My attacks proved woefully inefficient over the next couple of days, each swing of my borrowed blade meeting empty air or striking harmlessly against Deyric's elemental shields. The constant failures stalled any meaningful progress on our journey to Mount Ceru, leaving us camped in the same windswept clearing while I struggled against my own inadequacy. The Professor's patience, already thin as parchment, finally wore through completely.
"Your anger blinds you, my boy," Deyric mocked from across the illusionary training ground, his voice carrying that insufferable tone of scholarly condescension that made my teeth clench. The words cut deeper than any blade, slicing through what remained of my military pride. "To think of yourself as a reincarnated god is nothing but the most foolish of assessments—a child's fantasy born of desperation."
His white beard rippled with unseen currents of power, and I caught the faint scent of ozone in the air, warning of his storm-touched mood. The way he said it, with such casual dismissal, made my chest burn with humiliation. Here I was, heir to the Kuznetsov name, reduced to stumbling about like a village fool while this ancient sorcerer picked apart my every attempt at competence.
Frustrated beyond measure by his constant ridicule, I snapped back with all the venom I could muster. "Stop making fun of me, you bastard! My military training was cut short because of all this prophetic nonsense—I never asked for any of this madness!" The words tore from my throat, raw and desperate. I gestured wildly at the shimmering void around us, at him, at everything that had stolen my carefully planned future and replaced it with this nightmare of magic and mysticism.
"Only the weak make excuses when they fail, Nott," Deyric said, striking with his elemental staff. "Military training with wooden swords hardly prepares you for creation's raw forces."
Within the illusionary void Deyric had conjured around our training ground, our combat skirmishes remained completely hidden from the natural world beyond. The spell created a pocket of reality where time moved differently, where pain could be amplified or muted at his whim, where the very air itself could be shaped into obstacles or weapons. Yet despite the otherworldly nature of our arena, the pain I felt was brutally, unmistakably real. Every bruise, every strained muscle, every burning cut reminded me that this was no gentle lesson in academic theory.
After endless hours of being repeatedly knocked down—my body crashing against conjured stone walls, my limbs numbed by controlled lightning strikes, my breath stolen by sudden gusts of wind—I was forced to drink the Professor's healing potions. The vile concoctions made my stomach churn and twist, their bitter taste lingering long after I'd choked them down. These potions healed my body just enough to endure another grueling round, mending bones and closing wounds without truly relieving the exhaustion that settled into my very soul. It was a relentless cycle of training, punishment, recovery, and renewed torment that seemed designed to break both body and spirit.
The worst part wasn't the physical agony—it was the growing realization that everything I'd thought I knew about myself, about combat, about my own capabilities, had been nothing more than aristocratic posturing. All those years of believing I was strong, capable, ready for anything, I thought bitterly as another wave of exhaustion crashed over me. What a fool I was. In this void, stripped of my family name and reduced to my most basic instincts, I was discovering just how unprepared I truly was for the world beyond Braxmond's gilded walls. The Kuznetsov heir—what a joke. I'm nothing without the family crest, nothing without servants to cushion every blow life might deal me.
Another blast from Deyric's staff hit me square in the chest. I slammed into the stone floor, ribs burning, breath torn from my lungs. Blood spilled down my chin, sharp and metallic on my tongue. My arms shook as I pushed against the ground, every muscle screaming.
"Pathetic." His voice cut through me, cold and sharp. Sparks crawled through his white hair, snapping in the air. "A true mystic makes pain his weapon. You—" he sneered, "you drown in it."
Something inside me snapped. Not bone. Something deeper. The thin thread of restraint I'd clung to—gone. Hope of proving myself—ash. All the mockery, all the loss, my family, my mother—it all crashed down in a tide of rage.
"Enough!" The word ripped from my throat, raw and feral.
Black sand poured from my hands. Not the golden dust I knew, but something darker, alive. It swirled at my feet in jagged patterns that hurt to look at, whispering in voices I didn't know.
