The knock came with the dawn, three soft raps that seemed to hesitate before each contact with the weathered oak door. Mara Vayne froze at her loom, her shuttle suspended mid-weave as if the sound had turned her to stone. The morning light filtered through the cottage windows, casting long shadows that seemed to reach toward the door with grasping fingers.
Eris looked up from his porridge, noting how his mother's face had drained of color. Liran sat across from him, her spoon halfway to her mouth, her eyes tracking something invisible that moved along the cottage walls. Since the Weavers' visit, her sight had grown sharper, more intrusive. She saw layers of reality that others could not, and right now, those layers were telling her something important.
"Mother," Liran whispered, her voice carrying that strange duality that had plagued her since the bridge. "There's someone wrapped in shadows at the door. But the shadows... they're not hiding her. They're part of her."
Mara's hands trembled as she set down her shuttle. The knock came again, patient but insistent, and this time Eris heard something beneath the sound—a rhythm that matched no natural heartbeat, but rather the measured cadence of someone who had learned to move between moments, to exist in the spaces where others could not see.
"I know who it is," Mara said quietly, her voice carrying a weight that made both children look at her with new attention. She rose from her loom with the careful movements of someone whose past had suddenly become present, whose carefully constructed peace was about to be shattered.
When she opened the door, the woman standing on their threshold seemed to emerge from the morning mist itself. She was neither young nor old, with dark hair that appeared to absorb light rather than reflect it, and eyes the color of storm clouds at twilight. Her robes were the deep indigo of the Order of the Veil, but they moved wrong in the morning breeze, as if blown by winds that touched nothing else.
"Hello, Mara," the woman said, and her voice held the warmth of shared memories alongside something deeper—disappointment, perhaps, or a carefully contained grief. "You look well. Peaceful."
Mara's grip tightened on the door frame. "Lydia. I should have expected you would come eventually."
"Lydia Rooke of the Order of the Veil," the woman said, though her introduction was clearly meant for the children watching from behind their mother. "Former apprentice to Mara Korh, once Head of the Order of the Veil, now..." She paused, her gaze taking in the simple cottage, the domestic loom, the carefully ordinary life that surrounded them. "Now apparently a village weaver in Willow's Hollow."
The name struck like a physical blow. Eris saw his mother flinch as if Lydia had struck her, and Liran's eyes widened as pieces of a puzzle she hadn't known existed began to fall into place.
"Mara Korh?" Liran repeated, her voice carrying that unsettling harmonic that meant she was seeing more than one layer of truth simultaneously. "Mother, who is Mara Korh?"
"Someone who no longer exists," Mara said firmly, but Lydia stepped forward with the fluid grace of someone accustomed to moving unseen.
"May I come in? The morning air carries too many listening ears, and what I have to say shouldn't reach beyond these walls."
Mara hesitated, then stepped aside with visible reluctance. As Lydia crossed the threshold, Eris felt the cottage itself seem to hold its breath. The shadows in the corners deepened, and for a moment, he could have sworn he saw other figures moving in his peripheral vision—not the Lamentus that had haunted them since the bridge, but something else. Echoes, perhaps, of conversations held in darker places, of decisions made in hidden rooms where the fate of kingdoms were decided by people whose names never appeared in histories.
Lydia settled at their kitchen table with the ease of someone who had spent years making herself at home in places where she wasn't welcome. "Your children have grown," she observed, her gaze moving between Eris and Liran with professional assessment. "The boy shows clear signs of Echoflux manifestation, and the girl..." She paused, studying Liran with the intensity of someone reading a text in a language she was still learning. "Trauma-induced Sight, but unusual. She's not just seeing the supernatural realm. She's seeing the spaces between realities, the places where truth lives when it's too dangerous to speak aloud."
"They're children," Mara said sharply. "Whatever you think you see, they're just children who've been through something terrible."
"Children touched by gifts that will either transform them into something extraordinary or destroy them completely," Lydia replied without malice. "You know this, Mara. You've always known this. It's why you've spent the last eighteen years weaving protection charms into every piece of cloth in this cottage, why you sing the old hymns every night, why you've turned your back on who you were born to be."
Eris leaned forward, drawn by the weight of secrets finally being dragged into light. "Who was she born to be?"
Lydia's smile was as sharp as the winter wind. "Your mother was the most gifted practitioner the Order of the Veil had seen in three centuries. By the time she was twenty-five, she could walk through a crowded marketplace and emerge completely unnoticed, could stand in the same room as enemy agents and learn their secrets without them ever knowing she existed. She could disappear so thoroughly that reality itself would forget she had been there."
"Lydia, stop." Mara's voice carried a warning that made the cottage's protective charms hum with barely contained energy.
But Lydia continued as if she hadn't heard. "The Gift of the Veil comes from a particular kind of trauma, you see. It requires someone who has learned to exist in the spaces between seen and unseen, someone who has been so thoroughly overlooked, so completely dismissed, that they've learned to turn invisibility into power."
She reached into her robes and withdrew a small silver mirror, its surface clouded with age. When she placed it on the table, Eris could see his own reflection, but something was wrong with it. His face looked younger, more vulnerable, and there were shadows behind him that corresponded to nothing in the room.
"Your mother mastered the Veil because she learned early that being seen meant being hurt," Lydia said quietly. "She was nineteen when she found her way to the weavers, but had gone through countless hardships to arrive there"
Liran made a sound like a wounded animal. Through her altered sight, she was seeing something the rest of them couldn't—layers of pain that clung to Mara like a second skin, scars that went deeper than flesh, wounds that had never properly healed despite decades of careful tending.
