The Vein has always pulsed beneath Virelya.
Before the kingdoms. Before the gods turned to stone. Before lovers learned to lie.
They say the world began with a scream, a roar that cracked the heavens, bled the skies, and bared the bones of magic to the earth. The Vein, they called it. Not a river, not a root. A living current beneath the land, ancient and hungering, that twisted elemental threads into the veins of men.
But the Vein does not choose lightly. It speaks in firestorms and trembles. It dreams in blood.
And long ago, it dreamed of a girl who should never have been born.
Night had fallen in the eastern marshes, but the air still burned. Smoke curled from the mossy ground like the last breath of something hunted. A child cried somewhere beyond the fen—soft, hiccuping. Then silence.
Then a scream.
The kind that made the birds burst from the trees. The kind that split the dark in two.
A figure staggered into the clearing, barefoot and blood-soaked, the edges of her tattered cloak glowing faintly orange. Embers clung to her skin like bruises. She did not look back. Not when the trees behind her twisted. Not when the shadows shrieked.
She clutched something to her chest. Something wrapped in silk and silence. A newborn.
The baby did not cry.
The woman fell to her knees at the foot of an ancient tree—twisted, leafless, older than any crown—and pressed her forehead to the roots. Her lips moved in a prayer. Not to gods. Not anymore.
"To the Vein," she whispered hoarsely. "Take her. Hide her. Let her burn, but not yet."
Then the light swallowed her.
A pulse ripped through the earth.
Not a quake. Not a tremor. A beat. Like a heart.
The tree opened.
Not with bark-splitting violence, but a slow exhale. A hidden cavity in the roots unfurled, lit by the gold-red glow of the Vein beneath. The woman placed the infant inside and ran bloodied fingers over the baby's brow. A final kiss. A last whisper.
Then she turned to face the fire behind her.
And did not scream when it swallowed her.
Centuries later, across the continent, two heirs to rival kingdoms would touch for the first time—hands accidentally brushing in a temple not meant to hold them both. And something beneath the floor would pulse.
Soft. Slow. Ancient.
The Vein remembers.
And the girl who should never have been born, she remembers too.
She will be the end of all things.
Or the beginning.