Morning came slow.
A low mist clung to the Academy grounds, curling like smoke around the stone towers and training fields. Light filtered through the clouds in fractured bands, gray and gold, catching on the frost that still clung to the edges of the dormitory windows.
Inside, Vael moved in silence.
He washed, dressed, and double-checked the weight of his pack. The supplies from the sub-level were perfectly stowed. No waste. No excess. Just what he needed.
No blade.
No charm.
No crutch.
He stood in the center of his room and took one last look around. Blank walls. Empty shelves. A bed barely touched.
He wouldn't miss it.
The Voice stirred faintly — not fully present, but not absent either.
"You're quiet."
"I'm focused," Vael said.
"Good."
A beat of stillness passed between them. Not tension. Just presence.
"You feel it, don't you?" the Voice murmured. "That shift beneath your skin. You're carrying weight now — but not from the pack."
Vael adjusted the shoulder strap, then reached for the black icon and tucked it into the hidden fold of his coat.
"I feel it," he said.
"And?"
"It's not fear."
"No. It's something worse."
"It's knowing the storm is coming... and walking toward it anyway."
Vael didn't argue.
He fastened his coat. Rolled his shoulders. Took one long, steady breath.
Then he opened the door and stepped into the corridor.
The Academy halls were nearly empty at this hour. Training rotations hadn't begun yet, and most of the students were still locked in early meditation drills or sparring evaluations. A few instructors passed by — they didn't look at him. Didn't ask where he was going.
They didn't need to.
Orin had made sure the cover story would hold.
He passed through the inner halls, crossed the bridge arching over the deepwater channel, and walked the long outer path leading to the Order's Eastern Gate — the one used for sanctioned field departures.
His boots echoed along the cobbled stone, sharp and solitary.
No one walked beside him.
No one stopped him.
Not even when he reached the old iron gate standing tall against the pale horizon — its runes pulsing faintly with containment sigils, the ancient boundary between the world inside and the world beyond.
Someone was already waiting.
A man stood alone just past the gate's threshold, leaning casually against a low pillar.
Tall. Dark-haired. Cloak drawn tight against the wind. His eyes were unreadable beneath the shadow of his hood, but the air around him was calm — too calm.
Not military.
Not student.
Something... older.
Vael slowed his pace, gaze sharpening. The man looked up as he approached and gave a slow, subtle nod — not in greeting, but in confirmation.
"Vael Eldorin," the man said, voice smooth but low, like worn leather. "You're early."
"I know," Vael replied.
The man stepped away from the pillar and extended a sealed scroll — short, thick, marked with a different crest than the Order's usual insignia. A field relay.
"Your mission parameters. This version includes updated sightings and local terrain shifts. Last ping was sixteen hours ago."
Vael took it, eyes flicking across the seal.
No questions.
No handshake.
Just business.
"Anything else?" he asked.
The man hesitated, then added:
"You'll be off the network until extraction. Standard sigil masking has been applied. No contact unless you break the perimeter."
"And if I do?"
The man gave a faint smile — the kind that wasn't warm.
"Then you've either finished the job... or died trying."
Vael tucked the scroll into his coat.
He didn't say goodbye.
Didn't ask the man's name.
He turned, passed through the final gate rune as it parted like mist, and walked out into the morning fog.
The path beyond stretched eastward — narrow, frost-covered, wild.
The kind of road people didn't return from unchanged.
Behind him, the gate closed with a quiet hum.
Vael didn't head east on foot.
Not yet.
Just past the gate, nestled into the far corner of the cliffside wall, was a small outcrop of stone. Unmarked. Unremarkable. Barely noticeable unless you knew what to look for.
Vael did.
He walked to it, knelt, and pressed the black icon Orin had given him into the narrow divot along the rock's face.
For a moment—nothing.
Then the ground shivered.
With a soft pulse of light and a grind of ancient gears, the stone split open along hidden seams, revealing a metal lift embedded into the earth.
The air that rushed out was dry. Sterile. Electric.
Not natural.
Vael stepped onto the lift platform and inserted the icon again, this time into the brass-rimmed slot in the control panel.
A ring of glyphs ignited around the floor, humming as the lift responded.
Access: Granted.
The elevator descended—slow and smooth, guided by a silent vertical rail system, the stone wall sliding past as runes flickered in sequence to track movement.
Vael stood still, eyes forward, not blinking.
Not because he was surprised.
Because he wasn't.
He'd expected this.
The Order always hid its teeth behind stone and silence.
The elevator eased to a stop with a soft hiss of pressure.
What opened before him was nothing like the Academy's stone hallways.
The metro terminal beneath the Order was sleek and gleaming — steel floors marked with faint, luminous circuits that pulsed like veins under glass. Massive arc-lanterns suspended in the ceiling burned with cold white flame, and reinforced barriers lined the curved walls like the interior of a containment vault.
Magic and machinery blended seamlessly.
No clunky switches.
No loud engines.
Just clean, cold precision.
Along the far track, a single train waited. Long and narrow, its body matte-black with faint red trim and no windows — just arc runes drifting in symmetrical patterns along the surface.
Its door opened soundlessly as Vael approached, recognizing the icon embedded into his coat lining.
Destination Assigned: Sector Twelve — Outer Range.
He stepped inside.
The interior was almost silent — thin seating strips along the walls, supply racks overhead, a reinforced equipment bay to the rear. No driver. No visible controls.
The train moved the moment the door closed.
No announcement. No warning.
