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In the Wastelands, the group finds brief shelter among the Wayfen, whose visions and reverence only deepen the sense that Thane’s arrival was foreseen long before he ever stepped into Arbelon. When desert marauders descend on the camp, Thane’s wild magic rises with enough force to make both the attackers and the Wayfen kneel before him as the Celes’tio, leaving him shaken by how easily power can turn belief into devotion.
Chapter 19 - Welcome to Veydris
Night hadn’t yet broken, but the camp stirred with quiet purpose. Fires reduced to ash. Packs cinched tight. The Wayfen moved like shadows—soft steps, no voices, only farewells traced in soot across cheeks in spirals of parting.
But the air held something else now. A tension. Not fear—reverence.
Wherever Thane stepped, whispers followed. Murmured prayers. Eyes dipped low—not out of shame, but something near worship.
He didn’t know what to make of it. Part of him still wanted to write it off—just some mechanic, some programmed behavior, NPCs looping on a script.
But no one bowed to him back home. No one sang when he passed. No one touched his arm like he was real. Most people had already written him off. Forgotten about him. Here, he wasn’t forgotten. He was remembered. Revered.
That unsettled him more than he wanted to admit.
Tomael approached last, robes whispering against the sand. His rust-hazed gaze lingered on Thane, deeper now, the kind of look meant for prophecy—not people.
“Walk true through the veil,” the elder said.
Thane meant to answer. Meant to offer some response. But his throat closed. A nod was all he could manage.
One Wayfen placed a bone-carved charm in his hand—a spiral etched in red. Another bowed so low his forehead brushed the stone.
No one said his name.
They didn’t need to.
Even the marauders were changed. They moved quieter now, eyes lowered, their armor dulled by dust and something like humility. One offered the reins to Thane without a word. Just a nod.
The rest of the group mounted up with other riders. By the time they turned their mounts toward the east, the Wayfen had already faded into the dunes behind them—but they never turned their backs.
The journey toward Veydris passed in soft rhythm.
The Wastelands faded behind them, but not gradually—suddenly. One moment they rode over cracked shale and sun-bleached stone. The next, the world changed.
Green. Everywhere. Vines curling through fractured earth. Trees wide and gnarled, their bark pale as bone, moss climbing like veins. The air shifted—cool and damp and humming with life. It stretched the horizon as far as the eye could see.
They had crossed into the Great Forest.
No border. No warning. Just a line, invisible and absolute. Cael said it was but another imprint of the Rending. Leaving the Wastelands in devastation.
Behind them, the desert still baked. Ahead, the forest dripped.
A breeze threaded through the trees, cool and wet against Thane’s skin. He pulled his cloak tighter. After days of blistering heat, the chill felt like a lie.
Finally, the forest swallowed the last glimpse of the desert behind them.
When the marauders pulled their steeds to a stop, it was without a word. Just a low whistle, and the bone-armored lizards knelt. Their eyes blinked sideways, tongues flicking as if tasting the air.
The group dismounted in silence, boots crunching soft underfoot.
One rider nodded to Kaelir, then turned away. Another glanced at Thane—not in fear, not in reverence, just a kind of recognition, like he was recording this moment. Preparing his memories for the firelight stories to come.
The lizard-beasts hissed once, then darted off with surprising speed, their massive tails slicing ferns aside like oars through water. Then they were gone, swallowed back into the green.
Thane watched them vanish.
“Okay,” he said. “I know no one’s gonna say it, so I will. That was weird. Right?”
Kaelir smirked. “You weren’t on the one that kept trying to bite Cael.”
“It had judgment in its eyes,” Cael muttered. “Deep, biting judgment.”
Lirien just shook her head. “Let’s move.”
They didn’t make it far. Ahead, just off the trail, a statue rose from the earth like a forgotten tooth—stone dark with age, half-swallowed by moss and roots. It leaned, weathered and cracked through the middle, as if the forest had tried to reclaim it, pulling it back into the dirt.
As they drew closer, its shape resolved. Not just any statue—a shrine. Once sacred, now collapsed into memory. Its face had been mostly worn away, features eroded by time. Still, what remained was… familiar. Not specific, not detailed. But something in the shape of the brow. The tilt of the chin. The way the mouth had once held a line.