"The masters of the Order took her in, as they do with all the abandoned ones," Lydia continued. "But Mara was special. Her trauma hadn't just given her the ability to hide—it had given her the ability to help others hide. She could weave veils of invisibility around entire groups, could make a platoon of soldiers disappear from enemy sight, could walk into a fortress and emerge with its most guarded secrets."
Mara had turned away from the table, her hands working unconsciously at the protective charms she wore around her wrist. "You're frightening them," she said quietly.
"I'm preparing them," Lydia replied. "Because the world is changing, Mara, and the Order needs you. The kingdom needs you."
She withdrew a scroll from her robes, sealed with wax that seemed to shift between colors depending on the angle of view. "The previous Head of the Order of the Veil died three months ago. Assassination—someone had learned to see through his protections, someone with power we don't understand. The Council has voted unanimously to recall you to service."
The silence that followed was broken only by the tick of the old clock on the mantle and the soft sound of Liran's irregular breathing as she struggled to process the layers of truth she was seeing.
"I can't," Mara said finally. "I won't. I left that life behind when I married Gareth, when I chose to become just... ordinary."
"There is nothing ordinary about you," Lydia said gently. "There never was. Even now, sitting in this kitchen pretending to be a simple village woman, you're weaving protections that would impress Master-level practitioners. The very air around your children shimmers with safeguards you've embedded so deeply they've become part of the cottage's foundation."
Eris looked around the room with new eyes, noticing for the first time the subtle patterns in his mother's tapestries, the way certain threads seemed to catch light that wasn't there, the reason their cottage had always felt safer than anywhere else in the village.
"You've been protecting them from a distance," Lydia continued. "But your son's Echoflux is growing stronger, and your daughter's Sight is expanding beyond what untrained observation can safely contain. They need instruction, Mara. They need someone who understands the cost of power and the price of neglecting it."
She leaned forward, her storm-cloud eyes intense with conviction. "I'm not just here to recall you to the Order, though that remains our hope. I'm here because the Council has decided that Willow's Hollow shows too much promise to ignore. Your son, your daughter, the Thorne boy with his Silver Thread marking, the Ashford girl with her systematic mind—this village has produced more potential in a single generation than most regions see in a decade."
"What are you saying?" Mara asked, though her voice suggested she already knew.
"I'm saying the Guild has tasked me to remain here for the coming months, to provide preliminary instruction to the gifted children while they develop. To serve as their guide and protector while they learn to navigate abilities that could easily destroy them if left untended."
Lydia stood, moving to the window where the morning light streamed through Mara's carefully woven curtains. "But I was your apprentice, Mara. You taught me everything I know about walking between worlds, about seeing without being seen, about surviving in the spaces where others fear to tread. I can teach these children, yes—but they would learn so much more from a true master."
She turned back to face the family, and for the first time since her arrival, her professional composure cracked slightly. "I dreamed of you, in the towers. Even after all these years. I dreamed of the songs you would sing while working the looms, the way you could weave protections that felt like a mother's embrace. The Order has been colder since you left, Mara. More efficient, perhaps, but colder."
Mara's hands had stilled on her charms, and when she spoke, her voice carried the weight of eighteen years of carefully maintained distance. "I left because I wanted my children to have choices I never had. I wanted them to grow up knowing they were seen, valued, loved—not collected because their pain had made them useful."
"And they are loved," Lydia said simply. "Anyone with eyes can see that. But love alone won't teach them to control abilities that could tear them apart from the inside. Love alone won't protect them when the wrong people learn what they can do."
She moved back to the table, gathering up the mirror and scroll but leaving something else behind—a small wooden token carved with symbols that seemed to shift in peripheral vision, similar to the one Weaver Jorin had given Liran but somehow more complex.
"Think about it," she said to Mara. "Both requests—return to the Order, or at least allow me to guide your children through their development. But know that whether you help me or not, I will be staying in Willow's Hollow for the foreseeable future. The Council has arranged lodging at the inn, and I begin working with the marked children within the week."
She paused at the door, her hand on the latch. "Your daughter sees truth, Mara, even when it's painful. Ask her what she saw when she looked at me today. Ask her what she sees when she looks at you now that she knows who you used to be."
When the door closed behind her, the cottage seemed to exhale all at once. The shadows returned to their proper places, the protective charms settled back into their usual hum, and the morning light resumed its natural progress across the floor.
But everything had changed.
Liran was the first to break the silence. "I see layers," she whispered, her eyes fixed on her mother with an intensity that made Mara flinch. "I see the woman who makes breakfast and sings lullabies and weaves pretty patterns. But underneath... I see someone who learned to become nothing because being something hurt too much. I see someone who's been hiding so long she almost forgot what she was hiding from."
She reached across the table to touch her mother's hand. "I see someone who's still eleven years old in some deep place, still standing in that corner, still waiting for someone to decide she's worth keeping."
Mara's carefully maintained composure cracked, and for a moment, Eris saw his mother as she truly was—not the steady presence who had anchored their family, but someone who had built her entire life around ensuring her children never felt the abandonment that had shaped her.
"I wanted you to be normal," she whispered. "I wanted you to have ordinary lives, ordinary problems. Marriage and children and growing old in peace."
"But we're not ordinary," Eris said quietly. "We never were. The bridge just made it impossible to pretend otherwise."
Outside, the morning sun continued its rise, burning away the mist that had concealed so many secrets. In the distance, they could hear the sounds of the village waking—vendors setting up their stalls, children running to morning lessons, the comfortable rhythm of a community that believed it understood the boundaries of its world.
But within the cottage at the village's edge, a family sat in the ruins of their carefully constructed normalcy, staring at truths that could no longer be hidden and choices that could no longer be avoided.
The Veil had remembered, and in remembering, it had been removed.