The Painted Veil

Writing Prompt Three

In D’veen, a land of humans who have long forgotten magic…

The scent of oil and pigment hung thick in the air, clinging to the wooden beams of Elara’s cottage. Moonlight pooled through the single window, casting pale ribbons across the floor, she barely noticed.

The candle beside her flickered, the glow stretching long shadows along the walls. Her fingers were steady, her breath slow, her brush poised above the waiting canvas.

She had meant to paint the river at dusk—the quiet bend of water curling through the valley, the way the last light of day softened against the reeds. But the strokes had come unbidden, a force outside of herself pulling color and shape into something else entirely.

Now, before her, was a place she did not know.

A city swallowed by mist, its spires fractured against a violet sky. Lanterns glowed like distant stars in the windows of crumbling towers, their light stretching across empty streets, waiting for someone who would never return. A bridge, thin as a breath, stretched over a chasm that had no end. And at the very heart of it, framed by curling vines and stone worn soft with time—a door.

Elara swallowed.

She had not meant to paint this.

The wind outside howled, rattling against the windowpanes, though the night had been still only moments ago.

A shiver crawled up her spine.

The door in the painting was just a door. Just paint. Just brushstrokes.

And yet, she could not shake the feeling that something on the other side was waiting.

Watching.

Whispering.




The whisper came as a sigh against the nape of her neck.

Elara froze, paintbrush hovering above the half-finished canvas, her pulse drumming a rhythm too quick for comfort. The whisper had no words, only the suggestion of a voice, an exhalation laced with longing. A trick of the wind, she told herself, though the air in her small stone cottage was still.

She exhaled, shaking off the unease, and dipped her brush into midnight blue, streaking it across the canvas in long, sweeping arcs. The color pooled and deepened, swirling, shifting—until it became a doorway.

The whisper returned, this time a murmur.

"Remember."

She jolted back, knocking over a jar of water. It splashed across the wooden floor, reflecting her in fractured ripples—one eye the pale blue-gray of winter’s sky, the other a muted violet. A mark of her difference. A reminder of what she did not understand.

Elara had always been peculiar. Born beneath a waning moon, found abandoned at the threshold of D’veen’s western gates, raised by an elderly painter who had long since passed. But it was today—on her twenty-first birthday—that the world began to feel truly… wrong.

Her paintings were shifting beneath her fingers. Shadows flickered in the corners of her vision. And now, the whispers.

She should have been afraid.




The art she created in the days that followed was unlike anything she had made before. It was raw, aching, alive. She saw entire worlds in her waking dreams and brought them forth with oil and pigment—towering spires wreathed in mist, vast cities where violet lanterns burned in windows, bridges made of stardust stretching over endless chasms.

And always, in every painting, there were figures. Watching. Waiting.

At first, they were hazy, little more than shadows. One by one, they grew clearer.

A woman draped in sorrow stood in the corner of her room, her face obscured by a shroud. A child with hollowed-out eyes peered from the edges of her sketches. A man with antlers of ivory and eyes full of stormlight lingered in the reflection of her window.

None of them spoke. But their whispers filled her nights.

"Find us."
"Free us."
"You are the last of us."

She began locking her doors, though it did nothing to keep them out.



It was on the seventh night that her art moved.

Not the way it had before—no illusions of shifting shadows or the impression of motion. This was something else entirely.

She had painted a sorrowful figure, a woman veiled in twilight, her hand outstretched toward something unseen. The paint had barely dried when the figure stepped forward.

Elara stumbled back, breath caught in her throat, as the painted woman pulled free of the canvas. Her form was blurred at the edges, half-real, half-dream, yet the sorrow in her spectral eyes was unmistakable.

The woman’s voice was soft, layered, as though many voices spoke through her at once.

"You have awakened the Veil."

Elara shook her head. "I don’t understand."

"Because they made you forget."

The woman gestured toward the paintings lining the walls. The landscapes of another world, the beings who whispered to her at night.

"This is where you belong, child of two worlds."

Elara’s pulse thundered in her ears.

Magiri.

She had heard the name in hushed, fearful tones before. A people of magic, a race erased from D’veen’s history, cast into nothingness centuries ago. And yet, the whispering figures in her paintings spoke of them as if they still existed.

As if she was one of them.

Elara clenched her fists, nails biting into her palms.

"Why now?" Her voice was hoarse, raw. "Why am I only seeing this now?"

The painted woman reached toward her, fingers brushing against Elara’s forehead. A searing cold sliced through her mind, unraveling memories that had never been hers.

A great city swallowed by night.
A child torn from her mother’s arms.
A voice whispering, “Hide her. Make her human.”

Elara staggered back, gasping. The whispers that had haunted her all her life weren’t just echoes of something lost. They were pleas.

The Magiri had never been destroyed. They had been trapped.

And her art—the pieces of sorrow, the fragments of longing. Awakening the power.

Her fingers trembled as she reached for her brush.

There was more to paint.

More to remember.

And perhaps, if she painted enough—if she remembered it all—she could finally bring them home.


That night, the veil between worlds began to unravel.



The air in the cottage thickened, pressing against Elara’s skin like the weight of a thousand unseen hands. The final painting lay before her, the oil still glistening, the brush trembling in her grip. She could feel it now—the unraveling. The fabric of the world thinning, stretching, tearing at the seams.

Her violet eye burned.

She clutched at her chest, breath sharp and uneven, but there was no stopping it. The veil had been fraying for weeks, her paintings carving out the path like a knife through silk, each stroke of her brush cutting deeper into the fabric of what was real and what had been hidden.

And now—now it was breaking.

The wind shrieked through the cottage, though the shutters were locked tight. The candlelight flared and died, plunging the room into shadows that did not belong.

And the whispers—the whispers became voices.

"You have seen us."
"You have heard us."
"You have freed us."

The walls trembled. The air tasted of lightning and old magic. The figures in her paintings—those sorrowful, watching beings who had haunted the edges of her world—began to shift.

Not simply flickering. Moving.

A great and terrible sound echoed through the space between spaces, a deep, resonant hum that vibrated in her very bones. Elara fell to her knees, fingers clutching at the wooden floor, her pulse a frantic drumbeat beneath her skin.

And then—the city.

The ruined city she had painted, the one that did not exist—it was here.

Not a painting. Not a dream. Not a whisper from the past. It had come to life around her.

Mist curled at her feet, cold as breath against her skin. The sky above her was not D’veen’s, but a vast stretch of violet, scattered with stars that flickered like dying embers. And before her, rising from the fog, was the door.

The same door she had painted. The same door that had haunted her.

The same door she now knew how to open.

Elara’s heart pounded. She understood now.

She knew what had to be done.

The voices, once fractured and desperate, had gone silent. The world itself was waiting.

She reached out.

Her fingers grazed the door.

And the veil—the veil shattered.