruins with two glyph-bound rangers.
The mimic repeated every ten minutes.
"Mama?"
"Mama, where are you?"
Each repetition sent a pulse through the Veil.
A ripple.
A flare.
And then—
Nothing.
No sound.
No wind.
No breath.
Just absence.
Kael felt it before he saw it.
The world went gray. His ears rang with silence. A pressure built behind his eyes.
Then it stepped through the mist.
Tall. White. Faceless.
Not walking. Gliding.
It didn't speak. It listened.
Listened to the mimic voice.
Then it cocked its head, slowly, like a bird that had found something curious.
Kael's heart pounded. This was no mindless beast. It remembered.
It stepped into the trap's radius.
Veil sigils ignited.
The Voice-Eater froze.
For a moment, it was still.
Then its face shimmered—and the mimic stopped.
Silence fell. But not ordinary silence.
Heavy. Suffocating. Wrong.
The Voice-Eater's body began to pulse with stolen memory, trying to disrupt the glyphs.
"Now," Kael whispered.
Lyra activated the Veil clamps, energy coursing through the binding rings. The trap began to close.
Darric loosed the first arrow, tipped with soul-rune.
The Voice-Eater screamed without sound—
And the stone walls cracked inward.
Kael leapt from the rafters, Veyrath in hand, black lightning pouring down his arm. He stabbed the blade through the creature's chest—
And for a single instant, he saw inside it:
Screams.
Empty rooms.
Faces torn off.
Kael's own reflection, smiling.
Then the glyphs pulsed again—and the creature went still, frozen in a cage of Veil-light.
Captured. Contained.
Kael dropped to one knee, chest heaving.
"Now," he whispered, "we make it speak."
The spires of the Woundspire Citadel pierced the sky like knives. Veil-touched stone bled mist and shadow across the mountain's crown.
Here, in a sanctum of obsidian and silence, Malrik sat alone on a throne carved from a single slab of black memory.
Not stone. Not metal.
Memory. Hardened and sculpted.
Before him, the Chain of Echoes pulsed—sixteen links of silver-black soulsteel, each connected to one of the Voice-Eaters still hidden in the old vaults.
Thirteen were dormant.
Two were stirring.
And one…
One was trembling.
Malrik opened his eyes. Veins of violet light cracked across his skin like lightning beneath flesh.
"Containment," he said softly. "Impossible."
He stood and approached the trembling link.
It shimmered.
Distorted.
The captured Voice-Eater howled—not in sound, but in resonance. A fractured pulse. A distress signal.
Malrik extended a hand. His fingers hovered over the link. And for a brief moment—
He saw Kael.
The sword.
The sigils.
The cage.
"Clever child," he murmured.
His voice echoed through the throne chamber, and shadows along the walls stirred.
Malrik did not feel fear. But he calculated risk.
Kael Rivenhart had proven more than a mere war-chosen. He had tasted the Veil and not drowned.
He had remembered.
"So," Malrik said aloud, to no one.
"You've learned to listen without falling."
"But can you speak, Sovereign? Can you command the dark without becoming it?"
Malrik turned to the great window overlooking the Black Vale.
A thunderstorm rolled across the far side of the valley, veins of red lightning crawling beneath the clouds.
He raised both hands, and the Chain of Echoes pulsed in reply.
"I have fed the first voice to the world."
"Now I shall awaken the second."
Behind him, a hooded figure knelt—one of the Hollow Priests.
"Should we retaliate, my lord?"
Malrik's voice was low. Calm.
"No."
"We let him think it was a victory."
He smiled, eyes burning like coals soaked in pitch.
"Then we let the second Voice-Eater sing with a familiar voice."
"Let's see how Kael handles his own reflection."
The air inside the binding circle was thick. Time moved slower. Light fractured.
The Voice-Eater's body had no clear shape anymore—half-gliding, half-humanoid, it shimmered like a reflection in broken glass.
But its attention was fixed.
On Kael.
He stood just outside the glyph ring, Veyrath glowing with a steady crimson hum. His voice was low, measured—uttered not in speech, but in the old tongue. The one buried beneath all others.
"You were sent," Kael said. "You didn't choose Rellmoor."
No reply. Only pressure. Like hands on the inside of the skull.
"Who gave the order?"
The creature tilted its head. Its featureless face rippled—then twisted.
For a moment, it wore Kael's face. Pale. Burned. Smiling.
Lyra flinched. "That's new."
