The deeper they pushed into the highland marsh, the more the terrain betrayed itself. What looked solid crumbled. What looked still breathed. Roots curled like sleeping serpents beneath the moss. Trees leaned together like conspirators.
Zhurong whispered something in Draconic under his breath and marked another glyph into the leather of his bracer. Boo had stopped making jokes. Loque stayed tight at Nyxia's heel, tail low, ears swiveling like satellite dishes tuned to the static of another world.
The trail led upward along a ridge hemmed in by shattered stone and soft earth. They'd been following a faint line of scorch marks—recent, unnatural. Not fire. Not frost. Something that pulled heat away.
Then they saw it.
A figure in the clearing ahead.
Not lying down.
Not buried.
But standing—motionless, chest rising in impossibly slow rhythm, as if caught between one breath and the next.
A woman. Night elf. Eyes closed. Skin gray-blue and veined with faint violet. A Veil-bloom burst from her chest like a crown. White petals turned black at the edges, humming with silent tension. The flower pulsed—once every few seconds, like a dying star trying to remember how to shine.
"Okay," Boo whispered. "Nope. That's new."
Nyxia approached first. Her mark flared the moment she passed the treeline—hotter than usual. Urgent. She raised a hand, and Loque growled low, keeping just behind her.
"She's alive," Zhurong said. "How?"
"More like… paused," Nyxia murmured. "She's not in stasis. She's in loop."
Boo drew her pistol. "We breaking the loop or walking away?"
"We don't touch her," Nyxia said, sharper than she meant. Her eyes never left the elf's face. "Not yet."
Zhurong stepped closer, careful to stay behind Nyxia's shoulder. His fingers flicked through a mental index of warding runes, hesitating mid-air. "I've seen echoes," he said. "Visions. But this isn't one. She's still here. The Veil isn't finished with her."
A whisper licked the back of their skulls.
Not a word. Just a pressure. Like teeth behind the veil of the world.
The elf's mouth twitched. Then opened.
And she breathed a single word:
"Nyxia."
The name hit like a dropped blade.
Zhurong took a full step back. Boo's pistol lifted without thinking.
Nyxia froze.
"She doesn't know me," she said.
"You sure about that?" Boo asked.
Nyxia stepped forward.
"No," Zhurong warned. "No further."
Nyxia ignored him. The flower pulsed harder now. Her arm felt like it was burning from the inside, mark thrumming in her bones.
Then the elf's eyes opened.
Just for a second.
And the world screamed.
She wasn't herself anymore. She was somewhere else—somewhen else.
The sky was inverted—black sun, white stars, all trembling in a bowl of cracked glass. Chains strung between sky and earth. And beneath them, a massive structure—temple, fortress, machine. It breathed.
And inside it, her—the elf. Still alive. Still screaming. Kept alive by the bloom. Fed to it.
The Veil wasn't showing a death.
It was showing a prediction.
A failure.
And the one at the center of it all wasn't the elf.
It was Nyxia.
She collapsed, knees hitting soil with enough force to bruise. Loque whined, body tense. Boo was already kneeling beside her.
"You're back," Boo said. "You were gone for minutes."
"Just… one moment," Nyxia muttered, dragging breath into her lungs. "Only one."
"You sure about that?" Zhurong asked quietly. "Because your mark was singing. And not the happy kind."
Nyxia shook her head. "It showed me a future. My future. If I fail."
"Fail what?" Boo asked.
She didn't answer.
Instead, Nyxia looked at the woman, now motionless again. The Veil-bloom had faded slightly, petals dimmed, no longer pulsing.
"She was… shown something too," Nyxia said. "And the Veil locked her in the moment before it ended. Because it wants her to see that failure forever."
"That's not memory," Zhurong said. "That's torture."
"It's a warning," Nyxia corrected.
Zhurong opened his mouth, then paused. "She said your name. That means the Veil knows you now. Not just your mark. You."
Nyxia stood, slow and deliberate. Her legs shook.
"Yeah," she said. "It does."
They left her there—the elf, the bloom, the moment. Whatever lived in that loop could keep spinning.
They didn't talk until camp.
A small cave tucked beneath twisted rock, dry enough to sleep without drowning. Boo laid tripwires and Loque patrolled without being asked. Zhurong made a fire—not for heat, but for comfort.
Nyxia didn't sit. She stood at the edge of the cave, staring into the dark.
"She said your name," Zhurong said finally. "You want to explain that?"
Nyxia didn't turn. "No."
"She knew you."
"She knew the end of me," Nyxia said. "Or a version of it. The Veil's showing futures now. It's learning faster than we are."
Boo tossed a rock into the fire. "Great. We're fighting a memory with a learning curve."
Nyxia finally sat.
Zhurong stared into the flame. "That woman's not the first."
"No," Nyxia said. "But she was the first to see it before it happened. And survive."
Boo muttered something into her flask.
Nyxia's hand hovered over her pouch. She could still feel the ring inside. Still feel the warmth of that other fire—the one in her dream. The one where her father didn't say goodbye, just try again.
She looked across the fire.
"Next time," she said, "we destroy the bloom."
Boo raised a brow. "Thought we didn't touch the flowers?"
Nyxia's eyes were cold. "This one touched back."
Zhurong nodded, and didn't argue.
Loque lay at the mouth of the cave, growling low at nothing.
They all felt it.
The Veil was getting closer.
And it wasn't done.