Masks for the Lightless

The corridor that led to the Whisperers' interior chambers always felt colder than the rest of the compound. No torchlight held long to its walls. Every step Kael took felt like a trespass—even now, even after everything.

He'd returned from the Fracture with ash under his nails and memory burning in his spine.

But the compound hadn't changed.

It waited, as if the walls themselves had been listening in his absence.

"Kael."

He turned at the voice.

Eline stood near the edge of the stairwell, her cloak drawn tighter than usual. Her voice was soft, but it rang with something tense—a fracture line drawn thin and ready to split.

"They want to send us out," she said.

Kael frowned. "Where?"

"Grensha. Border town, east perimeter. They've had reports of a shimmer breach—Duskveil activity flickering beyond the perimeter wards."

His mouth dried. "And they want us to go?"

Eline nodded.

Kael's thoughts surged, full of suspicion—but not disbelief.

After what happened at the Fracture, the Whisperers didn't trust him.

So now they were testing him.

Field assignment. Remote town. Eline by his side—not just to assist. To monitor.

He saw it in her eyes even if she didn't say it.

You're the assignment now.

The journey was quiet.

They traveled light—no sigils, no apprentices, just cloaks, blades, and the seal of Hollow Quarter carved into a silver ring each of them wore. It was rare to see Eline dressed without the ceremonial layers of a handler; stripped down to travel leathers and a single veilband on her wrist, she looked less like the person who had kept Kael at a distance… and more like the girl in his dream from weeks ago.

The one who'd asked the darkness, Will he survive the binding?

"You're not going to ask me what I saw down there, are you?" Kael said as their boots pressed into the wet earth of the path.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because if you wanted to tell me, you already would have."

That silenced him. Not because she was wrong—but because she wasn't.

It wasn't mistrust. Not anymore.

It was fear of what he would say, if he gave the vision shape in words.

If I speak it aloud, it becomes prophecy.

The town was wrong.

Not destroyed. Not corrupted. Just… wrong.

Grensha sat in the curl of two hills like a cupped hand. From a distance, it looked normal: smoke from chimneys, movement in the fields, glowlamps burning near the inn.

But the moment they crossed into the outer wards, Kael felt it.

A pressure.

A distortion.

The Duskveil had touched this place—not fully broken through, but pressed its weight against the seams of the world. Like a hand testing thin glass.

Eline stopped beside the inn and narrowed her eyes. "Do you hear that?"

Kael nodded.

Not sound—absence.

There were no birds. No dogs barking. No distant iron clatter of forge or mill.

Just silence.

And something breathing beneath it.

They made contact with the mayor—an older man, tight-eyed and weary, who led them into a back room of the inn with boards nailed to the windows.

"We've had visitors," he muttered. "Not people. Not beasts. Walkers in the mist."

"Shimmer walkers?" Eline asked.

The man hesitated. "They don't shimmer. They hum. Not loud. Not music. Just…" He trailed off, glancing at Kael. "You understand, don't you, boy?"

Kael stiffened.

He did.

He'd heard the same thing in the dream before the coin burned to ash. A hum beneath silence. A sound that wasn't sound—a pull.

He could feel it now, faint but steady, like a rope knotted to his spine and dragging him forward.

"They're still here," Kael said.

The mayor paled.

That night, Kael and Eline took shifts circling the outer ridge of the town. They passed between cracked stone markers that once held sigils but now flickered like dying embers. Eline muttered a renewal phrase over one—but it only sputtered and dimmed.

"This place is bleeding," she whispered.

Kael crouched beside one of the stones. His fingers brushed it.

And the world split.

A moment—no more—flashed before him:

A veilwalker with no face.A child's laughter echoing from a mouth full of moths.Eline, screaming his name as shadow tore her backward—

And then it was gone.

Kael reeled back.

Eline caught his arm.

"What did you see?"

He looked at her.

And lied.

"Nothing. Just—flash memory."

She didn't press. But her hand stayed on his wrist too long.

Not suspicion.

Not quite concern.

Something else.

Worry, perhaps.

Or guilt.

Near dawn, Kael stood alone at the northern ridge.

The fog had deepened. The light was blue and sickly.

He didn't hear the hum anymore.

He felt it.

Like breath on the inside of his skin.

He turned—

—and saw it.

A figure.

Half-submerged in the fog. Tall. Wrapped in veiled skin. No face, no motion, no threat.

Yet Kael's knees nearly buckled.

Because the hum rose in him like a memory returning.

"You are bound to the wound," the figure said.

No mouth. No voice. Just presence.

Kael didn't answer.

He didn't have to.

The figure tilted its head.

"You carry her echo. You walk toward the unsealing."

Then it vanished.

No ripple. No noise. Just absence.

Kael staggered back—

And Eline caught him again.

"What did you see this time?" she demanded, eyes sharp.

Kael looked past her, toward the fog now thinning.

"Not what," he whispered. "Who."

When they left Grensha the next day, Kael didn't speak once during the journey.

Eline didn't ask again.

But when they reached the gates of the Hollow Quarter compound, the first thing Kael noticed wasn't the guards or the flags or even the curious eyes of waiting apprentices.

It was the veilstone markers along the walls.

They flickered—dimmed—as he passed.

Just like the ones in Grensha.

And Eline noticed. 

She slowed her pace. Looked at him.

Then said nothing.

But Kael could feel it in her silence.

She'd seen the same truth he had.

The Duskveil doesn't press against Kael anymore.

It moves for him.