The forest around Velcrith had grown less forgiving.
Corren had been running for days. The bounty hunters were getting smarter—tracking not just his steps but his patterns. One had followed the rhythm of his campfire ash. Another nearly caught him using a mimicry spell that pulsed with false threat—just enough to trick someone into reacting too soon.
He hadn't slept properly in three nights. The Song—once a distant warning—now whispered constantly in his skull. Too many deathnotes. Too many shifting melodies. The world around him was singing of endings, and his body was starting to feel like one.
He stumbled into a clearing ringed by shattered stone—once a waystone, ancient and half-buried. A circle of carved rock stood broken in three places, symbols half-erased by moss and time. He barely recognized it before the world pitched sideways and went dark.
When he woke, the light was different.
Faint and greenish, filtering down through what looked like luminescent vines and fungus. The walls were not earth or stone, but worked—carved arches, glass-bone supports, and scavenged metal reworked into quiet runes. It was too quiet.
A figure sat beside him, masked, cloaked, hands folded.
"You're awake," they said. The voice was low. Hard to pin. "Didn't think you would be."
Corren reached for his blade. It was gone.
"Relax. It's not far. You're not a prisoner."
"You know what I am?"
The figure tilted their head. "You don't wear the Song like a normal man. It bends around you. You're untethered. We don't know what kind of Gift it is—but we can feel its shape."
Corren said nothing.
"We call this place the Veil. Only those who hear the music ever find it."
The Veil lay deep beneath the mountain's bones, accessible only by paths hidden in silence. It was part sanctuary, part relic graveyard. Glowing fungus clung to the ceilings. Runes shimmered on walls made from salvaged ruins. Bones—too many of them—were set in spiraling patterns, woven with thread or metal or ivy. Some whispered faintly when passed.
People moved like shadows. Some wore scraps of noble silk, others the leather and steel of fallen orders. Their eyes gleamed too brightly. Their movements were too still.
Corren was led through chambers, down sloped halls and bone-bridges.
He saw a man humming at a wall, causing it to reshape itself. A child balancing pebbles that pulsed with faint rhythm. A woman carving notes into her own arms, whispering them aloud.
They were Gifted. Or had once been.
In a domed chamber at the heart of the Veil, he met Alsen.
The man's voice cracked the air when he spoke—like glass shattering gently beneath velvet.
"Welcome, untethered," Alsen said. "You step between fate's breath and the world's scream."
Corren stayed silent. He was tired of riddles.
Alsen smiled thinly. "You have power, boy. Raw. Dangerous. And unbound. Whatever your Gift is, it's deep—and it's not leashed to anything. Most of us had to bind our abilities. Oaths, relics, blood. You—you haven't been claimed. Not even by yourself."
"I didn't ask for this."
"No one does. But the thread pulls you anyway."
They gave him space. Food. His weapons back.
But not freedom.
He met others. Eryn, nineteen, too sharp and too fast with her words. She had eyes like frozen honey and hummed under her breath even when she wasn't speaking. She called him "stormboy" and leaned in too close. Her Gift bent memory—one note and people forgot, or remembered things wrong.
Tomas, older, heavily scarred, met Corren's gaze with suspicion. He claimed to smell betrayal in people's sweat. He challenged Corren to a spar, unprovoked.
"You're either our future," he said, "or our end."
They fought. Corren won—but only because the Song screamed just before Tomas feinted. His blade stopped an inch from Tomas's throat. Tomas grinned.
"You didn't flinch. That's worse."
Nira barely spoke. She watched. Listened. Recorded things in the Lament Ledger—a massive tome of red paper and silver ink. She wrote Corren's name in it when she thought he wasn't looking.
She also wrote the word: Threadwalker.
At night, the Song quieted. But not for long.
Corren stood at a balcony of sculpted roots overlooking the lower cavern. Lanterns flickered in breathing rhythms. A child below cried softly in his sleep—his own Gift making the stone ripple around him.
The Veil was a sanctuary. But it was also a place of containment.
Corren felt it. The eyes watching him. The whispered prayers that stopped when he passed. The silence that followed his footsteps.
He wasn't like them.
And that made him valuable.
Or dangerous.
He stared down into the dark and wondered what kind of sanctuary needed that many bones to stay whole.