The path to the Hollow Veil was not on any map.
Kael stood at the edge of a dead forest, the air thick with stillness. No birds, no breeze, only the tension of something ancient watching.
The scroll's flame had led him here.
Before him, a tear in space—a shimmering black slit—hung suspended between two crumbling trees. It pulsed like a wound stitched by darkness itself.
Kael stepped through.
The Realm Beyond
He emerged into a realm without sky.
Black sand crunched underfoot. Above him stretched a dome of gray light filled with flickering visions—memories, futures, nightmares—all blending, overlapping, bleeding into one another.
This was the Outer Sanctum of the Hollow Veil.
The trial had already begun.
"You seek sight?" came a voice without form. "Then see what must not be seen."
Light fractured.
The realm shattered.
Kael's senses tore sideways. For a moment, he saw himself—young, alone, burning—and then he saw himself old, dead-eyed, ruling a throne of ash.
Then, nothing.
The Trial
Kael awoke, or thought he did.
He stood in a mirror hall—thousands of reflections stretching in every direction. Each version of him was different. In one, he wore robes of gold. In another, his eyes bled shadow. In some, he was laughing. In others, screaming. Some were corpses. A few… were monsters.
Then they began to speak.
"You will lose yourself."
"You will kill her."
"You will fail."
"You will become them."
Kael clenched his fists, but his body didn't move.
The mirrors started to crack.
"You walk a path that ends in you," came a deeper voice, not from the mirrors but from within.
Kael saw a version of himself cloaked in ethereal white flame, eyes hollow with cosmic silence.
"Tier Ten is not ascension," the version said. "It is annihilation."
Mind Over Mirror
Kael's breath slowed. He looked into one mirror, locking eyes with a reflection that was almost him—but had flinched.
"You are not me."
The reflection snarled and shattered.
He turned to another—this one weeping, broken by guilt.
"You're not me either."
Another crack.
He began to walk. Mirror by mirror, he shattered them not with power, but with clarity. Acknowledging, dismissing, refining.
Until only one remained: himself as he was.
Cold. Controlled. Alone.
But real.
"You are me," Kael whispered.
The mirror turned dark, and then a door appeared.
He stepped through.
The Inner Sanctum
The Hollow Veil's true chamber was silent. Twelve masked Seers sat around a floating eye of light, each line on their masks flickering as if breathing.
Only Lirae stood.
"You have passed the Trial of Fractured Sight."
"It was not difficult," Kael replied coolly. "Just… irritating."
"Then you saw the cost?"
Kael's gaze did not falter. "I saw possibilities. That's all."
"We see what may become. You see what must," Lirae said. "We offer you this: knowledge not written, truths buried in the screams of the War of Immortals."
"In exchange?" Kael asked.
The Hollow Seer raised a hand. A tome appeared, bound in skin, etched in shifting glyphs.
"The records of the Tenfold Body Unification. What you seek lies beyond its pages."
"And the cost?"
"A single truth," Lirae said, stepping forward. "The one you fear the most."
Kael was silent.
Then: "I already know it."
He took the tome.
Aftermath
As he walked away from the sanctum, the Seers murmured.
"He saw beyond Tier Ten."
"He should not have survived that."
"And yet…"
Lirae stared into the dying light of the chamber.
"He didn't just survive. He chose."