The Realm Between Veils was not a place.
It was a wound.
A gash torn in the fabric of creation by ancient forces long devoured by silence. Within it, time pulsed erratically—sometimes frozen, sometimes weeping. Colors bled in impossible shades, and celestial rivers flowed upward, vanishing into hollow suns that never rose.
Kael Vanthelmir walked through this sacred rot barefoot, his blood leaving trails upon divine dust.
He did not feel pain. He had passed that threshold.
What he felt now was something else.
Something watching.
> "The Veil does not protect the weak," a voice echoed.
From the swirling void came a figure: translucent, yet vast—its face shrouded in shifting cosmos. Its limbs bent in unnatural angles, adorned with the rusted sigils of a sect long extinct.
It was no guardian.
It was a Remnant—a thought of something once divine.
> "You bear the curse of twin bloodlines. You are taboo."
Kael did not speak. He simply knelt and placed both hands on the shattered altar before him, the runes of his ancestors seared into the obsidian stone. It was here, in the center of the realm's wound, that the Hollow Rite could begin.
A ritual only those marked by oblivion could survive.
The Remnant's voice shifted to a whisper—soft, reverent, cruel.
> "You seek power. Not to protect. Not to restore. But to destroy."
Kael's eyes opened—black pools reflecting nothing.
> "I seek truth. And the right to silence those who mocked it."
The altar responded.
Rays of dying light erupted from beneath, carving celestial glyphs into Kael's skin—ancient daos branded across his bones. The Remnant roared, not in defiance, but in reverence.
> "Then become what they fear, heir of the Veilborne. Become the god who walks without prayer."
The Rite consumed him.
Flames born from annihilated timelines burned his flesh. His spirit was ripped open and sewn anew with the marrow of void dragons. Through pain that surpassed mortality, Kael awakened a divine body thought lost to time—
> The Nihilborn Aeternum Body — a vessel made for eternal silence.
And with it came whispers. Names. Powers. Doors once sealed by fate itself began to splinter.
Kael rose from the altar.
The scars glowed faintly across his arms, but his eyes now glowed with an eerie stillness—like stars that had seen too much.
> "Your daos are dead," the Remnant said, voice trembling.
"What will you walk with now?"
Kael stepped forward.
> "I will walk with nothing.
And still, everything will fall."
The Veil cracked wider behind him, opening a path toward the First World—a realm not yet ready for his return.
But Kael was no longer a disciple.
He was no longer buried.
He was the echo of the forgotten, the vessel of a silent truth.
And he was walking back into the light.