Darric cursed. "It's mocking him."
Kael raised his free hand and activated the secondary glyph ring: a mirror lattice, designed to pierce through mimicry and false echoes.
The false image shattered.
The Voice-Eater hissed—not in sound, but in distortion. Glyphs dimmed slightly. The binding was fading.
"It's trying to overwrite the trap," Lyra warned. "Time's running out."
Kael stepped closer.
His voice sharpened into command.
"Tell me what stirs in the Black Vale."
"Tell me what sleeps beneath Vault Two."
The creature spasmed. Its limbs jerked like a marionette cut mid-motion.
Then it spoke—not aloud, but into Kael's mind.
"You bear the mark."
"You open doors you do not understand."
"You dream in tongues that should have died."
Kael's eyes flared red. The air cracked.
He grabbed Veyrath, drove its point deeper into the binding sigil—and channeled the Veilfire directly into the creature's chest.
"I don't want riddles. I want names."
The Voice-Eater buckled.
And then it gave one:
"Isryn."
The name echoed. Carved itself into Kael's thoughts like a brand.
Lyra's head jerked up. "That's… one of the sealed thirteen. From the Concordant Vault."
Darric's face went pale.
"That thing's been dead for five hundred years."
Kael didn't blink.
"Then someone's trying to wake it."
The Voice-Eater began to scream again—but this time, it wasn't alone.
Somewhere far off, in the Veil's tangled echo-chambers, something screamed back.
The glyphs overloaded.
The Voice-Eater's form dissolved into a smear of un-light, torn apart by the very silence it devoured.
Kael stepped back as the chapel floor cracked and the binding ring exploded outward in a pulse of Veilshock.
When the light died…
The creature was gone.
So was part of the chapel.
The stone smoldered.
But Kael remained standing.
Breathing hard.
"Isryn," he said again, like a curse.
Lyra looked to him. "What now?"
Kael turned toward the horizon—toward the Vaults.
"Now we find out why Malrik is waking the dead."
There was no place here.
No air. No sound. No time.
Just chains.
Sixteen of them. Each the length of a continent. Each sunk into a body so vast, the world itself had once bent around it.
Isryn slept.
Not peacefully. Not dreamlessly.
But bound.
A low vibration crawled through the void, rippling across the obsidian seal like blood through water.
The chains held. But the glyphs burned out, one by one, fading like embers in a storm.
The wards had not failed naturally.
Someone was feeding them poison.
And deep in the black, a single golden eye opened.
Isryn did not breathe, but the void seemed to shudder with its awareness.
Fragments of old worlds swam through its mind. Cities swallowed whole. Armies dissolved into nothing.
It remembered the taste of the first Sovereigns—their fire, their screams.
It remembered the one who sealed it away, a woman crowned in the light of a fallen star.
And now…
It remembered freedom.
Through the void, a voice reached it.
Malrik's voice.
"Awake, my harbinger."
"The world has grown soft in your absence."
"Rise—and tear the gates of the Veil apart."
The chains trembled harder.
The cracks spread.
And Isryn smiled.
The chamber was cold.
Not by temperature, but by presence. Veillight flickered across obsidian surfaces, casting rippling shadows that moved on their own.
Malrik stood at the edge of the Abyssal Basin, a circular pool of black water that reflected not the room—but visions of possibilities.
He watched as the surface twisted, revealing the image of Kael, blade drawn, standing amid the rubble of Grey Hollow.
"Too fast," Malrik muttered. "Too clever."
"But not ready."
He turned away from the basin, robes trailing like smoke, and descended the stairs to the Inner Vault.
Twelve archways circled the vault.
Each marked with a symbol: ancient bloodlines, dead gods, forbidden arts. Most were cold. Dormant.
But one now pulsed.
The arch of Isryn.
Malrik approached and extended his hand, placing it against the warding rune.
A thousand screams erupted in his mind—but he did not flinch. Instead, he smiled.
"Soon, old friend."
"I'll return to you what was stolen."
Malrik raised both arms.
The air darkened.
Three Hollow Priests emerged from the shadow-walls, cowled and silent. Where their mouths should be were only unmarked flesh.
Malrik gestured.
"Begin the Cradle Rite."
"Drain the glyph towers. Collapse the old seals."
"Prepare the world for Isryn's birth."
One of the priests tilted its head in question.
Malrik answered without being asked:
"Kael has already torn the path open."
"The Veil bleeds."
