The passage spat him out into open space.
For a moment Evin thought he was falling, because the narrow stone crush of the tunnel vanished all at once and his feet hit nothing but echo.
Then his boots found marble.
He lurched forward, catching himself on shaking legs, and looked up.
The hall stretched out around him like the inside of a dead cathedral.
Tall pillars lined either side, carved with scripture that climbed all the way to a vaulted ceiling veined with age cracks. Dim blue flames burned in sconces along the walls, casting sick, cold light that made the air look thinner than it was. The echoes of his stumbling steps rolled away into the distance and came back wrong, arriving a half-breath too late.
The place was almost empty.
No statues.
No benches.
No altar.
Just space.
And his breathing.
And the quiet pressure of too much air.
Evin took a step. His shadow followed two heartbeats later.
He stared down at it, chest tightening.
"Keep up," he muttered.
It shuddered, then fell back into rough sync with his steps.
The remnants inside him never stopped moving. They pressed against his ribs and throat and skull, a shifting swarm of presence that refused to settle. His muscles felt like they'd been filled with splinters, every motion scraping something raw.
He walked anyway.
The sound of his footsteps made him flinch. They were too loud. Too sharp. Like the hall was leaning in to listen.
"Just a room," he whispered. "Just stone. Just air."
The Veil pulsed at the lie.
He made it maybe halfway into the hall before his balance tilted. The floor seemed to tilt with him, sliding sideways and then back with nauseating sway. His knees buckled. He staggered toward one of the pillars, hands out, and caught himself against the scripture-scarred stone.
It was cold.
Too cold.
The carved words beneath his palms vibrated faintly, as if they had their own voice.
Purify.
Contain.
Erase.
The remnants shrank back from the contact like burned skin.
Evin jerked his hands away with a hiss.
"Fine," he muttered to no one. "No leaning."
His lungs refused to fill all the way. Each breath felt shallow and tight, like something huge was already occupying the space where air should go. He tried to breathe past it.
In.
Out.
The whispers started as a tickle at the back of his mind.
Not words at first.
Just impressions.
Heat.
Stone.
Falling.
Light that burned instead of illuminated.
Then one sharpened into a voice.
It hurt.
Evin pressed his fingers into his temples. "Not now."
Another voice, higher, thinner.
Don't— please— don't let them—
He clenched his jaw.
The hall wavered.
For a moment he saw it not as it was, but as it had been in someone else's last seconds—filled with robed figures, gloved hands, a circle of clergy closing in as someone knelt where he now stood.
Blink.
Empty again.
His heart hammered.
He forced one foot ahead of the other, pushing himself toward the far end of the hall. There had to be another passage. Another door. Another crack in the Church's careful design.
The Veil coiled tighter.
His vision doubled.
One hall became two, sliding over each other like misaligned memories. Flames shivered in their brackets. The light from them stretched into long, thin lines that didn't line up with the sconces, as if the fire had forgotten where it belonged.
"Stop it," Evin rasped to the thing inside him. "Stop—"
A memory slammed into him like a thrown stone.
Stone becoming skin.
Skin becoming ash.
Ash becoming a scream that had nowhere to go.
He dropped to one knee, palm hitting the floor so hard his bones stung.
The whispers swelled.
We burned here.
We knelt here.
We begged here.
We ended here.
He saw flashes with each breath:
A woman on her knees, hair shorn, eyes wide with terror.
A ring of priests with lifted hands.
Light gathering, humming.
Then—
White.
Nothing.
He was back in his own body, gasping.
Sweat slid down his spine, chilling fast in the hall's dead air. He braced his hands on the floor, fingers splayed, trying to steady the spinning sky of ceiling above him.
"Not… mine," he forced out. "That wasn't mine."
The Veil didn't care.
It had never cared whose pain it showed him.
It pulsed again, harder. His shadow spread around him like spilled ink, seeping away from his hands and knees in jagged lines.
"Stop," he whispered. "Please, I—"
The world detonated.
Not with sound.
With pressure.
Something inside him snapped, and the release tore outward.
Shadows exploded from his skin, ripping across the floor in a shockwave that raced toward the pillars and walls. The air compressed so violently his ears popped; the blue flames went flat and then flared sideways, bending under the force like they were made of cloth.
