beneath the fractured sky
Chapter Five: Beneath the Fractured Sky
"The first time you step into the Veil, you lose something. The second time, you forget what it was. The third time—you forget you ever had it."
— Liam Carter
The Pawn Shop Sanctuary
The dusty pawn shop was too quiet, the air stale with the scent of old wood, rusted metal, and years of forgotten things.
Emma sat on the edge of a cracked leather chair, her hands still trembling faintly against her knees. The room was dim, lit only by a flickering fluorescent light that buzzed faintly overhead.
Liam stood by the door, his shoulders rigid, watching the street through the grimy window.
He hadn't spoken in five full minutes.
Emma's breath was still uneven, her chest tight from running. Her pulse hadn't slowed.
And her hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Finally, she spoke.
"Are they still out there?"
Liam didn't answer.
His eyes were fixed on the street, but he wasn't looking at it.
He was looking through it.
His irises were flickering with fractured light, faint and splintered—a reflection of the Veil bleeding through.
Emma's voice was softer this time.
"Liam."
He blinked. Slowly.
When he turned, his eyes were human again.
Familiar.
But still distant.
"No," he muttered finally. "They're gone. For now."
But his voice was flat. Hollow.
And she knew he was lying.
The Forgotten Room
Without another word, Liam crossed the room and knelt by the pawn shop's wooden floorboards. With slow, deliberate movements, he reached into his coat and retrieved the Hollowblade.
He didn't hesitate.
He jammed the tip of the blade between two planks and wrenched upward.
The wood splintered with a sharp crack, exposing a hollow space beneath.
Emma's breath caught as she stared down into the hidden compartment.
It was filled with iron lockboxes, bound in heavy chains, etched with runes she didn't recognize. Faint veins of black light pulsed along the metal.
When Liam lifted the lid on one, she felt a brief chill sweep over her skin, like stepping into a draft of winter air.
She stared.
"You've… done this before."
He didn't answer.
Because he had.
More times than he could count.
He lifted a small obsidian vial from the lockbox. Inside, the liquid was thicker than ink, swirling slowly.
Emma frowned.
"What is that?"
Liam didn't meet her eyes.
"Blood."
Her stomach twisted slightly.
"Whose?"
He exhaled sharply.
"Mine."
Her throat tightened.
Before she could ask another question, Liam uncorked the vial and poured a single drop onto his palm.
The moment the black droplet touched his skin, the mark on his hand burned—the jagged vein of Hollowborn corruption flared black for a heartbeat, searing with cold light.
The air rippled faintly around him, distorting at the edges.
And then she saw it.
For the briefest moment, she saw two Liams standing side by side.
One real.
One fractured.
The Veilwalker and the man.
The two versions of him overlapped—both flickering, unstable, barely bound together.
Then the image snapped back into one.
Emma's breath caught.
She stared at him, suddenly terrified.
"You're falling apart," she whispered.
He closed his fist around the burning mark and exhaled slowly.
"No," he muttered.
"I'm holding it together."
The Hollowborn's Price
He turned back to the lockboxes, working quickly.
With practiced hands, he began unfastening the chains and extracting small, jagged objects—fragments of the Veil.
Tiny slivers of broken reality.
Black glass. Fractured light. Blood-bound stones.
Each one was wrapped in dark cloth, bound with silver wire to keep it from unraveling time when touched.
Emma watched in silence.
"You've been… stockpiling these," she said softly.
Her voice barely louder than a breath.
Liam didn't answer immediately.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low, distant.
"I found them. When I ran."
He lifted a small, glass-like shard, no larger than a coin. It gleamed faintly, shifting in and out of focus like a mirage.
"Some are pieces I left behind when I crossed."
His jaw tightened.
"Some are pieces of other people."
Her chest tightened.
"You've been pulling people out of the Veil."
He set the shard down without looking at her.
"No."
He turned slightly, his face hard.
"I've been pulling what's left of them out."
Her throat dried.
The weight of his words pressed down on her chest, threatening to crush her ribs.
She had always known there was something broken in him.
But she hadn't realized how deep the fracture ran.
The Hollowblade's Truth
As he worked, Liam's hands moved faster, desperate and practiced, extracting the tools he would need. She could see the faint, violent tremor in his fingers.
She realized then that he wasn't just preparing.
He was afraid.
Her voice was soft.
"Liam…"
She took a step toward him.
"Tell me what you're really planning."
For a moment, he didn't answer.
The only sound was the faint, brittle clink of metal as he fastened the Hollowblade to his belt.
