Max
Two more days until the transports came to take us back to the fortress.
No demon activity since the first wave. The archdemon had retreated with a wound from my Coldiron spike. The Veil sat there, churning. Every stalled hour tightened the wire in my chest.
I needed Drakken’s training. Needed the heirs to build the rescue plan. They’d promised.
Meanwhile, I made myself useful—carried crates, hauled timber, repaired blast barriers. I worked until my muscles burned. Busy hands kept my mind from eating itself alive with visions of Missy in the Collector’s grip.
That night, I slept in my own tent. It was the right call.
I’d fed the rumor mill enough. But my chest ached at their absence.
No Fae magic shielding me, no wolf-heat comforting me, no volcanic dragon presence anchoring me.
I’d felt safe with them, even on my worst night. Now that safety net was stripped away.
I slept poorly and woke before dawn.
We’re here. We’re here.
The chanting started again as I ran.
The sky was a bruised purple bleeding to gray where the first light cracked through the darkness. The air bit, metallic with DarkVeil sulfur and faint woodsmoke. Frost crusted the canvas. Dead grass crunched underfoot.
The camp lay still. A few Spartans moved in the gray: two on watch, one feeding the embers of the campfire, one cleaning a weapon. Their breath fogged.
I ran parallel to the Veil, half a block out. Its pull dragged at my chest, magnetic, deepening with every stride.
My gaze snapped to it.
The Veil hung from the sky to the ground, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, so vast its edges vanished into the earth’s curve.
It shifted constantly, shadows rolling inside shadows, surface rippling as if something enormous moved beneath.
Occasionally, a pulse of deep crimson flickered in its depths, there and gone.
Terrifying. Splendid. I wondered if anyone else saw what I saw.
Nobody knew much about it, only that the Q-bomb tore the Shimmers apart.
Realms that had existed in parallel for millennia—Fae, demon, human, and whatever lurked between—crashed together.
Dimensions never meant to touch twisted, blended.
In their midst, the DarkVeil emerged. Some called it the world’s wound, sealed but never healed. Others named it the Hellgate on Earth.
With demons crawling out of it, that theory didn’t feel far off.
Good job, White Witch. Truly. Excellent work, I snorted.
Excellent!
The voices from within the Veil swelled like echoes in a canyon.
My steps slowed. I turned to face the vast darkness, its shadows rolling toward me like waves reaching for the shore.
Max! Max!
Coldiron hummed in my bones, desperate for contact.
My mind raced. Coldiron could carry intent across distances. A river of it inside the Veil could be the bridge between the Oracle and me. If I got closer, the connection would strengthen. I could find out where Missy was. If she was being fed. If she was still alive.
The thought of her gone nearly ripped my heart out.
Missy was six and a half. Left alone in Crimson Ridge when I escaped. I’d planned every detail, promised to go back. A month. Two at most. Instead, the worst predator had plucked her from the slave mine like a flower from a withered garden.
A bargaining chip with my sister’s face.
Guilt and fear squeezed my lungs. In daylight, surrounded by Spartans and schedules, I could hold it at arm’s length.
Here, alone in the gray dawn with the DarkVeil chanting my name, the distance collapsed.
Nothing left but cold, drowning terror for what was happening to my sister while I ran laps on the wrong end of the continent.
I jogged straight toward the Veil.
Closer than anyone in camp ventured voluntarily. The Spartans kept a full block back. I could see the sentries—squared shoulders, tight grips. Every thirty seconds, their gazes flicked toward it, held, snapped back. Checking it was still the same distance away.
Warriors who’d fought mutants and wyverns without flinching. The DarkVeil made them nervous in a way enemies with teeth never could. It wasn’t an enemy. It was a wrongness. Standing near it felt like standing at the edge of a bottomless cliff where the fall would never end.
But I didn’t feel that wrongness.
What I felt was recognition. A genetic memory.
In the mine, survival demanded numbness. But ever since the heirs pulled me from the Scorched Wastes, my feelings had been waking—Aelindor’s knuckles on my jaw, Caspian’s mouth on my cheek, Nikolai’s breath on my throat, Drakken’s fire on my skin.
I’d held the flood back with the discipline that kept me alive. At the Veil’s edge, I couldn’t hold it anymore. It stripped me raw.
Everything broke through. Fear for Missy. Guilt. Longing for the heirs—a need so consuming it terrified me. Grief for my parents, for Rogue, for the years I’d lost in the dark. Fury at a broken world that left its pieces sharp for people like me to cut themselves on.
For a former slave, freedom was the most terrifying thing of all—caring so much it could kill you.
I stood three feet from the shifting shadows.
Yes, yes, Max! Come!
“Cadet Max! What the fuck are you doing?” A Spartan’s voice cracked across the dawn. Boots on hard dirt—someone running toward me, fast and furious.
The pull hooked my ribs and drew me forward. The DarkVeil was a mouth, and I was about to walk into its throat.
Behind me, the boots closed in. “Stop! Max! Fucking stop!”
Don’t stop. Come, Max! Coldiron sang through me, pulling at the armguard, pulling at the desperate need in my blood.
I reached the wall of shadows.
The Veil breathed, rippling like black water disturbed by something vast. Darkness dense, layered, alive with currents caressing my skin with the intimacy of a hand testing the shape of a face.
I pressed my palm to it.
Shadows drew apart for me like black silk splitting along the weave.
I slid forward. There was no going back now.
Darkness swallowed my arms, my shoulders, my face. Cold—not winter cold, but the cold of deep space, between stars.
For one wild heartbeat, I couldn’t breathe. I was nowhere. Suspended in black, Coldiron singing through the void like bells in a midnight cathedral.
Then the resistance broke. Air rushed in. I stumbled, gasped, caught my balance.
Light hit—not sunlight but a reddish glow in the distance.
I was inside the DarkVeil.