They moved quietly through the highlands, following the line of dying trees that marked the marsh's bleeding edge. Each step took them closer to ground that no longer behaved like Azeroth. The soil felt thinner. The wind smelled wrong — sweet one moment, metallic the next, like something testing their senses.
No one spoke much after the encounter with the looped elf.
Nyxia hadn't said a word since the cave.
She moved ahead of the others, not fast, but with the sure-footed determination of someone who had already made a decision no one else had caught up to.
Zhurong kept glancing at her from behind. His lips moved in silent calculations, mentally working through wards and protections — none of which felt sufficient anymore.
Boo trailed behind, muttering half-coherent curses, pausing only to swat at branches that didn't seem to be there a moment before. "Feels like the trees are breathing on me."
"They are," Zhurong muttered.
"Fantastic."
Loque stuck close to Nyxia's side, fur twitching with unease. He hadn't growled once since they left camp. That alone was unsettling.
They found the ruin just before dusk — or what passed for dusk in this lightless part of the Veil's domain. A circular depression in the land, ringed by the crumbled remains of spires that once held up something greater. Whatever it had been, it was broken now. Swallowed by vines, the pieces of the structure seemed to shiver under scrutiny, like they knew they'd been forgotten.
At the center of the depression sat a stone table. Stained. Cracked. Carved in runes that pulsed faintly with leftover magic. Warding glyphs — broken and rewired by something that didn't understand their purpose, only their power.
Boo approached first, peering around with one hand resting on her pistol. "This feel like a place where answers live, or where we die with more questions?"
"Yes," Zhurong said, already sketching a replica of the runes.
Nyxia stood at the edge of the ruin. The mark on her arm itched. Not with warning — with awareness. Like it recognized this place. Or the thing it had once tried to contain.
She descended the slope without a word.
As she approached the stone table, the mark pulsed. Once. Twice.
Then something behind the runes woke.
A shimmer passed across the glyphs, and a figure rose from the far side of the ruin. Not summoned. Not hiding. Just… waiting.
Veil-marked.
A man. Not old, but worn — skin pale and tight across bone, lips cracked from speaking to nothing for too long. His armor was ruined, rusted in the way metal gets when reality itself has been chewing on it. A Veil flower bloomed over one eye, petals wrapped tight in spirals. Not dormant. Not alive. Watching.
Boo swore. "Hostile?"
The man didn't raise a weapon. Just tilted his head.
"Too late," he said.
Nyxia stepped forward. "You were one of us."
He smiled. It wasn't warm. "We were all 'one of us' once."
Zhurong muttered, "He's farther gone than the others."
"I'm not gone," the man snapped, voice sharp now. "I just stopped lying to myself about what this is."
He pointed to the runes. "This place was built to seal it. It failed."
He pointed at Nyxia. "You're walking toward it."
"We're trying to stop it," Nyxia said.
"No." He laughed bitterly. "You're trying to control it. There's no stopping something that was already inside us."
Loque growled for the first time, low and guttural.
The man stepped closer.
"The Veil doesn't want you dead, Nyxia. It wants you to remember. It's not the enemy."
"What is it, then?" she asked.
He raised a hand and pointed toward the sky, as if indicating something just beyond their ability to perceive.
"It's what comes next."
Then his body convulsed.
The flower in his eye bloomed wide — too wide. Veins snapped in his face. A whispering scream poured out of his mouth — dozens of voices layered, shrieking and pleading and laughing all at once.
And then he attacked.
Zhurong shouted, flames roaring to life in his fists.
Nyxia sidestepped as the man charged, moving like something half-pulled from dream logic. He blinked through space — flickering forward — swinging with claws where fingers had been.
Boo fired twice. One shot grazed his shoulder. The second hit the flower.
The scream deepened.
Nyxia barked, "Loque, left!"
The spirit beast lunged, intercepting the man mid-flicker, crashing them both into the broken pillar. The man rolled up from the dirt like he didn't feel pain. Zhurong launched a flare of white fire that seared the side of his chest.
Still he stood.
Still he spoke.
"You can't destroy it," he said. "You are it."
Nyxia moved in fast, blades drawn, and slashed at the flower — not to kill him, but to end the connection.
Her mark burned like a brand.
The flower screamed. The man fell.
Silence.
He didn't die. He didn't move.
Just lay there.
Empty.
Like the Veil had pulled itself out of him and left only skin behind.
No one said anything for a long moment.
Then Boo exhaled. "I'm starting to miss normal cultists."
Zhurong moved to the stone table, inspecting the remains of the broken seal. "This was a ward against a gate. Not the Veil itself. Just one of its teeth."
Nyxia looked down at the man's still form. "Then there are more."
Zhurong nodded. "Many."
She touched the scar on her arm.
Not pain.
Just fire.
And a whisper she didn't share.
They didn't bury him.
There was nothing left to bury.
Just another marker on the path toward something none of them could name — not yet.
When they made camp that night, Boo sat with her back to the fire, pistol half-cleaned, muttering to herself. Zhurong carved a new set of sigils into the ground, stronger this time. Tighter.
Nyxia lay awake, staring at the stars.
The Veil had shown her a failure.
Now it had shown her a survivor.
Both were warnings.
And neither gave her a way out.
Only a way forward.