Thane stepped closer, hand brushing the stone. He didn’t mean to. It just happened.
A memory tugged at him. Not sharp. Not recent. But deep. It wasn’t him the statue looked like. That’s what unsettled him most.
Erynn knelt beside the base, her hand hovering over the inscription. She traced the runes carved in jagged lines, barely legible through the grime.
“The Chosen Comes to Unmake What Was Made.”
Her voice was quiet, but it cut through the silence.
Cael crouched beside her, his expression unreadable. “This isn’t in the Codex,” he said flatly.
“That,” Erynn said, rising to circle the statue, “we can agree on.”
Lirien had been watching. She saw the way Thane’s fingers lingered along the statue’s chin. How his shoulders had drawn tight.
“Does it mean something to you?” she asked softly.
Thane turned—too fast, like he’d been caught in something.
“No,” he said, sharper than intended. He looked away.
Lirien’s gaze lingered. Not pushing. Just watching. As if she didn’t quite believe him—but chose not to press.
What exactly he saw, he wasn’t ready to say. Couldn’t. Not here. Not with the others so close, with that face half-lost to time staring back—echoing of something lost long ago. The grief came sudden, uninvited—choking tight in his throat. Not fresh, but still sharp in the quiet places. The ones he never let anyone see.
He stepped back, hand falling from the stone like it burned.
They regrouped in a clearing just beyond the shrine. No one said much. The forest had its own pressure, its own rhythm—slow and deep and old. Even Kaelir stopped scanning the trees after a while, as if it were pointless.
They worked their way down the path to a rise above a valley below.
That’s when the towers came into view.
Veydris.
But they weren’t towers. Not exactly. They were spires—black glass, impossibly thin, impossibly tall, like needles driven into the world. Too smooth to be carved. Too seamless to belong. The spires didn’t feel built—they felt left behind. The forest parted around them with eerie precision. The trunks closest to them bent away—as if pushed.
Thane stepped closer, and something inside him tightened. A recognition, subtle and knowing.
Cael shifted beside him, grimacing.
Lirien noticed. “You know this place?” she asked.
Cael hesitated. “You could say that,” he said crisply before turning away.
She didn’t ask more. He didn’t offer.
The path narrowed, framed by root and stone, until the spires loomed like blades through the canopy.
The forest deepened. Shadows stretched, drawn long by the rising sun behind them. Morning light filtered through the canopy like fractured glass—cutting the mist into slivers. The air was cooler here, wetter, humming faintly with birdsong and insect clicks, but the silence beneath it all still held.
Then the path rose, curling around a ridge of black-veined stone. Just beyond it, the trees began to thin.
They had arrived. Not by grand gate or guarded road. Veydris didn’t announce itself. It simply… appeared. And then, from the heart of the city, came the welcome.
Three figures approached in silence—two cloaked in white, faces veiled, quarterstaves of amberwood gleaming with inlaid spirals and crescent glyphs. Their steps were soundless, purposeful. Guards, clearly, though there was nothing threatening in their manner.
Between them walked a woman dressed not in white, but in slate blue. Her veil was sheer, revealing a face marked with fine lines and rust-hazed eyes that shimmered in the morning light.
She stopped before them, her gaze sweeping the group.
Erynn moved forward about to speak, but the woman moved past her, her eyes softening as they settled on Cael.
“It’s been a long time,” she said, voice light, almost fond. “You’re late, you know.”
Cael blinked, caught off guard. “Late?”
“She expected you years ago. Not that she’d admit it.”
Cael’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile. “She always did have poor judgment.”
The woman chuckled. “You’re just saying that because she chose me over you in sparring.”
“Once.”
“Twice,” she corrected. “And you’ve never let it go.”
There was a brief, warm silence between them. Then the woman’s tone shifted—softer, more careful.
“She’ll want to know you’re here. I told her to keep your room… just in case.”
“You would,” Cael murmured, and this time his voice had no edge. “Always the optimist.”
“Someone had to be.” Her smile lingered, but her eyes said more. “And she… well. Let’s just say she never stopped watching the road.”
Cael looked away.
“It’s not a social visit,” he said finally. “We have urgent business.”
