Mud pressed against his lips like a silencing curse.
Solan Maelvaran clawed through a skin-thick layer of grave sludge before gasping in a breath not meant for lungs so newly stolen. Damp soil and sour rot choked his throat as he pushed upward, tearing free of the trench's embrace. Rain whispered down from the broken heavens, streaking blood from his temple as he collapsed onto the embankment, gasping, coughing, trembling.
He should be dead. This body—scarred, starved, torn by rope and ritual—was not his own. Yet memory blurred. Was it?
Beneath him, the plague trench still steamed, home to cadavers cast without name or rite. Above, twisted ruins of Eidralune's outer district loomed: jagged spires cracked by time, temple fragments scrawled with divine seals that no longer glowed.
He didn't remember dying.
But he remembered the name they buried him with.
Varien Raithe. A disgraced noble. A heretic. One of the fallen Lords of the Veil.
Solan was none of these. And all of them.
Lightning split the black sky. In its wake, something hummed in the earth. A vibration against bone. Solan turned slowly, and there it lay half-buried beside the torn corpse he'd risen from.
A Mask.
Obsidian black, etched with runes that seemed to ripple like water under moonlight. As his trembling fingers brushed it, the air split around him—not with sound, but with silence.
He didn't put it on.
It put itself on him.
Pain roared through his skull as if a thousand languages screamed their final syllables at once. Symbols flared across his flesh—one bleeding from the back of his hand, another carved above his heart like a branded oath.
Veilcraft Initiation: Path of the Forsaken Tongue recognized.
No words formed. Only knowing.
The Mask whispered not with voice, but with hunger.
His shadow twisted beneath him—reaching. And then, something rose from it. A coiling, serpentine figure made of ink and memory.
"Wyrm," the voice echoed in his mind. Not his. Not fully.
It stared at him with hollow eyes. Its body shimmered with remnants of regret. It bore no mouth, yet he heard it speak from within his spine.
"Feed me. Or be consumed."
Solan stumbled away, pressing his palm to his ribs where the pulse of the system—something buried deep in his soul—had awakened.
.
Tier: Unranked
Veilcraft Access: Incomplete
Soul State: Severed / Rebinding
System Synchronization: 31%
Status: Bound to Mask [Forsaken Tongue]
Damage Accumulated: 2% (Ruptured Lungs, Nerve Trauma)
.
The words vanished into bloodlight. Behind him, the trench boiled with a pressure not of this world. Something else was coming. Or waking.
He fled.
The ruins of Eidralune's Veil District were still and haunted. Once the city's divine heart, it was now a dead cathedral to forgotten gods. Statues lay broken beneath withering ivy. Church bells wept rust. The wind carried with it not leaves, but whispers.
He remembered nothing of this place.
But the streets seemed to know him.
He passed through a stone arch marred with runes older than the empire—sigils of sealing. At the center of the broken plaza stood a raised dias, and on it: the remnants of a pyre. Charred bones lay half-scattered. Chains still glinted from their anchor points.
He'd been executed here.
Twice.
Once as Varien Raithe. Once as Solan Maelvaran.
And something still watched.
He turned. The torchlight of inquisitorial hunters burned in the distance, sweeping the shattered district like red stars in orbit. A prayer echoed from the walls.
"By chain, by truth, by judgment's tongue, we bind the cursed blood…"
Solan pressed himself into a shadowed alcove, veins filled with frozen glass. But the Mask pulsed again, stronger now. He didn't mean to speak. Yet his lips moved.
"Let them forget," he rasped. "Let them see nothing."
Runes bled from his tongue into the air—unwritten, unspoken words of the First Language. A surge of Veilcraft lashed reality.
A ripple distorted the plaza. The inquisitors blinked—then passed him by, eyes glazed. A successful spell, yet his ears rang with pain. His heart skipped twice.
Another line appeared in the interface.
.
Veil Stability: 92%
Symbol Drift: Minor onset
Mirror Sync Delay: Detected
Damage: +3% (Ritual feedback surge)
.
His breath caught.
Footsteps now echoed not behind him, but beside him. Two of him. One shadow. One real. For a second, his reflection in the broken window moved too slow—lagged behind.
"Don't look," Wyrm hissed. "That's not your face anymore."
Solan closed his eyes.
He didn't remember falling asleep.
But when his eyes next opened, he stood before a different sky.
A violet moon loomed above, bleeding strands of starlight into a corridor of bone and ash. Lanterns hung from black chains. Doors opened to nowhere. Walls breathed.
The Veiled Labyrinth.
The dream-realm of all Voidmarked. A twisted echo of the world. Here, fear birthed monsters. Sin built architecture.
He stepped forward.
.
Realm Transition: Complete
Veiled Labyrinth Tier: Regret
Soul Resonance: Linked [Shadow Entity: Wyrm]
Reckoning Available: Trial of Echoes
.
The Mask whispered again, but this time it wasn't in hunger.
It was in recognition.
Here, in the Labyrinth, Solan Maelvaran's story would begin again.
As a corpse reborn.
A prince without a name.
A shadow that spoke in screams.