When he finally turned to her, his eyes were shadowed.
Dark.
Desperate.
"I'm going to destroy the Architect," he said softly.
"No more running. No more hiding."
She shook her head slightly, her voice barely a whisper.
"Just like that?"
His expression didn't change.
"No. Not just like that."
He held her gaze, steady and unyielding.
"I'm going to drag it out of the Veil."
Her stomach twisted.
"What? You can't—"
"I can." His voice was steady.
"Because it marked me. Because I'm still part of it."
He unwrapped a thin strip of black cloth from the lockbox. The material shimmered faintly in the dim light—part cloth, part shadow.
He bound it around his palm, over the mark, sealing it tightly.
And when he looked at her again, his eyes were cold and hollow.
"I'll pull it out. And I'll cut it from existence."
The Veil and the Shattered Man
Emma stepped forward quickly, gripping his wrist before he could finish.
"No."
Her voice was sharp and uneven.
"You can't."
His hand was ice cold beneath hers, his pulse faint and unsteady.
And for the first time since she had met him, she saw him hesitate.
"Every time you step through, you lose more of yourself," she whispered, her voice cracking slightly.
"You're… breaking, Liam."
She watched his eyes flicker slightly at the edges.
For one brief second, she thought he might stop.
She thought he might let her pull him back.
But then his jaw hardened.
And his eyes burned black.
He pulled his hand free from hers.
And when he spoke, his voice was quiet.
Steady. Final.
"You think I don't know that?"
His hand curled into a tight fist.
"You think I don't feel it every time I breathe?"
He shook his head faintly, his eyes dark and sharp.
"I'm already gone, Emma."
He slipped the Hollowblade into its sheath and turned toward the door.
"I just want to take them with me."
The Architect's Backstory: The God That Should Not Be
"There was no darkness before it came. No light either. No time. Just endless stillness. And then it stirred. And the Veil cracked. And the world forgot what came before."
— The Testament of Kalaris, First Veilwalker
Before the Fracture: The World of One Light
Long before the Veil splintered into shadow and glass, there was only one world.
Whole. Untouched.
A place without borders between realms.
A place where magic and flesh, spirit and stone, bled together without boundary.
The people of this ancient world knew no gods, only the Nameless Light—the raw, ethereal force that stretched through their reality, pulsing through sky and stone alike.
But the Light was not merciful.
It was not kind.
It simply was.
And when the first mortals began to tear it apart—splintering its essence to wield as power—they unknowingly created the first cracks in the Veil.
Because the Light had no form.
No thought.
No voice.
But the thing behind it did.
And when the Light fractured, it came through.
The Birth of the Hollowborn
The Architect was not born.
It was never meant to be.
It was the first thing that existed behind the Veil, buried beneath the formless infinity, beyond time and being. It was not alive, because life could be defined.
It was not dead, because death could be measured.
It was simply absence made aware.
A void given self.
An impossibility given form.
When the Light fractured, it bled into reality, dragging pieces of the nothingness with it. The Architect was the first fragment to cross the broken line, tearing itself through the gap.
And the moment it entered existence, it created its own reflection.
It hollowed itself—splitting into infinite forms, each one a mirror of its shapeless self.
The first of its fractured children became known as the Hollowborn—shadows given form, shaped in mockery of mortal life.
They were not made of flesh.
They were made of memory.
Of forgotten things.
Half-real things.
Where they walked, the world forgot what had been there before.
Where they touched, time bled backward.
The Fracture War: When the World Forgot Itself
The Hollowborn did not come as conquerors.
They came as erasers.
The people who fought them did not die.
They were forgotten.
Entire cities were swallowed into the white void of erasure, their people slipping from memory as though they had never existed.
The world was fracturing.
Falling apart at the seams.
So the first mages—the Veilwalkers—rose against them.
They were not sorcerers or warlocks.
They were those who stepped through the Veil and returned with pieces of it still bound to their blood.
The Veilwalkers found that the only way to stop the Hollowborn was to become like them—to wear the Veil's power as armor, even as it burned them from the inside.
They shattered themselves into weapons of half-reality—flickering beings of shadow and light.
And with their power, they forced the Hollowborn back.
But they could not unmake them.
They could not erase what had already been erased.
So instead, they sealed them behind the Veil.
And at the center of it, they bound the first and greatest Hollowborn—the Architect.
Its infinite forms were drawn inward, collapsed into a single impossibility, bound in the hollow heart of the fracture.
The Hollowborn God became the Veil itself—the thin, broken line dividing reality from the void.
