Silence follows the veilbound like a shadow.
Since last night, narrowridge feels thinner less solid. The walls of alleys seem slightly skewed, the market's chatter echoes off in odd rhythms. I pass the old rain mother statue and notice its face once worn smooth is now cracked in a weird, jagged pattern. Something shifted.
I stare at the cracks.
Did someone carve them? Or did the fragment's presence ask reality to reshape itself?
By noon I'm restless. I leave the lower quarter and climb to the old tower near the library, where Ena Varis lives an old woman once shunned as a mad scholar. She whispers about fragments consuming worlds long before anyone believed.
Her door is open, despite the midday sun.
Inside: dust motes swirl in light beams. Shelves stacked with half burned scrolls and chipped stone idols. In the center, Ena sits behind a wide table cluttered with notes, ink vials, and a chipped ivory bust of the goddess Sirian.
When I enter, she doesn't look up at first.
Then:
"You've seen them, haven't you?"
Her words are calm, certain.
My heart jumps.
"Veilbounds," I whisper.
She nods. "They gather the fallen stones. Clean the witness."
She traces a line with her finger over the cracked goddess bust. The pattern matches exactly the cracks I saw in the statue.
I exhale.
"How do you know?" I ask.
She smiles, kindly but strange. "I've seen fragments talked about since the day they came to our world. But only those touched by them see it shift."
I feel exposed.
We sit across from each other in near silence.
She pours faintly luminescent tea from a carved cup.
"Trust is broken now," she says. "But more than that you've lost certainty."
"What do I trust?"
Her eyes are sharp now.
"Even you're senses. The veilbound don't just remove evidence. Sometimes they test the witnesses."
I think about the cracked statue, the silence in the alleys, the women at the crater with her skin like glass.
"Can I ever go back?"
"Back to who you where?" She asks. "No. But you can't stay this frightens."
She leans across the table and takes out a small statue a figurine carved from red shard. It looks like a bird, wings spread.
She places it before me:
"This was found beneath the broken archives, deep beneath the city. An echo statue: someone carved it to contain a memory.
She flips it over. On its underside is carved the same circle split by bolt symbol.
"This symbol marks places touched by fragments. Once someone carried that mark… it echoed through the city. Some saw; some forgot."
I picked it up. It's heavier than expected. Warm.
I turn it in my palm and feel the faint pulse almost like a heartbeat. I look up quickly. Ena meets my gaze steadily.
"Do you feel it?" She asks.
I nod.
I go outside to breath.
For a moment, everything seems normal. Then I pass a vendor's stall. The man's face flickers a flash of shock, as if he recognized me from somewhere or remembered something before his memory blinked out.
I freeze.
"My fragment," I whisper.
The vendor blinks, shakes his head, and smiles, offering me a fruit I didn't choose.
I shake myself out of it and climbe down the ridge toward home.
That night, I placed the figurine beside my bed. It pulses in time with my fragment. Two beating lights in dim symmetry.
I close my eyes.
And wonder:
If the fragment is echoing the city, and I'm its channel, what exactly am I becoming?