“I can see that,” she said glancing to the others. “But don’t pretend urgency can erase the past. Not here.”
Cael started to speak—then stopped. “Some things are not so easily forgotten, Vesha. You of all people should know that.”
“Yes, well, maybe some things should be forgiven.”
They stood for a bit too long holding each other’s gaze. Something knowing passing between them.
Vesha finally turned to the others with a broad smile. “Welcome to Veydris. Please come with me. There’s food. Rest. And shade—though I imagine the desert left little of your strength to spare.”
She turned and led them deeper into the city, the white-cloaked guards flanking her without a word. The spires of Veydris looming high above them, black and silent.
The city itself did not rise so much as ascend. What seemed like a clearing became a staircase. What looked like a grove became a plaza. Veydris revealed itself slowly, like layers peeled from the world.
Vesha led them through winding paths of dark stone and overgrown moss, the sounds of the city growing only slightly with each turn—a whisper of water here, a chime of metal there. It didn’t bustle like Trosten or hum like Salile. It breathed. Alive in its forest melody.
As they passed through a stone archway, the two guards remained behind. Unlike the other places they visited, this place had no curious onlookers. Only the spires—rising impossibly high and strangely quiet. The kind of quiet that made Thane’s skin itch.
They crossed a stone bridge suspended over nothing, the void beneath it veiled in mist so thick it seemed to breathe. Thane kept his eyes forward, unwilling to guess how far the drop went.
At the far end, a tall structure rose—a mix of sculpted archways and glasslike black spires, softened at the edges by ivy and carved sigils that reflected the rising sun.
Vesha stopped before an arched entryway carved with spirals and inlaid with pale stone. She rested her hand against a wooden door, and it opened with a soft click.
“Still the largest in this wing. And still… as you left it,” she said gently.
She glanced back at Cael. He gave a quiet nod.
“I’ll inform Aelith… she’ll want to see you.” With that, she dipped her head and disappeared down the corridor, her footsteps lost to the hush of the spires.
The room inside was vast—larger than any of them could’ve imagined. The floor was polished obsidian veined with silver. High arches framed windows that let the dawn spill across thick rugs and worn, velvet-lined furniture. A desk stood on the far wall. A table in the center held a bowl of fruit and fresh water. Folded tunics and robes lay neatly on a side table, untouched.
The place didn’t feel empty.
It felt tended to.
As if Aelith had preserved it like a memory she couldn’t let go. Not just a room. A sanctuary. A hope.
Silence lingered as they walked into the room until Lirien broke it.
“So,” she said, arms folded. “Care to explain what all this was about?”
Cael didn’t answer. He moved to the desk by the far wall, opening a drawer.
Erynn turned to follow. “Wait—so you two were a thing?”
“We all make mistakes,” he answered tersely. “Anyway, it was years ago.”
“And so this is this your room?” Erynn asked rhetorically. “She just kept it like some sort of a shrine?”
“She’s sentimental,” Cael muttered.
“Sentimental is a photo or a locket of hair,” Lirien said. “Not extra linens and fruit platters.”
“She obviously still holds feelings for you,” Kaelir added, unable to hide his grin. “You must have had her in your trance.”
The others chuckled, unable to hold it in any longer.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Cael said, still acting as if he were looking for something in the drawers.
“Why didn’t you say something? Anything?” Erynn said. “Now this is a little awkward.”
“Did you kiss her?” Lirien asked in a hushed tone, delight creeping into her voice.
Kaelir laughed. Thane and Erynn joined in.
Cael stopped what he was doing and looked up, exhaled slowly, without saying a word.
“You did,” Lirien added, louder this time. No longer able to hold back her own laughter.
Erynn arched a brow. “This explains so much.”
Lirien folded her arms. “It really does, doesn’t it?”
“Enough,” Cael said, voice firm but not harsh. “It’s been a long walk. Perhaps we rest before someone says something deeply regrettable.”
He didn’t turn—but Thane caught the flush at the back of his neck.
The others laughed quietly, drifting into the space. But Thane lingered near a window, letting the chatter fade behind him.
The forest spread out before him—the sun cresting above the upper boughs.
The air inside the quarters held something else. Something that felt out of place or wrong.
And he wasn’t sure he liked that.
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