Step beyond the veil, where whispers linger and secrets stir—read from the beginning.
The door had been waiting for her.
It loomed before her, its frame wreathed in mist, its surface cold and smooth beneath her trembling fingers. The city stretched behind it, vast and ruined, frozen in time. Lanterns flickered in the empty windows of forgotten towers. A bridge, thin as breath, vanished into the horizon where the sky bled violet. The air was thick with something ancient, something lost.
A breath—long, slow, exhaled from the depths of nothing—slipped through the fabric of the world. The mist recoiled. The sky dimmed. The ground trembled beneath her feet.
Elara staggered back, pulse thrumming against her ribs, the weight of unseen eyes pressing against her skin. The figures who had watched her for weeks—the sorrowful woman, the hollow-eyed child, the antlered man—remained silent in her paintings, their presence receding as something else emerged.
Something wrong.
The air thickened, heavy as wet silk, clinging to her throat. Shadows stretched from the open door, not cast by light but moving with purpose, curling, shifting, spreading. They slithered over the stone, pooling into shapes that were not quite human, but almost.
A presence.
It did not step through the threshold. It did not need to. It was already here.
The whispering had stopped.
Elara swallowed against the raw, aching silence.
She knew the Magiri had been trapped, that the veil had stolen them from history, from memory, from time itself. But she had never considered what else might have been caught within the weave of forgotten things.
The shadow stretched toward her, tendrils of ink curling against her boots. The candlelight in her cottage—what little had flickered back to life after the rupture—faltered, cowering against the weight of this thing, this him.
Not a whisper. Not a voice. But a feeling.
A cold hand at the nape of her neck. A breath she did not take. A silence that swallowed sound.
Elara stepped back, her spine pressing against the unfinished canvas behind her. Paint smeared against her fingertips—wet, though she had not touched her brush in hours.
The air tasted of earth and decay. Of something unearthed, something long buried and now free.
The shadows coiled, reaching, tasting the air, filling the space between heartbeats. The shape of him was shifting, unformed, something unfinished yet inevitable.
The whisper came.
Not like the others—not a plea, not a memory aching to be found.
This was a promise. A certainty.
“You should not have come here.”
Elara’s breath hitched.
The world darkened. The mist swirled.
The presence that was not quite a man, but almost, reached for her.