"All we must do… is let it drown."
Malrik stood once more before the Chain of Echoes.
Only twelve links remained untouched.
The thirteenth burned like a furnace.
"He thinks victory is a matter of battle."
"But the war is not for territory."
"It's for truth. For the right to shape what remains after the fall."
Malrik closed his eyes.
And for the first time in an age… he began to chant the true name of Isryn.
The one only Sovereigns knew.
The one meant never to be spoken again.
"Ahn'tael-Ris… Isryn-Khar…"
The Veil trembled.
The chains cracked.
And deep beneath the earth, something answered.
Grey Hollow was quieter now.
But not safe.
Veil residue still clung to the ruins—humming in stones, whispering in the cracks. Not loud. Not obvious. But present.
Wrong.
Lyra crouched near a fracture in the chapel floor, her palm hovering just above the glyph-ash. The sigils had burned out hours ago, but something still pulsed beneath them.
Something alive.
"You feel that?" she asked softly.
Darric nodded, one hand on the hilt of his blade.
"Like the ground's listening to us."
"No," Lyra whispered. "Like it's mimicking us."
She brushed her fingers over the edge of the stone.
The Veil threads etched into it had started to move.
Veil-script didn't move after collapse.
Ever.
"This wasn't left behind," Lyra murmured. "It's rewriting itself."
Darric stepped closer. "You think Malrik's already adapting?"
"No," she said. "I think… something older is watching."
She stood, brushing dust from her gloves, eyes scanning the ruins.
"Whatever we bound here—whatever we made speak—it wasn't alone."
Suddenly, the wind stopped.
The forest stilled. The crows fell silent.
And then—
A single sound pierced the quiet:
A child's voice, distant and soft.
"Mama?"
Lyra turned, blades half-drawn, but there was no one.
Darric raised his bow. "That mimic's dead. We destroyed it."
"That wasn't the mimic," she said.
They waited.
The voice did not return.
But something had changed in the light—a thin distortion, barely visible, like a heatwave rippling across cold stone.
And then it faded.
Lyra exhaled slowly, forcing calm.
"Kael needs to know. Now."
Darric nodded. "You think it's him—Isryn?"
"I think the Veil's no longer just reacting."
"It's beginning to speak back."
They turned from the ruins, leaving the broken chapel behind.
But behind them…
In the shadows of the crumbled arch…
A second echo whispered:
"Lyra."
Soft. Familiar.
In her own voice.
Lyra stood still for several breaths, eyes locked on the broken archway.
She had heard it. Her own voice. Her own name.
Spoken in the exact rhythm she would have used.
But it had come from nowhere.
Darric stepped beside her, tense.
"We move now," he said. "Before that thing tries to learn more."
She gave a curt nod. "Circle wide. No direct line through the ruins."
They moved out—slow, silent, eyes scanning everything. The wind had returned, but it carried no birdsong, no life.
Only the dry whisper of leaves and something underneath. A hum, just beneath hearing.
As they passed through the treeline east of Grey Hollow, Lyra dropped to one knee.
"There. You see it?"
Darric peered down.
A footprint. Their own boot pattern.
But inverted. Impossibly mirrored. As if it had been made not by pressure on the earth—but by something pulling upward from beneath.
More of them followed, looping around trees in impossible geometry—footsteps turning when no body could have.
"It's not tracking us," Darric said quietly.
"It's mirroring us."
Lyra narrowed her eyes.
"No—it's studying us. Every echo we leave, it copies. It's learning how to pass."
"It wants to blend."
They reached the edge of a shallow stream, its water cloudy with ash from the ruined chapel.
Lyra knelt beside it, and caught her breath.
In the reflection—only in the water—stood a second Lyra.
Same armor. Same weapons. Same scars.
But the eyes were completely black.
And it was smiling.
Darric saw it too. "Nope. No. We kill that. Now."
Lyra didn't blink. She slowly drew her shortblade.
But the moment the tip of the blade touched the reflection's surface, the figure vanished.
The stream stilled. And her own reflection returned.
Suddenly the air compressed.
Not wind. Not magic. Just pressure, from every direction.
A single tree cracked in half and fell. The soil warped. And in the space where the false footprints had ended—
A Veil Tear opened.
A narrow, jagged line through reality, about three feet tall. Flickering. Unstable.
From inside, something watched them.
But it did not step through.
It waited.
Lyra stepped back. "That's not a gate."
Darric: "No?"
