The rain had settled into a low, patient hum. It tapped on Aetherholt's grey stones, finding every crack, every worn edge. Not a cleansing rain, this, nor a summer's gentle moment. It felt heavy, like old sorrow draped over the land. Each drop seemed to remember past sacrifices, long buried in stone and forgotten lore. The air held the scent of wet rock, and something else, too – a faint, sharp tang, like rust mixed with damp earth.
The castle did not stir.
Its towers loomed silent against the colorless dawn, like watchmen too weary to sound alarm. Windows blinked dimly with firelight, shuttered against the cold. No bells rang. No horns called. Only the rain moved.
In the yard, the search had begun, though it did not feel like a search. It felt like mourning.
No barked commands. No rush of boots or snapping reins. Just the soft thud of water on iron, and the sound of men moving slowly like the weight of the storm pressed upon their backs. Cloaks dragged through puddles. Armor dulled to ghostly grey. They gathered in small clusters near the gate, some gripping reins, others swords. Most clutched nothing, not even hope.
Aric stood apart.
Unmoving. Untouched by the stirrings around him.
The silver of his armor had long since faded, muddied by a sleepless night and the soil of uncertain ground. Rain gathered at the ridges of his breastplate, then fell. He made no motion to wipe it away. His crown — simple, iron-banded rested low, casting a deeper shadow over his eyes.
The King looked carved. Not like a statue stone was too forgiving. He looked forged. Hammered by fate, cooled in grief.
At last, his voice came, low and colorless.
"Northwood path. Four groups. South to the river, two. East gate—sweep the old farmlands. West ridge, one line."
Each word dropped like a stone into silence.
"He's small," he added. "Couldn't have gone far."
But even he didn't believe it.
The men hesitated. Some glanced toward the eastern wing in the nursery, still lit with trembling torches. A place where no sound came now, save the drip of blood and water from the high-vaulted eaves.
Kael had left no trail. No footprints in the softened mud. No scuff against the stones. Not even a bent reed on the garden path. The hounds purebred, trained to follow the faintest scent — had turned from the nursery hall, tails low, ears flattened. They had whimpered, refusing to approach the child's room. Whatever they smelled, it wasn't man. It wasn't animal.
It wasn't right.
Aric knew it, deep in the place behind his ribs the space where warmth once lived, where fire once burned. Now there was only a throb. Cold and rhythmic, like a second heartbeat made of shadow. When he'd spilled his blood on the altar, he thought he'd saved something. Sealed something. But some seals don't close. Some doors lock on the wrong side.
Sir Keldon stepped near. He was a man built from oaths, broad-shouldered and lined with years of loyalty. The rain had soaked him through, and his beard clung dark to his throat. His voice, when it came, was nearly drowned by the storm.
"My King," he said, quiet. "Are we searching for a child who just wandered off, … or something else?"
He didn't finish the question. Didn't need to. His eyes flicked east, toward the place where Kael had vanished. Toward the nursery. Toward the memory of the nursemaid's scream cut short, sharp like broken glass and the black smear left behind where no blade had fallen.
Aric's gaze snapped to him, sharp and bright as steel in frost.
"You'll search for the prince," he said. "As if his life depends on it. Because it does."
Keldon bowed. Tight-jawed. He didn't speak again. He turned, relayed the commands, and the men dispersed like mourners at a funeral — slow, silent, their eyes never rising from the ground.
They combed the woods. The fields. The foothills. They rode past the edges of known land and into groves so old the trees bent from memory. They called his name, though they knew it wouldn't be answered.
All day the storm dragged its cloak across the sky. The light never brightened. The world felt half-drowned. Aetherholt's banners, soaked and heavy, clung to their poles as if trying to tear free.
When the search parties returned at dusk, their faces had changed. Not from fatigue, but from something deeper — something they couldn't name. They spoke of a stillness too complete. Of silence that pressed into the bones. Not just a quiet of birds or beasts, but of something vast. Waiting.
They had seen tracks of deer, wolf, even elk but none human. None small. None that wandered, or hesitated, or wept.
Just emptiness.
Seraphina had not left the library.
Not for food. Not for word. Not even for the king.
The chamber was lit with every candle she could find to scores of them, clustered along shelves, mantels, floors. Still, the cold lingered. A wrong cold the kind that settled beneath the skin and whispered to your bones. The flames flickered, but did not warm. The shadows stretched wrong, like they listened.
She stood hunched over the Prophet's Codex, its pages heavy with silver leaf, its language more riddle than scripture. Dust rose with each turn, though the book had not been opened in generations. It smelled of old parchment and older truth.
Her fingers trembled. Not from fear. Not even from grief — from knowing.
The Veil Eclipse — what they had called a celestial omen, a rare convergence of moonlight and starfall — was far more than spectacle. The Codex told of what came beneath it. Not stars, not light.
Breaches.
The world, it claimed, was a fabric woven between realms, thin in places, frayed in others. And on nights like the Eclipse, that fabric tore. Just slightly. Enough for things to slip through.
Veil-breaches, they were called.
Signs followed them: unnatural cold. Silence where noise should be. The sudden scent of lightning or dust. Rooms where shadows moved like thoughts, not forms.
And deeper still, in the margins etched by mad monks and dying seers:
Not spirits. Not demons. Reflections.
Remnants from before the world had shape. Leftovers from the time before the first word was spoken, before the first god woke. They were not evil. Nor kind. They were hungry. And empty. And drawn to things that echoed their own beginning forms not fully formed. Lives touched by the in-between.
Seraphina had read these words with disbelief once. Now she read them with memory.
Born under the Eclipse. Cold to the touch. Eyes too still, too deep. The mark on his throat — not a bruise, not a scar more like a seal. Something put there. Something ancient.
She remembered the way the wind died when he entered a room. The way birds never nested outside his chamber window. The way even his brother avoided him, unknowingly, like a twin pulled from fire and left unburned.
He had not wandered into the Veil.
He was a tear in it.
A wound.
The thing beneath the crypt—that vast pressure, that breath in the stone, that listening—it had not spoken. It had answered.
Because Kael was calling.
The Codex whispered of pacts, old as bone, made with gods whose names had rotted. Pacts that required blood. Sacrifice. A prince bled on stone. A fire lit from oath and desperation. But fire, once lit, spreads. Aric had tried to close a door. Instead, he'd fed it.
"The first will be the father's torment; the second, the mother's grief."
The prophecy she had dismissed it once rhymed superstition passed in wine halls. But now it rang louder than the storm. Aric's silence, his unraveling that was the torment. Her empty arms, the blood on the cradle that was grief.
And Kael's absence?
That was the reckoning.
Outside, the rain did not stop. The castle groaned in the wind. Somewhere deep beneath the stone, beneath the crypt and the sealed door, something ancient shifted. It was listening and waiting.