They left before dawn.
No fanfare, no briefing room applause—just the hiss of steel buckles and the soft clink of sigil-stamped gear. Eline Mora didn't speak during the ride. She hadn't said much after assigning Kael to her team either, aside from one clipped warning:
"Don't make me regret this. The Gloam cults don't recruit—they consume."
Their horses moved quietly along the misted track east of the capital, hooves muffled by early frost. Kael rode a pace behind her, watching how she never once looked back.
He didn't take it personally.
Eline Mora didn't do personal.
Not unless she could weaponize it.
They reached the outskirts of a village called Wexmere by mid-afternoon—a town too quiet for its population, shuttered windows and scorched offerings left unburned at shrine-stones. There was a stillness to the air, like something holding its breath.
The Duskveil loomed just beyond the tree line. Too close for this early in the season.
Kael shifted in his saddle. Tenebris stirred faintly against the base of his spine, restless.
Eline dismounted first. "Standard sweep," she said. "No magic unless you want to draw attention. Stay to my flank unless I tell you otherwise."
Kael nodded. "And if I see something that stares back?"
She met his gaze, cold and unreadable. "Then don't blink."
The first sign something was wrong came from the silence.
Wexmere wasn't abandoned. Doors creaked open to reveal faces—blank, unblinking, neither hostile nor afraid. Just… watching.
Children stood still in the streets as they passed. No movement. No whisper. Like actors waiting for a cue.
Kael touched the hilt of his blade. "This isn't just fear."
"No," Eline agreed. "This is conditioning."
They reached the old stone chapel at the village's centre—what should have been a holy ground. But the wards were cracked. The sigils etched around the door had been rewritten.
Not broken. Not erased.
Rewritten.
Eline hissed a curse. "Whisper-script. Backward. Twisted."
Kael squinted. "What does it say?"
She frowned. "'Veil not fallen… but unveiled.'"
Kael's stomach turned. "That mean anything to you?"
"Not yet," she said. But her voice had lost its edge.
Inside the chapel, rot perfumed the air—sweet, wet, and wrong. The stained glass windows had been painted over. Shapes coiled through the dark, too fluid for dust, too solid for smoke.
Kael took a step forward and Tenebris tightened.
Not this place, whispered the bond in his blood.
Not safe. Not veil. Wrong mirror. Wrong mouth.
He turned to warn Eline—only to find her already staring at the altar, where the shadows bent the wrong way.
Kael opened his mouth to speak.
And the screaming began.
It didn't come from outside.
It came from beneath the altar—low and wet and choked with blood.
Eline drew her dagger. Kael flared Tenebris to his fingertips, shadows rising like ink off his forearms. The voice was human. Or had been.
They moved as one.
The stairs behind the altar led downward—into catacombs never charted, wards never set.
And the fog followed.
It wasn't supposed to.
The Duskveil was a night-thing, bound to threshold and silence.
But it dripped from the ceiling like breath condensed on skin, curling through the stone like it belonged there.
Kael whispered, "Why is it inside?"
Eline said nothing.
She didn't know.
At the base of the stairs, they found the body.
A Whisperer. Half-rotted. Eyes clawed out, skin tattooed with cult-script, but the sigil stitched into his coat was unmistakable.
"Recon unit," Eline muttered. "Went dark last month."
Kael crouched beside the corpse. "They didn't just kill him. They unmade him."
Tenebris rippled at his touch. Kael let it stretch, just enough to test the air.
Emotion residue pulsed like a dying heartbeat—anguish, clarity, and something else—
Recognition.
Tenebris flinched.
This one saw.
This one knew.
Kael reeled back.
"What?" Eline asked sharply.
"He was Veilbound."
Eline stared. "You're sure?"
Kael nodded once.
Her jaw tightened. "We leave. Now."
"Not going to collect the body?"
"He's not coming back. And if we wait, neither will we."
They made it back to the surface in silence, the mist trailing them like a leash.
Back on the village edge, Eline stopped.
Kael followed her gaze.
A woman stood in the centre of the street—one of the villagers. Her eyes leaked black tears. Her shadow pulsed against the stones like a separate thing.
And she smiled at Kael.
"Little kin," she whispered.
Then vanished.
Not fled. Not ran.
Folded.
Like shadow into dusk.
That night, camped beyond the forest, Kael didn't sleep.
Eline didn't speak for hours. She simply sat, back straight, face lit by the dull glow of their sigil lamp.
At last she said, "That thing. The woman. She called you kin."
Kael said nothing.
"I need to know something, Kael. Are you making the Duskveil follow you?"
Kael looked at her. "No."
She didn't blink.
"But I think it knows me."
And she didn't ask again.
But she didn't turn her back on him, either.
Interlude: The Mouth Beneath Mirrors
The Veilmother awoke beneath the roots of a dead god.
Her breath rattled through the hollow bones of Wexmere's chapel crypt, curled through forgotten scripture and bloodied stone. She no longer needed eyes to see. Not with the fog watching for her.
The Whisperers had come.
And left.
But one had stayed, if only for a moment—his shadow clinging to her altar like a reluctant offering.
Little Kin, she had called him.
Not a lie. Not yet a truth.
She knelt where he had stood, hands black with ash and ichor, and pressed her palm into the floor. The Duskveil rippled in answer, not smoke, not air—but memory, still wet with his scent.
The Veilmother inhaled.
"A woundling," she whispered.
Around her, the other cultists knelt in near-silence, arranged in a spiral carved into the stone with bone ash and red iron. Every face was veiled. Every hand trembled with ecstatic anticipation.
"He doesn't know," murmured the Blind Apostle, the high-voiced girl who had been the first to dream of the Gloam Prince's return. "He walks unbound."
"Not for long," said the Veilmother.
They'd seen the signs in their dreams—the fluttering skin, the echoing breath, the coin dropped by mistake. The boy bore the Mark of Echoes. He was already being called.
One of the lesser cultists—a boy no older than Kael, shaking beneath his robe—stepped forward.
"I—I touched his shadow," he said, breathless. "It didn't flinch."
The Veilmother turned her eyeless face toward him. "It knew you."
He nodded, lips bloodied from silent chanting. "It thirsted. Like ours do."
More than thirst. Recognition. Kinship. Something older than blood and deeper than prophecy.
"It's him, then?" the Blind Apostle asked.
"No," the Veilmother said softly. "Not yet. The Gloam Prince waits still."
The gathered cultists let out a sound like wind caught in bone flutes. Hunger. Awe.
"But his path bleeds shadow," she continued. "And if he walks far enough into the dusk… he may become what we have lost."
"What of the girl?" someone dared to ask. "The ice-hearted handler. She walks with fire in her name."
Eline.
The Veilmother's mouth curled like torn silk. "That one will bleed silver."
She leaned close to the stone now, whispering words into the Veil itself—binding not magic, but memory into the very substance of the fog.
"Mark him," she breathed.
"Follow him."
"Watch how he chooses."
"And if he crosses the mirror's mouth—awaken."
The fog shifted, listening.
The cultists began to weep.
Somewhere far above, in the forest clearing where Kael had stood just hours before, the air grew colder.
And a flicker of shadow peeled itself from a tree trunk and followed.