"That's a mouth."
She reached for her comm-bead, fingers tight around it.
"Kael. Come in. We've got a tear—east of Grey Hollow. It's trying to copy us."
"Not attack. Not flee."
"It's trying to become us."
The Veil Tear pulsed once—like a heartbeat.
Then vanished.
Kael moved swiftly through the ruined pass known as Gravespine Ridge, flanked by a pair of scouts from the Emberwatch.
The trail before him led directly toward the edge of Vault Two—where one of the Dead Thirteen was buried.
But the path was wrong.
He could feel it in the air.
"The Veil's folding here," he muttered.
"Like something's trying to thicken the space."
The lead scout, a woman named Vess, nodded grimly.
"Every mile, the light bends harder."
"And we've seen no birds since sunbreak."
Kael didn't respond. He was listening.
Not to the air. Not to sound.
But to the pressure beneath thought.
The static snapped in his comm-glyph.
"Kael. Come in."
Lyra's voice—steady, but tight.
"We've got a tear—east of Grey Hollow. It mirrored us. Reflected our steps. Faces."
"It didn't strike."
"It watched."
"It wants to become."
There was silence, then the glyph pulsed with Veil static.
"This isn't just mimicry anymore. It's adaptation."
Kael slowed his stride.
He closed his fist, letting the glyph seal. The wind stirred his coat as if sensing tension.
He looked out over the cliff's edge.
Below, Vault Two's outer rim shimmered faintly—still sealed beneath layers of anti-Veil wards. But the soil around it had begun to blacken. Unnaturally. Roots twisted in impossible patterns. Stones seemed to blink when not looked at directly.
"Malrik doesn't need armies anymore," Kael said under his breath.
"He's trying to rewrite the idea of reality."
Vess approached. "Orders, commander?"
Kael's hand drifted to Veyrath's hilt.
"We breach the edge and establish a forward site. Small, hidden. No flares. If the Vault's reacting, it means the seal's weakening."
"Lyra and Darric regroup with us once they're clear."
He stared at the horizon.
"We're not just fighting what's coming out."
"We're fighting the part of us that wants to listen to it."
Behind them, the wind twisted strangely.
And somewhere beyond sight, deep inside the Vault…
A voice whispered Kael's name.
But it wasn't Malrik's.
It wasn't Isryn's.
It was his own.
Calling from inside the sealed tomb.
The ground curved strangely around the perimeter—flat terrain appearing sloped, sharp edges rippling like waves as they passed through Veil bleed.
Kael crouched behind a fractured ridge of blackstone. Beneath it, the glyph circle—once dormant—now pulsed faintly with blood-red light.
Six symbols burned along the ring's edge.
That was three more than the last time this Vault had stirred.
"How long since these symbols were last active?" he asked.
Vess checked her journal scroll.
"This Vault hasn't shown movement since the Sovereign War."
"Eighteen years. Glyphs dormant. No bleed. Until now."
"And now?" Kael murmured.
"Now it's breathing."
They spread out along the lower ledge. Silent. Careful.
Kael knelt beside a cracked piece of warding stone. His fingers brushed its surface—then flinched.
It was warm.
Alive.
And then—he saw it.
A handprint.
Not carved. Not drawn.
Pressed from below.
"This Vault's not sealed anymore," Kael whispered.
"It's waiting."
From deep beneath the surface, something spoke.
Not in words.
In emotion. Memory.
Kael felt it pour through him in waves:
The weight of a sword held too long
The betrayal of someone trusted
The scream of a kingdom burning
The sensation of tearing out one's name
His eyes flared red. Lightning cracked faintly along his knuckles.
He gritted his teeth and stood fast.
"No," he growled into the dark. "Not again."
The pressure faded. Slightly. But the air still hummed.
"It knows who you are," Vess said.
"Worse," Kael answered. "It knows who I was."
One of the glyphs flared.
And in the light—just for a heartbeat—Kael saw something beneath the glyph circle.
A body.
Tall. Unmoving. Featureless—but familiar.
A mirror image. Cloaked in a torn version of his own armor.
His face. His hair.
But no eyes.
No mouth.
Just a symbol burned into its chest.
A crown split by a lightning bolt.
"It's building a vessel," Kael said.
"A second me."
He turned to Vess.
"We seal this place now. Before the echo finishes forming."
But even as he said it…
A second heartbeat pulsed through the ground.
And a voice—his voice—whispered from the Vault:
"Too late."