Deyric froze. His smirk faltered. "No… control yourself, boy. That power—"
"Control?" My laugh wasn't mine. It echoed, hollow, someone else speaking through me. "You broke me down. Called me nothing. And now you're afraid of what I am?"
The sand rose, defying gravity, twisting into black columns. Faces screamed inside the grains. Landscapes of bone and shadow bled through, hourglasses spilling crimson dust. And I felt it—all of it—terrible and intoxicating. Power.
Deyric roared. Fire leapt from one hand, lightning from the other. Stone walls surged up, winds howled in a shield around him. The full might of a Transcendence Four sorcerer.
But his power didn't crush the darkness. It fed it. The sand drank his fire. Swallowed his lightning. Ground his stone to ash. The harder he fought, the stronger it grew.
"Impossible," he whispered. His defenses cracked. Sweat streaked his face.
The world around us splintered. The sky fractured like glass, shards of illusion falling away to reveal something vast and hungry beyond.
Then it broke. All of it.
We plummeted through collapsing realms, tumbling past broken spells and shattered dreams. It was like drowning in reverse, dragged upward through layers of sleep until—impact.
The Veil of Slumber stretched out before us. Ground made of crystallized dreams. Horizons shifting between memory and nightmare. Here, the sand bent to my will. Perfect. Absolute.
Deyric staggered to his feet. His power flickered, weak, useless here. For the first time, fear bled into his eyes.
"What… have you done?"
I smiled. The weight of countless sleeping minds pressed against me, each one waiting. Waiting to be mine. The sand whispered louder, pressing in, feeding me with fragments of voices older than time—ancient incantations, forgotten prayers, the last gasps of civilizations that had crumbled to dust. But amid the chaos, amid the raw, pulsing power that sang through my veins like molten gold, something flickered—something small, fragile.
Fear.
I saw it in Deyric's eyes, naked and desperate. And in an instant, like a lightning strike through storm clouds, I was somewhere else entirely. My mother's face materialized before me, ethereal and heartbreaking. That same fear reflected there—not for herself, but for me. Her arms around me, her body shielding mine as the brass golem loomed above us, its massive frame blotting out the factory lights. Its joints whirred with mechanical precision, steam hissing from hydraulic pistons in its chest, brass plating gleaming with merciless efficiency. The acrid smell of burning oil filled the air. Her eyes locked on mine, wide and desperate, blue as summer sky beneath the industrial smoke.
"Run, Nott. Please—run."
But I hadn't moved. I couldn't. My legs had turned to stone, my heart hammering with a child's helpless terror. The golem's eyes burned like furnace coals, casting hellish shadows across my mother's pale face. And then it struck.
The memory burned sharper than the wounds I'd endured in training, sharper than broken glass. The scream of metal on bone, her body folding under the crushing blow like paper in a forge fire. The warmth of her blood spattering my cheek, copper-sweet and terrible. My own voice, high and broken, calling for her when she could no longer answer, when her beautiful blue eyes stared sightless at the factory ceiling.
Here in the Veil, the image surged with unbearable clarity, as if the dream had been waiting for this moment to remind me who I had been before the power, before the prophecy. And the love I still carried for her—raw, unshaken, eternal—stabbed through the rage, cutting me open in a way no weapon could. It was a wound that would never heal, a hollow place in my chest where her laughter used to live.
The sand faltered, writhing in confusion, as if torn between hunger and grief. The grains scattered and reformed, unable to decide whether to devour or protect.
Deyric staggered back, watching me, watching the storm twist inward. His lips moved, but not with words of power—something else, something I couldn't yet hear. Prayer, perhaps. Or apology.
And then the Veil cracked again. Reality splintered like a mirror struck by a hammer. The ground dropped out from beneath us, crystallized dreams dissolving into mist. I stumbled, and suddenly we weren't in the dreamscape anymore. We were in a memory. Mine.
