The air was thin this high up, but Kaelen barely noticed. His lungs burned from the climb, his legs from the sprint, and yet it wasn't the altitude or the pace that hollowed him out—it was the feeling that the world beneath them was dying in silence.
The fortress had shrunk into a jagged black tooth behind them, its spires half-lost in the rolling clouds. But the Veil… the Veil was no longer a distant smear on the horizon. It rose like a tide of ash, tendrils curling and collapsing in slow, deliberate swirls, as if it were breathing.
Orien walked ahead without a word, the hood of her tattered cloak pulled low. Even with her limp, she moved like someone who always knew where the next foothold was, as if she could see the path before it existed. Kaelen didn't trust that.
"Still not going to tell me what that was back there?" he asked, breaking the long silence.
"What?"
"The way the guards looked at you. They weren't afraid of me. They were afraid of you. And then you spoke to that commander in—what was it?—a language I've never heard in my life. He didn't question you. He let us pass. That's not just 'having connections.'"
Orien kept walking. The wind whipped her cloak aside just long enough for Kaelen to glimpse the faint shimmer of runes etched along the inside of her wrist. Old runes. Older than Sovereignty craft.
"You think you want to know," she said at last, voice flat. "But you don't."
"I'm already running for my life," Kaelen said. "How much worse could it get?"
Orien stopped so abruptly he almost stumbled into her. She turned her head just enough for him to see her eyes under the hood—too sharp, too steady, too ancient.
"You think the Veil is the thing swallowing the isles," she said softly. "You're wrong. It's just the shadow of what's coming."
Kaelen opened his mouth, but before he could speak, the cliff trembled under their feet. Far below, one of the smaller floating islands groaned—a sound like stone grinding against bone—before dropping into the mists with a final, echoing crack.
The Veil surged upward to claim it.
Kaelen's pulse quickened. "We need to keep moving."
Orien's lips curved—not in a smile, but in something closer to resignation. "Yes. We do."
And then, so quietly he almost thought he imagined it, she added, "Before it recognizes you."