Pillars groaned.
Thick marble, inscribed with doctrine, cracked from top to bottom in a spiderweb of fractures. Scripture flared bright white for a single heartbeat—then blackened, letters bleeding into each other like ink left in rain.
Evin was thrown backward.
He hit the floor hard, the impact knocking breath from his lungs. He rolled onto his side, coughing dryly, every nerve screaming protest. The hall around him roared with movement and breaking stone.
He didn't pass out.
The Veil wouldn't let him.
He watched.
The floor rippled. Whole rows of tiles lifted and fell in waves, as if something beneath the hall had decided it no longer respected straight lines. Cracks opened, closed, opened again in jagged mouths that showed darkness beneath.
One of the pillars gave up its struggle and split down the middle. Chunks of carved marble dropped in staggered beats, smashing into the ground with enough force to send splinters skittering across the floor.
The blue flames screamed.
Not like wind.
Like metal dragged along bone.
Their light stretched into long streaks that bent around the shockwaves of shadow still radiating from Evin's body.
He clutched at his chest, fingers digging into fabric, feeling the pull.
The Veil wasn't just leaking.
It was trying to get out.
His back arched involuntarily. Shadow-tendrils burst from his spine, black and glossy and edged like torn glass. They lashed wildly, striking pillars, floor, empty air, leaving trails of dark residue that burned through scripture wherever they touched it.
"Stop—" He gagged on the word.
His tongue felt thick with unfamiliar syllables. For a second, someone else's prayer came out in another language entirely, a string of sounds he didn't understand but felt like death in his mouth.
The remnants weren't just showing him their memories now.
They were using him to speak.
He dug his nails into the stone, trying to anchor himself to something that wasn't moving. Slivers of marble broke under his fingers. His arms trembled, veins standing out in sharp lines.
Another pillar began to fall.
The crack that had split it widened with a sharp, gunshot pop, and then the entire column tipped sideways. Evin flinched, but it crashed down several paces away, sending up a choking cloud of dust.
He could barely see.
The hall became a blur of fractured shapes and tilting lines, of falling stone and seething darkness. The Veil roared inside him, drowning his own thoughts in a flood of voices.
They erased us here.
They watched us scream.
They called it cleansing.
They carved their prayers into our bones.
His breath came in short, panicked bursts.
"This isn't—" he choked. "This isn't helping—"
The Veil didn't know how to help.
It only knew how to exist.
A new sound cut through the collapse.
Singing.
It started faintly, like a thread of sound caught on stone, then grew as more voices joined. A too-perfect harmony, cold and sharp. The hymn of the Choir.
They entered through the far archway, robes swirling, faces veiled. A formation of six at first, then more behind them, each pair of lips moving in synchronized prayer.
Their song pushed against the Veil's riot, trying to press it down, contain it, erase it.
The effect was immediate.
On them.
Not on him.
The first row of Choir members shuddered mid-step. Their song wobbled, notes bending off-key. One staggered, hand flying to his head as if something had crawled into his skull.
Another's voice broke entirely, his note turning into a rough cough. He dropped to his knees, fingers splayed on the floor, eyes wide and unfocused beneath his veil.
Evin watched, horrified and helpless, as their own hymn turned against them.
The Veil's eruption twisted their chant, catching at each word and stretching it thin, unraveling meaning. Syllables melted into nonsense. Harmonies collided and shattered into discord. A few tried to push louder, to overcome whatever was corrupting their voices, and only made it worse.
A third Choir member screamed.
Not words.
Just raw sound, ripped from his throat as he clawed at his own face, tearing off his veil and throwing it aside. His eyes were bloodshot, veins standing out at his temples. He staggered back from Evin as if from a fire.
"Breach—" he gasped. "It's—it's—"
He didn't finish.
The ground beneath him buckled. He fell, hitting hard.
The others fell back, formation broken. Some tried to regroup; others simply stumbled away, hands pressed over ears like the echoes inside the hall were too much to bear.
Evin curled in on himself, shadows still whipping from his spine but losing some of their violence. His jaw ached from clenching it. His muscles burned like they'd been torn and restitched wrong.
