Prologue: The Shifting Veil

Silence hung over the ruins like a held breath.

Beyond the shattered stone and blackened earth, the world seemed unchanged—trees whispering in the wind, distant birdsong trembling across the valley. And yet Lira knew better. The air itself carried a strange weight now, as though the world were listening.

She walked where the monastery once stood. Pillars lay broken, scorched, charred to ash at their bases. The mountain wind dragged the scent of old smoke through her hair. She didn’t remember falling. She didn’t remember screaming. She remembered only—

Teeth. Shadow. Hunger.

And then the darkness speaking her name.

She placed a hand against what remained of a wall. The stone was cold. But beneath the cold, something pulsed—faint, like the last echo of a heartbeat.

“Lira.”

The voice was not spoken.
It was felt.

The others believed she had escaped the Nythrall unmarked. That she had survived. That she had won.

But the truth pressed against her bones like frost.

The veil did not end at its surface. It seeped. It lingered. And something had crossed with her.

In the quiet, she could still hear them—the whispers curling along the cracks in the veil like smoke. They followed her into waking, into dreams, into the spaces between thoughts.

You are not alone.
You are ours.
We remember you.

Her pulse fluttered like a trapped bird.

Somewhere deep inside, beneath memory and fear and the fragile shell of who she had been, something stirred in response.

Not with terror.

But recognition.

She knew the darkness now.

And worse—

It knew her.

— End Preview —

The veil is thinning. The shadows remember. And Lira is no longer certain which side she stands on.