The veilborn
The first thing Caelan felt was the burning.
Not from fire. From within.
He shot upright in bed with a ragged gasp, drenched in sweat, heart pounding like a war drum in his chest. He tore his shirt open and stared at his reflection in the mirror across the dorm room.
It was still there.
The spiral.
Branded over his heart—reddish, almost bruised in hue, and faintly glowing. Not some dream-ghost or illusion from a nightmare. Not a figment of stress or sleep deprivation.
Real.
He touched it. Winced. It was warm, like a coal buried under skin. The closer his fingers came, the more the pendant around his neck buzzed—like the two were communicating.
The dream—if he could still call it that—was burned into his memory. The battlefield. The snarling creatures. The woman in white armor bleeding beneath a torn banner.
And her voice.
"Caelan... Duskwither."
A name that didn't belong to him. A name no one had ever spoken aloud in his life.
A name that felt like it was waiting inside him.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood shakily. His roommate's side was empty—thank God. No awkward questions. No panic.
Just the heavy silence and the sound of rain against the window.
---
The campus was drowned in mist.
Caelan walked under the shelter of a hoodie, hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, his breath visible in the air. The city didn't feel the same anymore. It felt emptier. Or maybe not empty—hollowed.
As if something had scraped a layer off the world.
Lights flickered above him as he passed. Shadows didn't behave quite right. They shifted when he wasn't looking directly at them.
He tried to focus on rational explanations. Sleep deprivation. Psychological stress. Some rare side effect from a fever. Maybe he was losing his mind.
But the mark still burned. And the pendant glowed faintly through his shirt like a second heartbeat.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the note he'd found after the dream. It was written in dark ink on aged parchment, impossible to trace.
> "You are not dreaming. You are remembering."
His breath caught. He had checked online. Searched for the language. Nothing matched. Not the script. Not the spiral. Not even Duskwither.
It didn't exist.
And yet—it lived in him.
---
Caelan wandered through campus like a ghost, avoiding light, avoiding people.
Eventually, he ended up outside the old sculpture garden—one of the older parts of the university where the city's modern edges gave way to ivy-covered stone and timeworn paths.
That's where he saw him again.
The man in the fog.
Same cloak. Same stillness. No footsteps. No movement. Just presence.
He stood beneath a dead tree, half-wrapped in shadow. His face was cloaked in darkness, but the pendant reacted the moment Caelan spotted him.
It flared.
Caelan stopped cold. "What do you want?" he called out.
The figure didn't respond.
Instead, the fog thickened.
It began to bleed across the garden, swallowing benches, trees, statues. Swallowing the world. It curled around Caelan's ankles like misted chains.
He turned to run—but the garden path was gone. The statue he passed just moments before? Crumbled. Overgrown. As if abandoned for centuries.
The city had vanished.
Replaced by a landscape dim and shrouded in silver-blue haze, like the ruins of some forgotten realm. The moon above was wrong—larger, fractured, glowing faintly violet.
Caelan spun in place.
"Where am I?" he whispered.
The cloaked man finally moved. Just a few steps. But with them, the pressure in the air deepened—like gravity itself bowed.
"You are between," said the man. His voice was deep. Unnatural. "And you are waking."
Caelan's knees threatened to buckle. "I don't understand—"
"You are Veilborn," the figure said. "You do not belong to one world alone. The blood in you is ancient. Bound in silence. Forgotten in time."
"That doesn't mean anything to me!"
"It will." The man raised a hand, palm open. "The seal has broken. The dream bleeds through. You are remembering what should have remained buried."
"Why now?"
"Because your presence has stirred the Veil. And others have noticed."
Suddenly the fog shifted—jerked violently.
Shapes flickered in the haze. Snarling. Crawling. Things not built to exist in daylight. Their eyes shimmered amber and violet. Their breath reeked of rot and silver.
The pendant at Caelan's chest pulsed wildly.
"Run," said the cloaked man. "There are things older than prophecy. And they are hungry."
The fog screamed.
Caelan turned and bolted.
---
He wasn't running through campus anymore. He was sprinting through a dream fractured by reality.
Stone archways stood where there should've been benches. Ancient trees twisted into unnatural shapes. A bridge of bones crossed a creek where the science building used to stand.
Every shadow seemed to move.
And then he saw it—a doorway standing freely in the mist.
An arched gate of black stone, marked by the same spiral etched into his chest.
The pendant dragged him toward it.
The howls behind him grew louder.
As he reached the threshold, something lunged from the fog—a blur of claws and crimson eyes. It roared—
—and the pendant exploded with light.
The creature shrieked, thrown backward into the mist as silver fire raced through the air, forming protective runes in a circle around Caelan.
The mark on his chest burned bright.
Then the world snapped.
---
He fell forward into silence.
He landed on smooth stone. Cold. Ancient. The chamber around him was dark—lit only by the glow of his pendant and faint silver veins in the walls pulsing like blood vessels.
This time, the dream wasn't a dream.
And he wasn't alone.
From the far end of the hall, a figure approached.
Not cloaked. Not monstrous.
A woman. Armored in white. Face calm. Familiar.
The one from the dream.
The battlefield. The whisper. The blood.
She knelt as she had in that memory, and pressed her fist to her chest.
"Caelan Duskwither," she said. "The bloodline endures."
---
He stared, breathless. "What... is this place?"
"This is a memory held within the Veil," she said. "A sanctuary echo. One of many. A part of you called this here."
"I didn't do anything."
"You remembered. That's all it ever takes."
She stood and walked closer. Her armor shimmered faintly, inscribed with the same spiral marks that danced across his skin.
"You carry more than you know," she said. "And there are many who will kill to stop you from discovering it."
"I'm not special," he muttered. "I'm just a guy from nowhere. I grew up in an orphanage. I—"
She held up a hand.
"You were hidden," she said softly. "Not abandoned. Hidden by those who knew the prophecy. Hidden from the eyes of kings. From monsters. And from yourself."
He took a breath.
"What am I?"
Her golden eyes met his. "You are the last living heir of House Duskwither. Human-born, but carrying blood older than empires. You are the bridge. The spark. The Veilborn."
---
The chamber began to shudder.
Something outside pounded at its edges.
The woman turned sharply. "They've found this memory. This echo cannot hold them back."
"What do I do?!"
"Wake," she said. "Run. Survive."
"And after that?"
She pressed two fingers to the glowing spiral on his chest.
"Come home."
The light engulfed him.
---
Caelan awoke on the floor of his dorm room. Gasping. Shaking. Cold sweat slicking his skin.
The pendant lay still and cold again.
But the spiral? It was brighter now.
And outside his window, something howled—deep and long—a sound no animal on Earth should ever make.
Caelan stared at the sky.
Everything had changed.
And somewhere, far beyond the veil of this world, kings had begun to stir.