The air smelled of oil and iron, the sound of saws gnashing in the distance like hungry teeth. Steam pipes groaned overhead, and somewhere a forge hammer rang against anvil in steady rhythm. And there I was—small, fragile, lying on a workshop floor slick with grease and blood. A jagged saw blade had ripped through my side, the metal still warm from cutting. My tiny body shook, my breaths shallow and wet. My hands clutched the wound, red spilling everywhere, staining my white shirt crimson.
And she was there. My mother. Kneeling over me, her golden hair falling like a curtain around us, whispering soft words through her tears. Her hands glowed faintly—had they always done that?—trembling as she pressed clean cloth against the wound, her voice weaving lullabies to drown out my screams. Her dress was already ruined with my blood, but she didn't care.
"You'll be all right, Nott. You'll be all right, my little light."
The younger me whimpered, my child's voice breaking on each sob. She kissed my forehead, her tears streaking across my skin like warm rain. Her love was a shield stronger than steel, her fear a weapon against death itself. And I remembered—no, I felt—how much I had been loved. How her hands had never left me, how her voice had followed me even into fever dreams.
The vision blurred, edges dissolving like watercolors in rain, and before I could hold onto her, before I could speak the words I'd never said, the scene shifted.
Deyric.
But not as he was now—not the towering master of elements who had tormented me for months. Young. Barely older than the boy I'd just seen myself as. His hair darker, untouched by elemental fire, his frame lean and awkward, all elbows and uncertain posture. His eyes filled not with arrogance but with yearning, with the desperate hunger of someone who had tasted power and found it wanting. He stood alone in a barren courtyard, mountains rising like jagged teeth in the distance. A crude staff trembled in his grip. The first sparks of magic licked at his palms, wild and untamed, searing his skin with each attempt.
He hissed in pain, dropped the staff with a clatter, and almost wept. His shoulders shook with frustration, with the weight of failure. And then a voice—steady, confident, warm as hearthfire.
"Again."
The memory clarified, and the courtyard filled with someone else's presence. A figure moved into view, her silhouette sharp against the dying light. She was young too, but already composed, her movements flowing like water over stone. Her robe was stitched with alchemical sigils that glowed faintly like embers, and beneath it she wore the layered skirts and jingling ornaments of the Wiltshaw clan. Her eyes carried a fire that bent others to her will, not out of cruelty, but out of sheer conviction.
Ayla.
My chest tightened. It couldn't be. The chronology made no sense—she should have been decades older when Deyric was learning, unless... unless time moved differently for her kind.
She walked toward Deyric with the ease of someone who understood power intimately. Not just mysticism, not just alchemy—something greater. The authority of someone who had paid prices others couldn't imagine. She took his burned hand in hers, unflinching even as sparks crackled between their fingers, and guided him back to the staff.
"Control," she told him softly, her voice carrying a faint accent I couldn't place. "Not by fear. By love of the art itself."
Her presence seemed to steady him. The chaotic sparks grew smoother, forming streams of coherent light that wrapped around the staff like liquid fire. His breathing slowed, his fear softened into something like reverence.
And then he looked at her.
Not as a teacher. Not as a mystic. He looked at her with unguarded devotion, the way a drowning man looks at shore. The way a plant turns toward sun.
Love.
The realization struck me like another blow from his staff. Deyric had loved her. Ayla—the Alchemist, the gypsy girl who wore masks within masks, the one who would shape so much of what I had become—had once been his guide, his anchor. And he had loved her deeply, perhaps still did. The way his voice changed when he spoke her name, the careful distance he maintained—it all made terrible sense now.
The memory shimmered, resisting, as though it wanted to be buried beneath years of pride and disappointment. But the Veil gave it no mercy. Truth was currency here, and it demanded payment in full. The image hung between us, undeniable and raw.
I turned to him, my voice low, thick with a thousand unspoken questions. "You... loved her."
Deyric's face twisted, pride and shame colliding like opposing storms. His lips trembled, no sneer, no mockery left to hide behind. The careful mask he wore had cracked completely, revealing the wounded man beneath. Just the raw wound of someone who had lost something irreplaceable and never learned how to stop bleeding.
