The Veil chamber, midnight
Esmé stood barefoot at the edge of the old altar, her fractured pendant held tight in one hand, her other tracing the fresh sigils Luca had carved into the floor beneath her feet.
Twelve runes.
Each one drawn in silver ash.
Each one humming with a frequency that wasn't sound, but remembrance.
The room was cold, but not because of air. The cold came from the veil between what was and what always had been—a cold that tasted like forgotten names and voices only the dead remembered.
Luca stood nearby, tense, silent.
"Are you sure?" he asked for the fourth time.
Esmé turned to him. Her eyes glinted like glass under firelight.
"No," she said. "But I have to know what it wants from me."
She stepped into the circle.
The world did not explode.
It unraveled.
There was no sound when the Veil opened.
No wind. No flash. Just a soft, imploding pull, like being drawn inward into a memory that had never belonged to her.
She didn't fall.
She simply stopped being where she was—and became somewhere else.
The Veil
It was not a place. Not really.
Not shadow. Not light.
The Veil was a knot of timelines, dreams, truths half-written and half-erased.
Esmé stood on a surface that did not exist. Beneath her feet, fragments of places flickered in and out—cobblestones, stained glass, a riverbed, a cradle.
Above her, the sky burned in reverse—stars flowing inward, collapsing into silence.
And ahead of her, something waited.
A figure.
She walked forward.
Time did not pass.
Only meaning.
The figure was robed in white and faceless, stitched from the same ash-light as the world around it. When it turned toward her, it did not speak with a mouth.
It remembered aloud.
"You are the rose born between fire and forgetting."
"You carry the wound of the world."
"You are not meant to survive. You are meant to awaken."
Esmé's voice trembled.
"Awaken what?"
"The Threadwalker."
The figure raised a hand.
The world pulsed.
And suddenly, Esmé was alone—but not.
She stood inside her childhood.
The bakery.
The garden.
Her mother's voice. Her father's laughter.
But no one moved. No one breathed.
Then a shadow passed through the scene, and all color drained.
The Veil did not show memories.
It showed wounds.
In the bakery, her mother wept—over a cradle that no longer held a child.
In the garden, her father stared at a letter that would never arrive.
Esmé clutched her pendant, heart pounding.
"These aren't my memories."
"They are your threads."
She turned—and saw herself.
Not as she was now, but older. Stronger. Eyes veiled in silver. A version of herself she had not yet become.
"To mend the Veil, you must remember what has been erased."
"And choose what to forget."
The world pulsed again.
She stood on a battlefield.
Thousands of voices cried out.
In the center—Valtheran.
Not godlike.
Not monstrous.
Just a man.
A man holding a child.
A child who bore the rose sigil on her palm.
Esmé gasped.
The child looked up—and it was her.
She stumbled backward.
"This isn't possible."
The voice of the Veil answered.
"Memory is a spiral, not a line."
"You were not born to prophecy. You were born to rewrite it."
She knelt, trembling.
The pendant glowed in her hand—and sealed.
The fracture was gone.
But something new had been etched into the glass:
A third symbol.
One she had never seen.
A rose split down the center—one half blooming, the other burned.
The Voice spoke one last time:
"When the third voice rises, and the last lie breaks…"
"The Threadwalker must choose the world to save."
Then she woke.
————————————————————
Palazzo Rosso
Just before dawn
She gasped, sitting upright in the Veil chamber, Luca rushing to her side.
He caught her before she could fall, hands cradling her shoulders.
"Esmé—what did you see?"
She clutched the pendant and whispered:
"Not what's coming."
She looked up at him.
"But what came before."