Just motion — fast, smooth, and perfectly silent.
Vael sat, gloved hands resting loosely on his knees, eyes fixed ahead.
Outside the narrow vision slit at the front of the car, shadows blurred past — not just tunnels, but shaped terrain. Caverns reinforced with arc runes. Stabilizers drilled into the rock. Places no civilian would ever know existed.
"They built all this beneath the world," he murmured aloud, more to himself than to the Voice.
But the Voice, quiet until now, responded:
"This is the Order's true shape."
"Silent. Hidden. Watching while the world forgets it still bleeds."
Vael didn't answer.
He simply waited.
It didn't take long.
Exactly nineteen minutes later, the train began to slow, the air pressure shifting subtly as red sigils lined the tunnel walls like landing lights.
The train came to a smooth halt inside a forward station — this one smaller, colder, and far more worn. Dust clung to the corners. The metal hummed differently here — older, not maintained as often.
The only door opened.
No one waited.
Just a sealed access tunnel ahead, marked with the sigil of Field Deployment: Class Four+ — and a faint arrow pointing toward the mountains.
Vael stepped out.
The train didn't wait.
It vanished into the darkness with barely a sound.
The station door sealed shut behind him.
Ahead, the tunnel stretched into a stone corridor that ended at a reinforced breach gate — old and sealed by layers of runes etched in languages most modern mages couldn't even identify. Vael touched the access plate. The glyphs flickered once, then receded with a low hiss as the gate opened.
A sudden gust of cold air swept in. Wild. Untamed.
He stepped through.
The land beyond the breach gate was dead.
Not broken. Not cursed.
Just… absent.
No birds. No sound. No scent of soil or growth.
Just long stretches of wind-scoured stone and dry earth, cracked and bleached by a sun that barely seemed interested in shining. Sharp hills rose in the distance, jagged and bare, like the ribs of some forgotten giant buried beneath the crust.
Vael walked.
No path. No signs of life. Just a compass rune etched onto the back of his glove, pulsing softly with directional pull — part of the field kit, just enough guidance to keep him from drifting too far off-target.
Each step echoed in silence.
And the more silence he passed through, the more something in him began to stir.
Not the Voice.
A memory.
One buried under weeks of training, sparring, and watching people pretend this place was normal.
It came back slowly — like frost melting in reverse.
A lecture.
Instructor Nyara Volen.
Her voice had always felt like it could cut glass.
It wasn't during combat training. This was theory. The kind of class most students slept through.
But not that day.
That day, she said something he hadn't forgotten.
And now, walking through a place that felt like the world had simply been erased from it, her words hit harder than they had in the classroom.
"You ask why the world is safe," she had said, facing a room full of curious, half-trained students.
"Why we walk through cities without fear, why the skies don't blacken, why beasts the size of towers aren't devouring the land."
She let the room sit in silence for a few seconds before answering.
"Because we don't live in the world."
"Not the real one."
That had made the room shift. The skepticism was instant. Vael remembered the looks on their faces — the way even the top-ranked students furrowed their brows.
Nyara continued anyway.
"Thousands of years ago, when gods still walked openly and the world burned under creatures no army could kill, one of the divine did something… unexpected."
"He hid us."
"Not by building walls. By changing the layer of reality we exist in."
"The world you know — the cities, the oceans, the forests — all of it exists inside what we call the Folded Veil. A dimension peeled away from true reality. A shelter. A lie wrapped in beauty."
"We walk through it like it's real. We build lives in it. Raise families. But it is not the true world."
"It's the illusion built to keep us sane."
Vael had felt it even then — a chill under the skin. The idea that everything he'd seen, touched, fought for… was just a protected slice of something much bigger, and much worse.
"We walk through our lives behind those walls, unaware they exist. We see sky, land, oceans — but not the real ones. We live in a replica designed to protect us from what the real world became."
"And most never see the edge. Never even feel the boundary."
A student had raised a hand that day. Nervous. Skeptical.
"So how do you know this is true?"
Nyara had stared at him like one might regard a naïve child.
"Because we see the wall."
"The Order," Nyara said, "doesn't live inside that veil. At least, not entirely."
"Our sigils, our rites, our structure — they're all built to allow us to move between the layers. To touch what's beyond."
"And sometimes—" her voice had gone quieter then, cold as frostbite, "something else touches back."
"Sometimes a beast crosses over. A glitch. A scar in the veil. A fragment of reality cuts through, and something that shouldn't be here ends up in the places we think are safe."
"When that happens… we send people like you."
The words had landed heavily in that lecture hall. Back then, it felt like theory. Like myth dressed up in doctrine.
But now—
Here, in the middle of nowhere, walking through a dry valley where nothing grew, where the horizon seemed to blur like unfinished paint—
It didn't feel like theory anymore.
It felt like truth.
He could feel it in the way the air didn't move right.
In the way the silence wasn't just empty — it was wrong, like something had devoured the sound itself.
No birds.
No wind.
No insects.
Just stillness that pressed in around him like the inside of a sealed room.
Like the sky was waiting for something.
Vael kept walking.
The ground was cracked beneath his boots, patterned like scales. Trees, if they could be called that, stood petrified in the distance — twisted and stripped of color, like shadows burned into the land.
And now, he understood what she had meant.
And the wall—whatever it was—had already been broken.
He could feel it in his bones. In the air.
Something about this place felt off.
Not just empty.
Wrong.
Like the world here wasn't stitched together right anymore.
Like reality had slipped—and no one had noticed.