The sand around me stirred again, restless, but not with hunger this time. It carried whispers I almost understood—threads of Ayla's name woven through the void, memories of promises broken and paths diverged.
And for the first time since I'd known him, Deyric looked not like my tormentor, not like a master drunk on his own power, but like a broken man who had spent years trying to forget the one person who had made him whole.
The Veil tore like old cloth.
Wind knifed through the crack. Light hit my eyes—real light, harsh and clean. The ground buckled beneath us and then steadied, the dream-sand evacuating my hands like a flock startled into the sky.
We were back.
Pines rose in black pillars around a wide grass clearing, far from any road. The air smelled of sap and damp earth. Insects sang. The sky was a bruised blue, evening sliding in, the kind of light that turns leaves to stained glass. I stood swaying, lungs filling with air that didn't taste of sleep. The black sand lingered as a fine stain across my fingers, then faded like smoke.
Deyric landed hard a few paces away, one knee in the grass, the other foot braced. He kept the staff angled across his body—not a threat, not yet, more like a guard rail for a man trying not to fall. The arrogance was gone; what remained was wary focus. His hair, white and wild from static, lay flat now, the sparks snuffed by the natural world. His eyes cut to me, searching for signs the nightmare still had me by the throat.
I beat him to it. "Ayla."
His jaw tightened. A small movement. Almost nothing. But I saw it.
"You trained under her," I said. "She was your mentor. You loved her." The words came low, even, the way a blade whispers when it leaves the sheath.
"We are not in the Veil anymore," he said, breath steadying. "And you—" he gestured at my hands—"you nearly lost yourself. Do you understand what you were becoming?"
I closed the distance, grass whispering under my boots. "We're done dodging. Tell me about Ayla."
His gaze flicked to the tree line, then back. "You drew on the sand until it drew on you. That is the bargain. Where the waking world ends and the nightmare begins—" He tapped the staff once against the earth. "You crossed it."
"Ayla," I repeated.
"You became something I have spent years ensuring never takes root in a living soul." His voice dropped. "The Demon of Nightmares. That title is not poetry. It is taxonomy. It is what happens when a mystic stops being a person and becomes a conduit for hunger."
The wind passed over the clearing, setting the tall grass to bowing, the sound like a thousand small hands clapping once. I kept my voice level. "You put me in that arena. You pushed me there."
"To test your limits," he said. "Not to erase them." He rose fully now, balance regained. "You think the Veil is a playground. It is a graveyard that never learned how to rest. You offered it your anger and it offered you power. That exchange always ends with a body."
"Whose?" I said.
He let that sit.
"I want the truth," I said. "About her."
"The truth is that this—" he gestured between us, to the trampled ring of grass where we stood—"is the only place you should be speaking from. Not from inside a storm that wants to wear your skin." His gaze sharpened. "You held the sand in your fist and told it 'enough' only after it tasted you. That line—boy—that line is not one you cross and walk back from without a scar."
"You're deflecting."
"I'm prioritizing," he snapped, then reined it in. He planted the staff, slower. "Listen to me. If you keep feeding that black tide with your grief, with your need, it will name you what it names all its vessels. Demon. And then I will do what I vowed to do to any Demon."
The words landed like stones dropped into a well. "Which is?"
"End it."
We stood with the pines as witnesses. The light thinned. The world felt honest again—brutal, simple, loud with crickets. I took a breath that scraped all the way down.
"Then answer me," I said. "So I can decide who I am before you decide it for me."
Deyric's eyes narrowed—not in contempt this time, but calculation, cost. He looked tired to the bone. He looked like a man holding a door closed while something enormous tried to push through.
Finally, he exhaled. "Ask."
"Ayla," I said. "Who is she—really?"
The staff's tip sank a fraction into the dirt. He stared past me, into some old hallway of memory, and chose a door.
"You want the clean version," Deyric said. "There isn't one."
"I want the real one."
His mouth tugged into something that wasn't quite a smile. "Then we will both bleed."
I waited.
"She was an Alchemist," he said. "The best in a generation. She believed transmutation wasn't just for matter. She believed it could cure what breaks in people." He paced a step, grass brushing his robes. "She proved too much of it."
