Some doors open with memory. Some never close.
Rael Veyrin had mastered invisibility—not through shadow or spell, but by being utterly forgettable.
His presence barely registered. Even Echo scanners stuttered near him, confused by the emptiness of identity.
He was fifteen years old. Slender. Quiet. His skin held the bronze tint of rusted lantern light, his hair soot-black and tangled like steam soot on pipework. His eyes, wide and amber-gray, carried the sheen of reflected grief—too hollow to betray thought, too soft to be dangerous.
Ashborne was his home.
A city of scorched alleys, cracked towers, and sorrow-bound machinery. Built inside the ancient kingdom of Velhira, it lay stitched between realms shaped by grief and denial. Beneath the cobblestones pulsed memory-stones—fragments of past regrets still echoing through the grid. Even the lanterns flickered in rhythm with suppressed emotion. Some machines wailed when sadness neared.
In Aetherfallen, emotion was law.
Regret forged mountains. Denial broke timelines. Power was not wielded—it was bargained, carved from one's past, traded with sentient remnants called Echoes.
Rael didn't seek power.
Only silence. Only warmth.
His sanctuary was a broken condenser pipe in Ashborne's lower tunnels—just warm enough to survive, just forgotten enough to remain his. His coat was stitched from scraps: faded blue, fraying seams, one name sewn inside.
Rael.
No surname. No record. No mention in the Vault Archives.
Just a boy breathing where nobody looked.
He scavenged quietly—slipping between leaking valves, crouching beneath rust-stained platforms when the steam lines hissed loud enough to mask his steps.
Ashborne moaned in emotion.
Mist seeped from cracked towers. Fog flowed thick from eastern vents, where Veilrift leaked into the city's edges—a realm where sorrow distorted reality. People didn't enter Veilrift. They drifted toward it when forgotten.
One night, Ashborne blacked out.
Steam slowed. Sensors hushed. The grid collapsed in silence. Fog thickened like a held breath.
Rael curled against the pipe wall, knees locked under his chin.
And then—she appeared.
No footsteps. No sound.
Just breath and presence.
Blindfolded. Robes stitched with silver thread, shimmering faintly in the mist. She knelt before him, unmoving, as if waiting.
Her voice was velvet-soft.
"Rael Veyrin."
He flinched.
"How do you know my name?" he asked.
"Because it was given," she said. "Not chosen."
"It's all I have."
She tilted her head.
"And all you'll lose."
Steam flared behind her. Light cracked.
She vanished—devoured by fog.
That night, Rael felt warmth behind his wrist.
Not fire. Not pain.
Something waking.
He dreamed—corridors of ink. Obelisks made from memory shards. And a voice, quiet and aching:
"Reach with what aches."
He wandered.
Past grief merchants and flickering Echo beacons. Toward the mist-canyon where Veilrift carved silence into stone.
In the shattered ruins of a forgotten obelisk, he found it.
A door.
No hinges. No frame. Just a surface of shadow-glass—pulsing faintly, whispering names.
One name burned steady.
Rael Veyrin.
"This is why she came?" he whispered.
"What am I supposed to give?"
He reached.
Not with his hand.
With something buried deep.
The door opened.
Emotion collapsed into a swirl—laughter not his, grief he couldn't place, regret older than memory.
And then...
Sadness left him.
He tried to cry.
He couldn't remember how.
On his wrist, a mark burned into his skin—alive, shifting with light.
Sigil.
His first.
A Flicker Pact, forged in silence. Formed without consent.
"What did I give?" he asked the mist.
It answered.
"The ache you always carried."
Rael collapsed.
Fog wrapped around him like memory.
When he woke, his shadow had split—two lines stretching in opposite directions.
His breath no longer felt his own.
The Whisper Gate had opened.
The Pact had begun.
And something else had stepped through with him.