Kairos Vale didn't like heights.
But up on the roof of the old observatory, above the chaos of the city, he felt like he could finally breathe.
Lunaris City buzzed below him with hover-trams, blinking holosigns, and people too busy to notice a boy sitting five stories up, lost in a sketchbook. The sky stretched violet, the twin suns hanging low like lazy eyes watching from afar.
Kairos pressed his pencil to the page. His fingers moved without thinking, guided by something deep inside. He drew towers shaped like claws, mountains floating in fog, and winged shadows flying beneath a shattered moon.
He had no idea where the images came from. They were too vivid to be fantasy. Too familiar to be imagination.
Then the sky cracked.
Thunder boomed out of nowhere. The pencil snapped in his hand.
Kairos looked up. Clear sky. Not a single cloud.
And then—lightning.
A white-hot bolt ripped straight down from the heavens, faster than thought, louder than sound. It didn't hit the city, or the observatory.
It hit him.
There was no pain. No scream. Just light.
And then… darkness.
---
Beeping.
Soft voices.
Flickering lights.
Kairos opened his eyes to find himself staring at a cold metal ceiling. Holograms danced above his chest, reading vitals he couldn't understand.
"Subject's stable. Neural sync returning to baseline."
The voice sounded distant, mechanical. He turned his head. A woman in a white coat stood by the bed, tapping on a tablet.
"Kairos Vale?" she asked. "Can you hear me?"
"I… yeah," he said slowly, blinking.
"You're in Mira Sector's Medical Core," she explained. "You fainted. Witnesses say you were struck by a power surge. You're lucky."
He didn't feel lucky.
He felt wrong.
---
Later that evening, after they discharged him, his mother drove him home in silence. She glanced at him often through the transport mirror, lips tight, eyes unreadable.
He didn't say much either.
Back in his room, Kairos peeled off his shirt and stood in front of the mirror. He didn't know what he expected to find. A scar, maybe. A burn. Proof that something real had happened.
But there was nothing—until the light in the bathroom flickered.
That's when he saw it.
Faint silver lines traced themselves across his chest, glowing for a single moment before fading into nothing. Not a wound, not a mark.
A word.
Veilwalker.
---
The days that followed were strange.
Mirrors glitched when he walked past. Birds followed him across the city, flying just overhead like silent shadows. Streetlights dimmed. Doors opened on their own. Sometimes people would glance at him, eyes narrowing, before hurrying away as if they'd seen something they couldn't explain.
He kept sketching. He couldn't stop.
And the drawings were getting worse.
A city made of bones. Rivers that flowed upward. Trees with roots in the sky. Every time he tried to draw something normal, the pencil refused to obey.
These weren't just pictures anymore.
They were memories.
But they weren't his.
---
On the fifth day, the doorway appeared.
Kairos was cutting through a narrow alley behind the tech bazaar when the air began to hum. Not a sound, really—more like pressure in his skull. A vibration in his bones.
Then, the space in front of him... tore.
A single line of light opened in the air, thin and vertical, like a crack in glass. It widened slowly, splitting space itself. Behind it, another world shimmered. Endless black sand. A sky with no stars. A broken moon hung low, casting eerie blue light across the ruins of something ancient.
Kairos stared.
Then a voice whispered, right beside his ear, though no one stood behind him.
"Return, Veilwalker. Before it remembers you."
He turned. The alley was empty. Lights flickered and buzzed. Shadows stretched long and unnatural across the walls.
The doorway pulsed again, wider now. Waiting.
His body wanted to run.
But something deeper… didn't.
This was the place from his drawings. The same sky. The same moon. The same feeling in his chest, like gravity pulling in reverse. He wasn't afraid.
He was curious.
Kairos reached out.
The moment his fingertips brushed the light, everything changed. His body twisted, stretched, pulled through a tunnel of color and sound and memory. It felt like falling—but through time, not space.
And then, just like that, it was over.
---
He landed hard on warm black sand.
The air was cold, sharp, and unfamiliar. He sat up, breath fogging, eyes wide.
Above him, the moon loomed impossibly large, etched with strange runes. Giant stone ruins jutted from the ground like broken teeth. In the distance, something massive moved—too far to see clearly, but close enough to feel.
Behind him, the doorway flickered once… and vanished.
Kairos stood slowly. The ground hummed beneath his feet, alive and ancient.
The wind whispered in a voice he somehow understood.
"You have crossed the Veil."
And deep in the heart of this forgotten world, something stirred.
Watching.
Waiting.
Because the Veilwalker had arrived.
---
End of Chapter 1