The name pressed against my tongue before I knew I was speaking. "Ayla."
He watched me, not missing the way I said it. "You've felt it," he said quietly. "Not just awe. Not just gratitude. The pull of her. Physical. Emotional."
Heat ghosted across my face. I didn't look away. "Yes."
He nodded once, as if confirming a number he already knew. "And did you feel the cold, too? The way the room tilts toward her shadow? The way your pulse listens for hers?"
I swallowed. "Sometimes."
"She made something," he said, voice thinning with memory. "A draught meant to repair blood. To strengthen the body's night-side—the part that heals while we sleep, the part that holds the secrets of what we are when no one is watching." His jaw set. "It changed her."
"Changed," I echoed.
"Charged," he said, the word sparking out of him. "As in set the trap in motion, set the balance off. She crossed a boundary alchemy is not designed to cross and did not come back the same."
The crickets hushed, as if the clearing leaned closer.
"She is vampire," he said finally. No flourish. No warning. Just the blade laid on the table. "Not a myth, not a metaphor. You will not see fangs unless she chooses. You will not feel the bite unless she allows it. But it is there. In the marrow."
The world shortened to my breath. "No."
"She manages it," Deyric said, steady. "There is an elixir. Redbane. She brewed it herself. It quiets the hunger. Keeps the mind in the driver's seat." He held my gaze. "But there's a cost. Two, in fact."
I said nothing. He continued.
"When she misses it—when she forgets, or when she sacrifices her dose for a refugee, or a patient, as she is prone to do—her blood-work stumbles." He touched the inside of his wrist with two fingers. "The strength you think of as vampiric does not come. Not first. What comes is fragility. She is as breakable as a young woman with no training. Bones like glass. Skin like paper." His eyes hardened. "And alongside that fragility, the hunger of a starving creature wakes. Not polite thirst. Not ache. Need. Months of it."
The wind ruffled the grass. I pictured her hands—cool, sure. I pictured them shaking. "So she becomes… both."
"Exactly," he said. "A contradiction with teeth. A body that can be broken by the world and a want that will break the world to drink."
"How often?" I asked, my voice thinner than I wanted.
"Often enough that I keep count," he said. "Often enough that I learned what color her lips turn first, and how many heartbeats it takes for her to clamp down and crawl to her lab rather than to a throat." He looked at me as if deciding how much glass to give me to hold. "She is not a monster. But the monster knows her address."
The clearing tilted again, as if the earth itself was adjusting to the shape of this truth. I remembered the way Ayla's eyes went far away sometimes, mid-sentence, as if listening for a sound no one else could hear. The way she smiled afterward, gentle, apologetic, like someone returning from a long distance.
Deyric took a slow breath. "You wanted to know who she is. She is a person who saves people during the day and chains herself to a table at night so she doesn't fail them. She is a mind I would follow into any fire. And she is also the one who taught me to walk away when it was time to stop burning."
"You loved her," I said.
He flinched. "I still do."
Silence gathered between us. Not empty. Full. A bowl that couldn't hold one more drop.
"You will say you can handle it," he said softly. "You will say you can anchor her when the elixir thins. That your affection will be enough to keep her safe, to keep you safe." His voice lost its professor's edge; what remained was a man's weariness. "But hunger doesn't negotiate. It only delays."
I pressed my palm to my chest like I could slow the hammering there. "She didn't tell me."
"She wouldn't," he said. "She hopes she has outrun it. She hopes each week is the week she will not need the brew. She hopes until the hunger reminds her what she is." He paused. "And she would rather be your light than your lesson."
The name tasted different now. He saw it happen.
"Nott," he said, gentle for once. "Be careful where you put your heart. The Veil is not the only thing that devours."
I didn't speak.
The clearing accepted my silence without comment, the pines making their slow dark shapes against a dimming sky. Somewhere a brook gossiped over stones. Somewhere an owl tested the air. The world continued doing ordinary miracles while mine reassembled itself around a hole.