"Stop," he begged the thing inside him. "You'll kill us all."
For the first time, the Veil hesitated.
Not because it heard his words.
Because something else inside the storm of remnants flared—a tiny shard of something not born from the Church's cruelty. Not tied to burning or stone or erasure.
Rell, hauling him up the steps.
Rell snarling at a guard, "He's already burned. Haven't you taken enough?"
Rell's hand gripping his cloak, keeping him moving when his legs had wanted to give up.
Evin latched onto that flicker like it was the only real thing left.
"Rell," he whispered.
The shadows wavered.
He sucked in a ragged breath. "You… you didn't break. You stayed. So I don't get to break here."
Another breath.
Another.
"Pull back," he whispered—not to the Bishop this time, not to the Church, but to the Veil. "That's enough. You made your point. Pull. Back."
The tendrils resisted.
For a heartbeat he thought they would lash out harder just to spite him.
Then, slowly, they began to retract.
One by one, they sank back into his skin, leaving the air clear of dancing shadow. The pressure in the hall eased, like a fist unclenching around stone. The flames in the sconces wavered back into some semblance of normal shape, though they still burned wrong-cold.
The floor stopped moving.
The last crack in the pillars settled with a low, groaning creak.
Dust drifted down from the ceiling in thick sheets, softening the hard edges of the damage.
Everything fell still.
Evin collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, chest heaving. Sweat dripped from his hair onto the stone. His arms trembled violently under his own weight.
He waited for the next wave.
It didn't come.
The Choir members still standing stared at him across the ruined hall. None of them moved closer. No one sang. Their earlier certainty had vanished, leaving something raw and frightened in its place.
One of them whispered, voice cracking under the strain:
"What… are you?"
Evin didn't have breath to answer.
He wasn't sure he could.
He pushed against the floor, forcing his legs under him again. They felt like they might fold at any second, but they held. Just barely.
The hall was broken.
Pillars in pieces.
Scripture scorched.
Ceiling fractured.
Choir scattered.
And all of it because he had lost control for a moment.
He swallowed against the dryness in his throat, tasting dust and something metallic.
He couldn't stay.
He staggered forward, away from the crushed center of the hall, toward the far side where cracks had spiderwebbed across the wall. One fissure had widened enough for daylight—or something like it—to pierce through in a thin slant.
Up close, he saw that it wasn't daylight.
It was just less darkness.
The wall had split, stone shoved aside by the shockwave. Beyond the broken edge, he saw a narrow service tunnel running parallel to the hall. Older stone. Less ornamentation. No scripture.
No eyes.
He didn't remember deciding to move toward it. One moment he was staring at the opening, the next his shoulder was scraping through it, cloak catching on jagged rock as he squeezed into the gap.
Behind him, no one grabbed him.
No hymn swelled.
No command rang out.
The Choir let him go.
He didn't know if that should make him feel relieved or worse.
On the other side, the tunnel was dim and cramped. His footsteps no longer echoed, swallowed instead by close, damp stone. The air smelled older here, like dust and mold and water that had seeped where it wasn't welcome.
Evin leaned a hand against the wall and drew a breath that didn't taste like burning scripture.
His legs wanted to fold. He didn't let them.
One step.
Then another.
His shadow walked with him again, back in sync.
The remnants inside him were quieter. Not silent. Never silent. But the screaming had dulled to murmurs now, the pressure less knife-sharp and more like a constant weight he'd grown too tired to argue with.
He turned a corner.
Somewhere ahead, deeper in the tunnels, a sound tapped faintly against stone.
Not dripping water.
Not shifting rock.
A pattern.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
Like wood or bone striking stone at a measured pace.
A cane.
Evin froze.
"Hello?" he rasped before he could stop himself.
The tapping stopped.
Silence stretched out in front of him, thick and patient.
No one answered.
He waited another few breaths, but no shape emerged from the dark. No voice greeted him or condemned him. The tunnels stayed still.
Eventually, his legs demanded movement.
He swallowed, pushed off the wall, and kept walking—toward the deeper dark, toward the unknown, toward whatever waited in the bones of the Sanctum.
Behind him, the shattered hall groaned softly as more stone settled out of place.
No one followed.
For now.