The silence after the Council's judgment did not ease it clung thick and choking, like smoke refusing to clear after fire.
Sorin stood at the chamber's center, shoulders squared though his fingers trembled not with fear, but with the crushing weight of their decree.
His Silence Path was no longer secret. It had been dragged into the light, dissected beneath cautious eyes, condemned by sharpened words.
The Council no longer saw him as a boy, nor as the orphan of Ashenreach. They saw him as other as vessel, as fracture, as threat.
Their verdict was iron: he would be watched, bound beneath scrutiny until the Silence revealed its full shape. Asset, or danger. Nothing between.
The judgment pressed on his chest like chains. Each breath reminded him he no longer lived unseen; he endured beneath their gaze.
As robes whispered and torches guttered low, one figure lingered. Ariven, the Councilor whose voice carried both warning and curiosity, approached.
Her eyes were sharp, yet softened by something unspoken.
"The veil between silence and sound frays because of you," she said, her voice sinking into him as though spoken inside his marrow. "Be cautious.
What you awaken may not only reshape you it may unmake us all."
Then she was gone, leaving him with words that felt more like curse than counsel, echoing in his thoughts long after the chamber emptied.
The days that followed were heavy with unease. Ashenreach itself seemed restless, its heartbeat uneven. Whispers tracked him through the streets.
Some called him chosen, others cursed; many turned away, as though even his shadow carried peril.
Children were pulled aside by anxious parents, merchants paused mid-call, and even the guards watched with unease, their hands never far from hilts.
And beneath it all, the Silence intruded. Sounds flickered the clang of forges, merchants' cries, children's laughter then fell away into void, leaving Sorin suspended in a silence not his own.
When the sounds returned, they crashed violently, like floodwaters breaking through a shattered dam.
Each intrusion chipped more from his sanity, leaving him both exhausted and sharpened, like steel ground too fine.
His mind frayed at the edges. Yet even within the unraveling, he trained.
Zira remained unshaken, her loyalty fiercer than rumor.
Her blade rang against his movements beneath the ruins of the spire, steel flashing in moonlight. "If they would bind you, then grow stronger than their chains," she urged, her voice both iron and warmth.
"Do not let them shape you into their weapon. Do not let them take what is yours."
Her words steadied him, even as silence clawed deeper into his core.
But Toven had grown quieter. His laughter came slower, weighted with calculation.
Too often, Sorin caught him staring not with brotherhood, but with assessment, as if trying to measure what remained of the boy against the shadow of what he was becoming.
The silence between them was no longer absence; it was fracture. Where once there had been bond, now suspicion lingered.
The night the Veil shattered began like any other. The city breathed uneasily, bracing against an unseen storm.
The moon hung swollen and pale, casting Ashenreach in ghostlight. Sorin lay awake, the hum of silence tugging at him, insistent, pulling him toward something unnamed.
His skin prickled, every heartbeat out of rhythm with the world around him.
Then he felt it.
The Veil.
Invisible, yet undeniable fragile as glass, taut as stretched skin. A boundary between what was his silence and what waited beyond. It quivered like a drumskin until, without warning, it broke.
The world convulsed.
Sorin staggered, clutching his chest as silence roared. Not absence, but presence vast, invasive, alive. Shadows stretched unnaturally across walls.
The city's cries warped, torn between sound and nothingness, as though reality itself stammered and forgot its lines. The Veil had shattered.
And from its fracture, something stirred.
Voices poured into him thousands, tangled and discordant. Whispers, screams, prayers in forgotten tongues.
They braided into something unbearable, as if memory and prophecy collapsed into one.
His knees buckled, blood filled his mouth, iron sharp on his tongue. And amid the agony, visions seared themselves into him:
A throne carved of silence.
A crown forged of absence.
A sovereign not of men, but of echoes.
And at the center himself.
He gasped, dragging in air like a drowning man breaching the surface. The world snapped back, but it was changed.
Cracks laced the sky, faint as spiderwebs of glass, glowing with a lightless energy that pulsed like veins across the night.
The Veil was gone.
He had broken it or it had broken for him.
Zira found him amid ruined stone, collapsed to his knees. She reached for him, though her hand trembled as silence coiled about him like a living shroud.
Even her courage faltered as she felt the weight of the unseen pressing around him.
"What happened?" she whispered.
Sorin's throat burned as he forced sound through it the first words since the shattering.
"The world is no longer whole," he rasped, his voice resonant, carrying more than sound. "And I… I am its fracture."
Above them, the cracks widened, the city holding its breath, bracing for what would come next.
The air itself trembled, as if awaiting command.
The Shattered Veil had opened and Sorin stood at its center, no longer just an orphan of Ashenreach, but the fulcrum upon which worlds might tilt.