And the Veilwalkers tore themselves apart to keep it sealed.
The Hollow Crown: When the Veil Bled Again
For centuries, the Veil held firm.
The Architect remained bound.
Dormant. Silent.
But the Veil was never meant to hold something like the Architect.
It was not a prison.
It was a bandage.
And over time, it began to fray.
The Architect did not need to escape.
It only needed to stir.
And when it did, the Hollowborn began to slip through the cracks once more.
Not as conquerors.
As ghosts.
As mimics and shadows, walking in stolen skin.
They erased quietly this time—one face at a time, one memory at a time.
Spreading like a disease of forgetting, removing people from time, from existence.
And with every erasure, the Architect became stronger, feeding on the void it created.
The Architect's Manifest: The Hollow God's Plan
Now, the Architect no longer wants to escape.
It doesn't need to.
It plans to turn the mortal plane into its mirror—to reshape it into a realm of half-reality, a hollowed reflection.
Where time can be rewritten with a glance, and existence can be undone with a thought.
But to do so, it needs three things:
• The Heartstone of the Veil: The last remnant of the original fracture, where the Veilwalkers sealed the Architect.
• A living tether: A mortal being bound to the Veil, capable of pulling it apart from the inside.
• Oblivion's Key: An artifact forged from the first splinter of fractured light—the only object capable of tearing the Veil open completely.
The Architect has already found the Key.
It has already begun to corrupt the Heartstone, unraveling the seal.
And now it needs Liam—the only living tether still bound to the Veil, the only human with enough Hollowborn corruption to bring the fracture down from within.
It doesn't want to kill him.
It wants to become him.
To wear his face.
To walk through the world as him, unseen, unknown, unremembered.
And with each step, it will erase the world.
The Forgotten God's True Name
The Architect is not its true name.
No mortal tongue can speak it.
No mortal mind can hold it.
But the Veilwalkers knew part of it—the first syllable.
And they wrote it in runes of shadow and glass, hidden in the forgotten tongues of the Hollowborn.
Its name is Aezh'thal.
The Unmade God.
The First Void.
The thing that existed before existence.
And now, it seeks to be the only thing that remains.
The Origin of the Veilwalkers: The Ones Who Unmade Themselves
"There is a moment when you cross the Veil for the first time—a moment when you feel the world unravel behind you. That is when you become a Veilwalker. Not when you step through. But when you realize you cannot step back."
— Kalaris, First Veilwalker
The Age of the Fracture: When the Veil First Bled
Before the Veil existed, the world was one place—whole and indivisible.
There was no line between what was real and what was not.
No border between light and shadow.
No separation between the mortal realm and the void behind it.
But when the Architect first stirred, it created the Fracture—the first wound in reality.
It began as a single line of splintered light.
A tear no wider than a hair.
But even that was enough.
The void bled through the crack, and the Hollowborn followed.
They were not conquerors.
They were erasures.
Where they walked, time recoiled, and memory bent backward.
Whole cities were swallowed into oblivion, slipping out of history as though they had never been.
And when the last bastion of mortals faced extinction, they did not turn to gods.
There were no gods.
They turned to themselves.
And they stepped into the Veil.
The First Veilwalkers: The Twelve Who Crossed
The first Veilwalkers were not mages.
They were not scholars or kings.
They were desperate men and women, willing to sacrifice themselves for the only chance of survival.
They were known only by their titles, their true names lost with the passing of the Fracture War.
• Kalaris, the Last Daughter: A mortal queen, willing to become a hollowed god.
• Sevrin, the Black Flame: A blood-forger who fed his own soul into the Veil to bind its edges.
• Erya, the Sightless: A seer who blinded herself with fractured light, leaving her eyes in the Hollowborn's grasp.
• Orros, the Silver Shade: A man who offered his reflection to the Veil, leaving no trace of himself behind.
• Veylin, the Stoneborne: A warrior whose bones were made of Veilsteel, forever bound to the fracture.
• Lira, the Hollow Muse: A singer whose voice was erased from existence, leaving only echoes.
• Jevran, the Bloodwright: A healer who unmade his own heart to craft the first Hollowblade.
• Askel, the Ghosthand: A thief who stole his own name and fed it to the Veil.
• Tovran, the Mirrorlord: A lord who ruled over nothing, his kingdom a reflection no one remembered.
• Naeris, the Forsworn: A priestess who bound her god's name to the Veil, erasing it from reality.
• Kirin, the Fractured Star: A child who gave up her entire future, condemned to live in a single, repeating moment.
