Chapter 63
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
LEINA
I’d come to think of the Veil as something I had to fight. It’s wild, unknowable, dangerous. But as its endlessness swallows me, surrounds me with something vast and strangely soft, I realize what Bri had tried to tell me: it’s also alive.
It hums around me. It has a heartbeat. A breath.
I shudder from the terrible, aching familiarity of it. The Veil isn’t a place .
It’s a who .
And it’s everyone.
I don’t go to places . I go to souls .
I search the darkness for that tide of wrongness, for the souls here that are chained to a tainted sort of death.
“There!” I say, pointing to something that’s oddly … dull. They’re … out of place, somehow.
“ I see it, ” she says, and she banks hard until we’re coming again into the light.
The battlefield opens beneath us.
The Kher’zenn wheel through the sky, their long white hair streaming behind them, their eyes pure and empty and terrifying.
They are beautiful the way a blade is beautiful right before it sinks into your heart.
The draegoths open their mouths in silent shrieks, flashing rows of jagged teeth that drip venom so potent the air is rank with it.
The Altor meet them in midair, blades slashing atop the surging backs of their beasts.
The faravars’ wings catch the wind in violent beats, driving their riders harder, higher, into the core of the enemy. A storm that didn’t exist before starts to stir from the force of all these wings. Feathers—ripped free by the draegoths’ claws—spin down into the sea like bloodied petals.
But they’re losing. Everywhere I look, Altor and beasts are falling, spiraling into the cold grasp of the ocean below. Lightning flashes on the horizon, throwing the world into sharp, savage relief—death dressed in something beautiful.
The air burns my face, and salt sticks to my skin. My heart beats once, twice. Vaeloria vibrates beneath me, aching to dive. Her mind presses against mine— let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.
The Veil inside me stirs too, whispering with a voice made of memory— you are the undoing.
I lock my knees around Vaeloria’s flanks, and lower myself against her neck, making myself as one with her as I can.
“Alright, girl,” I whisper, silently pulling my scythe from my back. “Let’s undo what we can.”
She answers with motion, tucking her wings against her body, dropping us from the sky.
We burst from the heavens on a whistle of pure speed. I swing my scythe out, decapitating the same Kher’zenn I’d locked eyes with before. He doesn’t see me until his head is severed. Another tries to wheel his draegoth around, but I swing again, ripping him from his saddle.
"Veilstrider!" he screams, a sound full of terror even as he plummets, blood pouring from the ruin that’s his chest.
I pull my scythe in close again, breathing hard, as Vaeloria levels off and spreads her magnificent, terrible wings.
She slashes through the back of a draegoth as it turns to face us.
Grim satisfaction floods me as our Altor surge forward, seizing the opportunity we’ve carved open.
They cut through the Kher’zenn and their creatures, through those foolish enough to turn their backs.
But every time an Altor falls—and they fall, oh gods, they fall—it punches straight through my chest. I waste precious moments searching for Ryot in the chaos. I panic when I can’t find him, terrified he’s already at the bottom of the ocean.
He’s cutting through the Kher’zenn like a man possessed.
His blade flashes in brutal, economical strikes—no wasted motion, no hesitation.
He turns for a breath—merely long enough to see me above him, to know it’s me.
His face breaks open, a crack of fierce relief cutting through the mask he wears.
His sword slams through a draegoth’s eye socket a second later.
Shredwhips slice through the air, one tearing across my forearm, peeling flesh from bone. I don’t feel the rest because I’ve already reached for the Veil again.
And it’s there. So easy. So close.
Like slipping into my own skin.
It embraces us.