17. Eirene
SEVENTEEN
EIRENE
The voices start three hours after the Sovereign retreats.
I’m at the central stone, checking the tear for signs of widening, when the first whisper curls through my mind. Not the Veil’s familiar hum—this is different. Sharper. Personal.
You took my daughter’s face from me.
I freeze. The voice is feminine, cracked with grief—a woman from a village three years past. Her daughter had wandered too close to the boundary, and I’d saved the girl by taking the mother’s memory of her child’s first smile.
The daughter lived. The mother never looked at her the same way again.
You stole my mother’s song. A different voice now—male, young, heavy with accusation. The father from yesterday. The one I saved. I can’t remember her voice anymore. Can’t hear her singing. You took that from me.
The stone is cool beneath my hands. It doesn’t help. The voices aren’t real. They’re echoes—stolen memories twisted into weapons, fragments of grief given teeth.
But they feel real. Gods help me, they feel real.
You promised safety and gave us emptiness. More voices now, layering atop each other. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Every person I’ve stolen from, every memory I’ve consumed, all speaking at once. You carved out pieces of our souls and called it mercy.
My knees buckle. I catch myself against the stone, fingers scraping ancient runes, and the voices swell into a chorus of accusation that drowns out everything else.
Then they stop.
All at once. Complete silence.
And in that silence, a single voice emerges—not speaking through stolen memories anymore, but with a presence that presses against my mind like a hand closing around my skull.
Blood-keeper. The Sovereign’s voice is neither male nor female. It’s a chorus compressed into singularity, ancient and hungry and terribly patient.
Blood-keeper. A name for what I’d become without realizing it. Not a boundary witch anymore—something older. Something the Veil had made of me.
Did you think I needed to manifest to speak with you?
I force myself upright. Force my voice to remain steady, though my hands are shaking against the stone.
“I know what you are.” The words come out stronger than I feel. “Severed ties and stolen moments. Everything the Veil has consumed for centuries, given form.”
Laughter ripples through my mind—not cruel, but amused. The way a parent might laugh at a child who thinks they understand the world.
You understand so little, boundary witch. I am not merely what the Veil has consumed. I am what YOU have created. Every memory you’ve taken lives in me now.
The truth of it hits like a blade to the gut.
I made this. Eight years of mercy, eight years of stealing memories to spare lives, and all of it—every fragment, every moment, every precious piece of humanity I’ve torn away—has been feeding an entity that wants to unmake the world.
“Why?” My voice cracks. “Why tell me this? Why not just—”
Kill you? The presence pulses with what might be amusement. Because I don’t want you dead. I want you willing.
A shudder runs through me. Not from the cold—the Veilborder is never truly cold—but from the implication beneath those words.
“Willing to do what?”
The Sovereign doesn’t answer with words. Instead, it shows me.
The vision slams into me without warning.
One moment I’m standing at the stones, fingers pressed to ancient runes. The next, I’m somewhere else entirely—a place that exists outside of space and time, where reality bends like wet paper and darkness has texture, substance, intent.
The Shadow Court.
I’ve glimpsed it before—through tears in the Veil, through the eyes of travelers too damaged to describe what they’ve seen. But those were fragments. Shadows of shadows. This is the real thing, laid bare before me in all its terrible glory.
Faces pressed against the darkness on all sides—souls by the thousands, mouths open in silent screams, straining toward me as if they knew I was coming. And at the center of it all, a throne.
It rises from the living darkness like a tumor rising from flesh—twisted, organic, wrong.
It’s made of names. I can see them carved into its surface, can feel them humming with residual identity.
Thousands of names. Millions. Every soul the Veil has consumed since the original betrayal, compressed into a seat of power.
The throne is empty.
Waiting. Do you see now, boundary witch? Do you understand what waits on the other side of your precious boundary?
“This is what you are.” I force the words out through the horror clawing at my throat. “This is what you want to bring through.”
This is what WILL come through. The only question is whether it happens with your cooperation… or your screams.
The vision shifts. I see the Veilborder—my Veilborder—but changed.
The stones are inverted, pointing down into the earth instead of up toward the sky.
The tear has become a doorway, yawning wide, bleeding darkness instead of light.
And through that doorway, the Shadow Court pours into reality like infection flooding a wound.
Villages burning with black flame. Cities swallowed by living shadow. People running, screaming, falling—their memories torn from them, their identities consumed, their faces joining the millions already pressed into the walls of this nightmare realm.
And standing at the center of the breach, feeding it with her blood, a woman with silver-streaked hair and scars on her wrists.
Me.
You’ve been feeding the Veil so long that you’ve become part of it. A living anchor. A door that walks and breathes and bleeds. If I can bind you—make you bleed for MY purposes instead of the boundary’s—the Veil won’t just open. It will INVERT.
“You want me as a breach.” The realization crystallizes, cold and clear.
I want you as a door. One that never closes.
The vision releases me as suddenly as it seized me.
I’m back at the stones, on my knees in the black soil, bile rising in my throat. My hands are bleeding—I must have clawed at the runes without realizing it—and the Veil is shuddering around me, responding to my distress.
“Eirene!”
Varkhul’s voice cuts through the fog in my mind. Then his hands are on my shoulders, turning me, pulling me up from the ground with careful strength. His face swims into focus—brutal features tight with concern, that orange-gold gaze moving over me quickly, checking for wounds.
“What happened? I felt—” He breaks off. His jaw tightens. “Pain. Fear. I thought—”
“The Sovereign.” I manage the words through chattering teeth. When did I start shaking? “It spoke to me. Showed me things. The Shadow Court. What it wants.”
His grip tightens on my shoulders. Not painful—grounding. Real. A reminder that I’m here, in my body, at the boundary that’s still intact.
For now.
“Tell me.” His voice is rough with command. “Everything.”
So I do.