• Dellan, the Deathless: A soldier who died in the Veil a thousand times but never truly perished.
The Twelve did not enter the Veil seeking power.
They went in knowing they would never return.
The Sacrifice of the Twelve: Becoming the Veil
When the Twelve crossed the Veil, they did not emerge as they once were.
The Veil remade them.
• Their bodies became fractured, flickering between existence and erasure.
• Their shadows moved without them, walking in different directions.
• Their reflections never aged.
• And their eyes became black mirrors, hollow and infinite, reflecting nothing.
But they endured.
And when they returned, they carried pieces of the Veil inside them—living fragments of the void, bound to their blood and bone.
The price for wielding that power was steep.
For every time they crossed into the Veil, they lost part of themselves.
• One memory.
• One face.
• One moment.
Forever.
But the Twelve did not stop.
They stepped into the Veil again and again, trading fragments of their existence for the power to bind the Hollowborn.
The Hollowbinding: Sealing the Architect
The Hollowborn could not be destroyed.
They were not beings.
They were forgotten moments.
Erased time.
You cannot kill what was never meant to exist.
So the Veilwalkers unmade themselves.
One by one.
They tore fragments of their own souls and lashed them together into the first Heartstone of the Veil—the core that would bind the Hollowborn beyond the fracture.
It was made from their memories.
Their faces.
Their names.
And when they placed the Heartstone in the center of the Fracture, the Hollowborn were forced back.
Reality sealed itself shut.
And the Architect was bound.
But the Twelve did not return.
Not fully.
The Veilborn: When They Became Their Own Prison
The Twelve became part of the Veil.
Their names were lost.
Their faces were forgotten.
They were stripped from history, just like the Hollowborn they had banished.
But they were not dead.
They were alive and unremembered, walking as half-shadows, slipping between worlds.
The Veilwalkers became the first Veilborn—immortal, unaging, unanchored.
• No one could remember them for longer than a few moments.
• Their names could not be spoken—only whispered to the Veil itself.
• Their faces could not be painted or drawn—their images blurred into shadow.
• When they died, they simply returned to the Veil, lost and reborn.
They were no longer mortals.
No longer men and women.
They were the wound itself.
They were the Veil.
The Veilwalkers' Legacy: The Shadowed Few
As centuries passed, the Veilwalkers became legends, then myths, then forgotten.
But their bloodlines remained.
Over generations, their descendants—the Veil-touched—were born with fragments of the fracture in their veins.
Some could see through reflections, glimpsing memories of erased time.
Others could step through the Veil without realizing it, wandering into places that no longer existed.
And a rare few could tear it open.
These Veil-touched bloodlines became the targets of the Architect's cults—the Hollowborn's mortal worshippers.
The cults hunted them.
Erased them.
Until there were almost none left.
Now, only a handful remain.
Liam Carter is one of them.
The last true Veilwalker.
The First Veilwalker's Prophecy
Before she disappeared, Kalaris—the first Veilwalker—left behind a single prophecy, etched into the stone at the base of the Heartstone's prison:
"When the Fracture bleeds again, the blood of the Veil will stir.
The last of us will walk in shadow.
And with each step, the Architect will remember its own name.
And then, it will come."
Now, Liam carries that blood—the last shard of the Twelve.
He is the final Veilwalker, the last of the unmade souls.
And he is the only one who can tear the Architect from its throne.
The Hollowborn Cults: The Devoted of Oblivion
"You think you're afraid of being forgotten. But that's not your true fear. Your true fear is that someday, you will remember being nothing. And that you will long for it."
— Ezryn, Hollowborn Priest
The Cult of the Hollowborn: The Faith of Erasure
The Hollowborn were not meant to exist.
And yet, they do.
Their existence is a paradox—beings of unmaking, walking through a world that should have no memory of them.
But the mortal mind is weak.
It craves meaning, even in oblivion.
And in the Hollowborn's wake, the first cult was born.
The earliest followers were not believers.
They were survivors.
People who had watched their families erased from existence.
Cities and homes torn from time.
People who had seen the Architect's hand reach through the Veil and snuff out their lives without ever shedding a drop of blood.
And when the Hollowborn left them behind—forgotten, but still alive—they believed they had been chosen.
The cults were not formed out of devotion, but out of desperation.
Because the Hollowborn only spared the nameless, the lost, the forgotten.
And so, the survivors made a vow:
They would become nothing.
And by doing so, they would be spared.
The Doctrine of the Forgotten:
The Hollowborn cults did not worship a god of creation.
They worshipped the absence of one.
