The room was quiet as bone.
Kael stood at the threshold of the Seer's chamber, heart pounding.
The Copper Wound's basement opened into tunnels far older than the city itself etched stone passageways where the air hummed with a breathless stillness. Torchlight didn't flicker here. It floated. Suspended as if unsure if fire still had a place.
Elira placed a hand on his shoulder before he entered. "She doesn't lie," she said. "But she doesn't speak plainly either. Listen... carefully."
Kael nodded, not trusting his voice.
The door shut behind him.
The room was circular, the walls covered in mirrors blacker than night. At the center sat a woman in robes of unraveling thread. Her face was covered by a mask made of polished bone featureless but for a single vertical slit where the eyes should be.
The Seer.
A thread of pale light wound from her fingers into a bowl filled with swirling sand.
Kael stepped forward. "You're the Seer of Veln?"
She did not answer at first.
Instead, her hand hovered over the bowl, fingers twitching.
The sand shifted forming runes, circles, shapes too complex to hold. They bent and broke themselves as Kael looked at them, dissolving before he could grasp meaning.
At last, her voice came soft, toneless, and old.
"Who brought you from the dark?"
Kael swallowed. "I... I escaped on my own."
"Did you?"
A pause.
Then her fingers dipped into the sand.
The room shifted.
The mirrors hummed.
Kael's mark ignited with cold.
Not fire. Not pain.
Something else.
Like space itself remembering something terrible.
The Seer's breath hitched.
She rose suddenly, as if jerked by invisible strings, and staggered back from the bowl.
Kael took a step forward. "What's wrong?"
Her masked head snapped toward him.
"You are not Veilborn."
Kael blinked. "I... I didn't say I was."
"You are not Whisperborn. Nor Fathomwalker. You are not chosen."
Her voice cracked on that last word, like something underneath her mask had begun to fray.
"And yet you bear the mark of all three. An echo in a place where echoes do not belong."
The mirrors around them darkened.
Kael's heartbeat was too loud now.
The sand in the bowl erupted twisting upward, forming shapes like claws reaching for the ceiling.
The Seer gasped, falling to her knees.
"The Pattern does not hold. It does not see you. You are the threadless one. The veiled echo. The unmarked flame that casts shadow in every direction."
Kael stepped back. "What does that mean? What am I?"
She looked up at him no longer the composed oracle of the city, but something brittle and deeply afraid.
"Not born. Not made. A fracture left behind. A root from a tree no one remembers planting."
She trembled.
"You are not meant to be—"
The mirrors shattered.
Every last one.
Kael covered his face as shards of dark glass spiraled like storm winds, then stopped mid-air and fell in slow motion.
The Seer collapsed.
Elira burst in moments later, blade drawn, Ryall close behind her.
"What the hell happened?" Ryall demanded.
Kael stared at them.
"I—I didn't do anything."
The Seer stirred. Her voice was hoarse, broken.
"Do not test him again. Do not bring him before the Council. Bind him with lies if you must but do not let the Concord know. Do not let the Ascended see."
She looked directly at Elira.
"If they learn what he is... there will be no Veln."
They left the chamber in silence.
No one spoke.
Even Ryall, who always had something sharp to say, kept his mouth shut.
Back in their room, Kael sat on the edge of his cot, hands trembling.
"I'm not anything," he muttered. "I don't even want to be anything."
Elira stared out the window, jaw clenched.
"No one gets to choose what they are," she said. "Not in this world."
Kael looked at her, desperate. "Then what do I do?"
She finally turned.
"You pretend," she said. "You lie. You keep your power small. You stay quiet until we figure out what they saw."
He wanted to scream.
He wanted to burn something just to feel control again.
Instead, he nodded.
And outside, high above Veln, something watched.
And smiled.