Chapter Nine — Dominion Veil
The city of Arakan never slept, but now it trembled.
The Dominion's towers pierced the sky like blades, their obsidian glass reflecting the pale dawn bleeding over the horizon. Beneath those towers, thousands of whispers swelled into a tide—a tide ready to crash.
In the highest spire, Governor Malren stared down at the sprawling city like a watchful god. His eyes were sharp, but his hands trembled beneath the weight of the news.
A Choir warship descended.
Silent, spectral, and humming with a dread resonance no ear could hear without madness.
"Report," Malren demanded.
A trembling aide bowed.
"Governor, the Ash Crown has been breached. The Vessel known as Kaelen... he has awakened something beneath Venn's Hollow."
Malren's jaw clenched.
"The Vessel..." he muttered. "They said it was a myth. An old ghost story."
"The myth is breathing, sir."
Malren turned away.
"The Dominion will not fall to ghosts."
Far below the glittering spires, the streets of Arakan pulsed with unrest.
Rumors spread like wildfire: that a song once buried now clawed its way back into the world; that the breath was being stolen not by force, but by memory; that the Choir had risen again.
Crowds gathered at the plazas, chanting fragments of ancient hymns no one fully understood, yet all feared.
Lira moved through the throng, her body still fragile, her voice nearly gone. She watched Kaelen from the shadows, her eyes wide with urgency.
He was changing.
Not just inside.
Outside.
Kaelen stood atop the Terrace of Ancients, the city sprawling beneath him like a map of broken promises.
His chest still carried the resonance of the Ash Crown. The new organs inside him whispered with a song he couldn't yet sing. Every breath was a battle—a negotiation between what he was and what the Dominion wanted him to be.
Behind him, Lira stepped forward.
"You cannot hide anymore."
Kaelen nodded.
"I know."
"The Choir is coming," she said. "The Dominion will send its Veil—their assassins of silence. They hunt the unsung."
He closed his eyes.
He had no illusions of victory.
Only one choice: to sing.
The first Veil arrived at twilight.
They were ghosts made flesh—cloaked in shifting shadow, their faces veiled by masks of broken glass. Silent footsteps echoed on stone as they descended into the city's heart.
Kaelen and Lira awaited them in the abandoned temple of the First Echo.
The air was thick with tension.
A voice broke the silence.
"You are the Vessel."
Kaelen stepped forward.
"And you are the Veil."
The air rippled.
The first assassin smiled beneath the mask.
"Then we are the end."
The battle was not fought with swords or guns, but with breath and silence.
Veil assassins moved like whispers—striking into the spaces between words, dissolving sounds before they could form.
Kaelen's new lungs sang with a voice that shattered glass, a resonance that bent light and thought.
The temple shook as songs clashed—silence against sound, shadow against light.
Lira's voice rose, ragged and raw, weaving protective hymns.
Veil assassins faltered.
But the cost was great.
Kaelen's body trembled.
The Ash Crown's echo burned through his veins, unraveling his flesh and remaking it with every note.
He was becoming something else.
As the last Veil fell, the city's night sky ruptured.
From the clouds poured a choir—a fleet of warships, their surfaces alive with pulsing Breath, each vessel a cathedral of sound and fury.
The Dominion's final verdict.
Kaelen looked up.
He understood.
The war was no longer for territory.
It was for the soul of the world.