My throat felt raw. Not from shouting. From swallowing.
I sat. The grass was cool and a little damp; it pressed crescents into my palms. The adrenaline of the Veil had burned off, leaving ash. Behind my ribs, that black tide turned over once, twice, and went quiet, like an animal deciding—for now—to sleep.
Deyric stayed standing. He knew better than to come closer. The staff tip sank deeper into the soil, a root searching for something to hold.
"Say something," he said at last.
I looked at him and saw not a teacher, not an enemy, not even the man who had beaten me across a conjured floor. I saw the patient face of the world's cruelty wearing a human expression. I saw rules. I saw the price tag hanging off every kind thing.
"What would you like?" I asked, voice sandpapered smooth. "Gratitude for the warning? Promise I'll be good? You want me to nod and say I'll stay on this side of the line while the person I—" The word snagged. "—the person I care about fights her own blood in the dark?"
His eyes softened. "I want you to live."
I laughed once, ugly. "Live," I said. "In this? In a world where magic eats you from one side and love eats you from the other?"
He didn't move. The crickets started up again, brave things. I closed my eyes and saw Ayla's hands guiding mine through a delicate pour, the red coil of a tincture dancing like a ribbon in glass, her voice low and unafraid: Again. Not by fear. By love of the art.
Something hot rose in my chest and broke. "Damn this," I said, not loud, not blasphemy, just exhaustion hammered into a word. "Damn magic, damn gates between worlds, damn the Veil and the things that live there and the lessons that come with teeth." My hands curled into the grass. "Damn whatever kind of universe hands you someone incandescent and then equips them with the one thing that will eat them first."
Deyric let it pass through him. He had his own curses; I could see the shape of them in his shoulders.
"You think I wanted this?" he said at last. "You think I chose to be the one who remembers her doses when she forgets? To be the one she avoids when she knows I'll see? To be the man who has to say 'enough' when she wants to try one more time?" His jaw trembled. "I loved her before the brew. I loved her after. I love her still. My love did not cure her. It never would. It is not a medicine. It is a witness."
The word sank into me. Witness.
"I don't want to witness," I said. "I want to fix something for once."
"Then start with yourself," he said. No edge. Just fact. "You cursed magic. Fine. Curse it. But understand what else you cursed: your gift to stand in two worlds and remain yourself. The Veil heard you today. It will hear you again. If you meet it broken, it will give you the Demon as a crutch and ask for your name in payment."
"Maybe my name isn't worth much," I said. It came out too fast. Too young.
His eyes closed for a beat, like he was listening to a difficult note, then opened again. "Your mother thought otherwise."
The world tilted. The brass golem. The blood. Her voice: You'll be all right, my little light. Love and fear bound together so tight they hummed. The black tide stirred. Not with hunger. With an undertow of grief.
"I'm tired," I said. It was the closest I could come to a truce with the night.
"I know," he said. "We walk back at first light. We don't go near the Veil until you can hold a thought without it drawing teeth." He angled the staff toward the trees. "There's a shelter not far."
I didn't stand. The sky bled into indigo. A first star appeared, small and brave.
"What do I do with this?" I asked, not sure if I meant the sand, the love, the truth, or the ruin they made together.
He looked at the same star. "You carry it. Carefully. You ask for help when it cuts. You keep your dosings of grief, and you keep your dosings of joy. You learn the names of your monsters so you don't mistake them for yourself. And when the Veil calls you by the wrong name, you answer with the right one."
Silence once more. Not empty. Maybe useful.
I stood finally, joints complaining, heart a slow, stubborn drum. The clearing allowed it. The pines creaked like old bones, but not unkindly.
We walked toward the dark seam of the trees. Somewhere behind us, the grass settled back into its own private order. Somewhere ahead, the world bent into a narrow path.
I did not pray. I did not promise. I let the night take my curses and hand me back a quieter thing.
And in that space—small, painful, honest—I decided nothing. Which is its own kind of decision.
The first step sounded loud in the hush.
The second sounded like mine.