Mira moved through the city's rooftops like a rumor, her steps barely disturbing the dust. The skyline shimmered beneath her feet—half-lit towers, neon rivers, and distant, blinking stars. But Mira's attention was fixed elsewhere.
She paused atop an old warehouse and let her gaze sweep the streets below, eyes sharp in the dark. She could still sense Elias and Jamie, their auras tangled with possibility. The world was changing around them. The Veil's edge grew thinner every night.
Mira pressed a palm to her chest, feeling the slow, ancient beat of her heart. Most days, she tried to forget who she was. But memories clung like frost, refusing to thaw.
She remembered Jamie before he ever met Elias, years ago when he was just a lost kid scribbling spirals on the back wall of the city library. Mira had watched him from between the shelves, careful to keep to the shadows. Even then, Jamie saw more than he should. Sometimes he'd look straight at her, as if he could see through the veil that kept her hidden.
Back then, he'd called her "the ghost lady" and tried to capture her in his drawings—always a blurred figure with silver eyes. Mira never revealed herself fully, not even when Jamie started leaving pages tucked into books for her to find: cryptic sketches, secret notes, questions no one else dared ask. It was a strange friendship, silent and uneven, but it had anchored Mira to the world in a way nothing else could.
Now, seeing Jamie with Elias, Mira felt old instincts stir. She'd been warned to keep her distance. The council's laws were clear—observation, never interference. But Jamie's curiosity had drawn the Veil's attention before. If he got too close, the consequences could be fatal.
Tonight, Mira slipped down from the roof and let herself wander the edges of the park. She stayed in the gloom beneath the trees, watching Jamie and Elias sit together on the fountain's rim, their voices hushed and cautious. She felt the pull between them, a resonance she recognized from old stories and older scars.
Mira's own past pressed at her—memories of a time when she, too, had been guided by someone older, someone who'd broken the rules to save her. Maybe that's why she couldn't let Jamie go, even now. He was more sensitive than he realized, more attuned to the Veil's currents. It made him both valuable and vulnerable.
She closed her eyes, feeling for the web of energy connecting the three of them—herself, Jamie, Elias. The lines were growing stronger, like a song gathering force.
For a moment, Mira allowed herself to hope.
Maybe, this time, she wouldn't have to watch from the shadows.
She closed her eyes, feeling for the web of energy connecting the three of them—herself, Jamie, Elias. The lines were growing stronger, like a song gathering force.
For a moment, Mira allowed herself to hope.
Maybe, this time, she wouldn't have to watch from the shadows.
But hope was dangerous. She'd learned that in the old cities—what remained of them, at least. The last time a tether like this formed, it fractured entire sections of the Veil. Back then, they thought the threads of fate could be guided gently. That was before the Shattering, before the Council stepped in.
"Control the flow. Never awaken what you cannot contain." That was the first rule. The one Mira had broken.
Now she lived between layers—an in-between thing. Trained by remnants of the old orders, bound by the Council's mercy, permitted to exist only so long as she didn't interfere. The Veil was sacred. Unstable. Alive in ways even the elders barely understood. And when it stirred, the world rewrote itself.
The average citizen didn't see it. They didn't feel the hum beneath their skin, didn't notice how time slipped on certain streets, how memory bent around old architecture. They had forgotten the cities used to breathe with qi. Forgotten that cultivation was once a birthright—not a myth.
Most called it superstition. Energy therapy. Quantum bleed. Those with power rebranded it as science, buried it in data. But Mira had seen the truth. She'd walked in places where thoughts became weapons, where old names still echoed in stone.
She looked down at the boys again—Elias, still staring at the feather in his palm; Jamie, flipping absently through a sketchbook filled with dreams he didn't understand.
She felt the pull of destiny again, slow and low like thunder on the horizon.
The world is beginning to remember itself, she thought.
And if they weren't careful, it might not like what it sees.