Their doctrine was simple:
• Existence is a wound.
• The Veil is the scar that binds the wound closed.
• The Architect is the remedy, the force that will unmake the scar and return reality to what it was meant to be—nothing.
The cult believed that the mortal world was a mistake, a flawed dream that should never have been.
And that by tearing the Veil open, they would return the world to its original, unremembered state.
To exist was to suffer.
To be forgotten was to be free.
The Hollowborn Rites: The Rituals of Erasure
The cults did not simply worship oblivion.
They practiced it.
They made it their faith.
They performed rites of erasure—sacrifices designed not to kill, but to erase the victim from existence entirely.
Their rituals were violent, but not in blood or pain.
Instead, they were precise.
• Names were carved out of stone until no record of the victim remained.
• Faces were burned from portraits until no one could recall their likeness.
• Birth records were cut from ledgers, family lines erased from archives.
• And in the end, the victim's final memory was consumed by the Hollowborn's mark, and their place in the world was unwritten.
The cultists did not mourn.
They rejoiced.
Because they believed that the souls they sacrificed were being freed.
Not sent to an afterlife.
Not sent to hell.
But to nothingness.
And to them, that was salvation.
The Three Hollowborn Orders:
Over centuries, the cults fractured into three distinct orders, each devoted to different aspects of oblivion.
1. The Scions of the Veil – The Keepers of the Hollowborn's Name
• The Scions were the oldest order, formed in the aftermath of the Fracture War.
• They were scholars and priests, tasked with preserving the knowledge of the Hollowborn's true nature.
• But they were also defilers of knowledge.
• They did not simply seek to preserve forgotten history.
• They sought to erase it entirely.
• They burned records of ancient kingdoms, cut names from stone, and rewrote history with holes in it.
Their ultimate goal was to restore the Architect's name—the true, forbidden name that had been severed from reality by the Veilwalkers.
They believed that by speaking its true name, the Architect would remember itself fully.
And when it did, it would unmake the Veil in an instant.
The Scions were marked by their Hollowborn brands—sigils carved into their skin with Veilsteel blades.
They willingly let the Hollowborn mark them, making their memories fragments of the void.
• When they were seen, they could not be remembered.
• When they spoke, their voices faded the moment they left the listener's ears.
• When they died, there were no graves.
2. The Veil Reavers – The Cutters of the Fracture
• The Veil Reavers were the militant order.
• Formed from the remnants of fallen Veilwalkers, they were mortals who had once crossed the Veil and returned… fractured.
• Their bodies were unstable, half-real, half-lost.
• They could phase in and out of reality, appearing as nothing but shadows when they moved.
• Their touch could slip through time, aging and unmaking their victims with a brush of their hand.
The Reavers were hunters.
They tracked down Veil-touched bloodlines, seeking to cut them from reality.
They wielded Veilshards—broken fragments of the Veil itself—fashioned into blades and gauntlets.
When they cut their victims, they didn't draw blood.
They cut away moments—removing entire fragments of their lives.
Their victims would forget the last five minutes, then five years.
Until there was nothing left to forget.
3. The Hollow Choir – The Singers of Silence
• The Hollow Choir was the smallest and most fanatical order.
• They were not born from the Fracture War but from those left behind—the broken survivors of entire villages erased by the Hollowborn.
• The Choir's members removed their tongues and replaced their voices with Hollowborn runes.
• Their throats became conduits for oblivion, allowing them to speak in the language of erasure.
When they sang, they unwrote reality.
• Their voices could erase spoken words, removing them from the air.
• Their chants could dissolve names, making people's memories of their loved ones blur and fade.
• And when they performed their ritual hymn, they could call the Hollowborn directly through the Veil.
They were the Architect's voice, calling it back into existence.
And with each song, they pulled it closer to waking.
The Cult's Ultimate Purpose: Tearing the Veil Wide Open
The Hollowborn cults have only one goal:
To tear the Veil apart, piece by piece.
To them, the Veil is a prison.
A cage around the only true god.
And they will do anything to break it.
To undo the Veil, they need three things:
1. The Oblivion Key: The artifact forged from the first sliver of fractured light—the only tool that can cut through the Veil.
2. The Veilwalker's Blood: The bloodline of the original Twelve—the only mortals still bound to the Veil's power. Liam is the last of them.
3. The Architect's Name: The true name of the Hollowborn god, which they believe will call it back into being.
The cults are hunting Liam.
Not to kill him.
But to use him.
To turn him into the Architect's vessel.
And through him, the Veil will fall.