What Refuses to Sleep

The Hollow did not let them leave.

Not immediately. Not cleanly.

Kael and Eline climbed the spiral vault stairs in silence, the weight of what they'd seen pressing down with every step. The monolith's hum still lingered in Kael's bones—a vibration, a recognition, and something more dangerous: a bond that hadn't been forged but remembered.

He was no longer a stranger to the Veil.

He was something it had once known.

When they breached the chapel ruins again, dusk had already returned, though Kael would've sworn they'd only been down there an hour.

Mist curled at the threshold like a waiting beast.

Eline stepped into it and faltered.

The ground trembled beneath her foot.

Just slightly.

Enough.

They froze.

From deep within the mist, a sound emerged.

Not a whisper.

Not a growl.

A chant.

Low, rhythmic, impossible to place in any known tongue. It rolled through the fog like breath, accompanied by shapes that darted just out of focus. Black forms. Tall. Thin. Walking in slow circles around the remnants of the chapel. Never stepping closer—but never straying too far.

"They weren't here before," Kael murmured.

"They were beneath," Eline replied grimly.

They made it to the edge of the chapel grounds without confrontation. But the mists followed. The chanting faded, but Kael could feel it still—thrumming behind his ribs, like a second heartbeat.

They reached the narrow descent path where their horses had been tied.

Gone.

Not dead.

Not released.

Simply gone.

Hoofprints vanished halfway across the shale, as if the animals had been lifted from the world mid-stride.

Kael scanned the slopes. "This place is reacting to the mark."

Eline nodded. "Or to what you did to the mark."

He opened his palm, letting the crescent-ring symbol burn faintly in shadowed blue. The fracture line now pulsed with its own rhythm—out of sync with his own heartbeat. Faster. Hungrier.

"We walk," Eline said.

The route back to the outskirts of the Hollow should've taken an hour. It took three. Paths twisted. Landmarks changed. At one point, they passed the same broken veilstalk tree three times, though neither had circled.

"Spatial dissonance," Eline muttered. "But not natural."

"Not Whisperer-set?"

"No," she said flatly. "This is instinctual."

The Veil itself was folding space—not to mislead them, but to contain them.

Tenebris stirred within Kael's veins. He felt its frustration, but also its excitement. Like a child returning to an ancestral home where the adults had long perished.

Kael breathed carefully, feeling his focus slip.

"Keep talking," he said. "About anything. I need an anchor."

Eline hesitated.

Then: "Do you know what the Hollow used to be called before the mines?"

He shook his head.

"Tessariel. One of the old waystations in the time of the fractured kingdoms. It guarded the Duskroads. Some of the Veilbound legions passed through here."

Kael blinked. "How do you know that?"

Her voice was tight. "Because my mother was stationed here. Before everything broke."

That silenced him.

She'd never spoken of her lineage before. Not clearly.

And it left Kael with more questions than answers.

By the time they reached the outskirts of the Hollow again, night had fully dropped. The sky was invisible—veiled in a dense web of unnatural clouds. Only the Duskveil's resonance provided light now: deep blue shimmerings that outlined the terrain in lines of haunted luminescence.

Eline slowed, hand raised.

Kael felt it, too.

They were no longer alone.

Figures stood across the path.

Not the same shadow-thin forms from before. These were humanoid. Cloaked. Faces obscured by hoods and half-masks of tarnished mirror-glass.

Not Gloamkin.

Not fully Whisperer.

Somewhere in-between.

"Watchers," Eline said softly.

"Yours?"

"No. Not ours."

Then the lead figure stepped forward.

And spoke Kael's name.

Not aloud. Not in whisper.

Inside.

It echoed across the thread between his mind and Tenebris.

"Kael of Hollow Quarter. Veil-marked. Inheritor."

Eline tensed beside him. "Don't engage."

Kael didn't listen.

He stepped forward.

"Who are you?"

The voice returned.

"We are the Last Bound. Those who refused the Sundering."

He heard the capital letters even in thought.

"They were purged," Eline whispered. "That's impossible."

"They hid," Kael said quietly.

Another step forward. The Watchers did not attack. They parted instead, revealing the slope beyond—the safe trail back into the wilds north of the Hollow.

"Let us pass," Kael said.

The figure inclined its head.

But as he stepped forward, it raised a hand.

"When the fracture completes, we will call you. You carry the last shape."

Kael froze.

"The last shape of what?"

The figure did not answer.

Instead, it turned to Eline.

And said something Kael did not hear.

But it broke her.

She staggered. Caught herself. Didn't look at him.

The figures faded into the mist.

They walked in silence for hours.

Eline kept her hood low, face unreadable.

"What did they say to you?" Kael asked, finally.

Her voice was brittle. "Something I didn't want to remember."

"They knew you."

"They knew my mother," she said, and her voice cracked. "She didn't die in a purge, Kael. She joined them."

He stopped walking.

"I thought she'd been loyal to the end. I was raised to believe it."

Kael's heart thudded.

"You were raised to watch me."

She didn't answer.

As the Hollow receded behind them, Kael felt a subtle shift in Tenebris. It wasn't as wild. Not as eager. As though the thing inside him had finally fed on what it needed—not flesh, not fear.

But truth.

That night, when they made camp in the ruins of an old stone barn, Kael didn't sleep.

Eline sat across from him in the flickering firelight, head bowed, the shard she'd kept earlier now exposed: a Veilbound relic, but splintered—too unstable to activate, too personal to discard.

"My mother left behind fragments," she said quietly. "She marked them to guide someone back if they ever carried the same resonance."

"You think it's me."

"I don't want it to be," she said.

Then softer: "But I think it always was."

Kael stared at the flame.

"I'm not ready."

Eline looked up, eyes shadowed with something near sorrow.

"Neither was she."