The wind carried the taste of copper and rot.
Kaelen pressed his back against the jagged ribs of an ancient hull, one of the countless shipwrecks tangled in the lower mist. The rotten timbers creaked under the strain of the drifting island's slow tilt. Somewhere below, in the white-grey soup, the Veil whispered. Not the usual hiss of toxic wind, but something deeper—almost like the sound of breath drawn through stone lungs.
"Three scouts," Orien murmured. His voice was low, but Kaelen heard the sharpness in it. "Sovereignty livery. Runes fresh-inked."
Kaelen peeked around the splintered edge. Three figures were picking their way across the skeletal remains of the ship, their lanterns burning with the unnatural green fire Sovereignty mages used to keep the Veil at bay. That firelight made the mists recoil. It made Kaelen's skin crawl.
"They're tracking us," Kaelen said.
"They're tracking the shard," Orien corrected. His gaze flicked toward Kaelen's forearm where the bone shard's lines pulsed faintly under the skin, brighter now than they had been even yesterday. "It's not you they want—it's what you carry."
Kaelen almost spat back, but the words died in his throat. He wasn't sure if Orien meant that as comfort or warning.
One of the scouts knelt, running a gloved hand along the planks, and Kaelen saw the telltale shimmer of a rune tracing spell. Orien's hand shot out, gripping Kaelen's wrist with surprising strength.
"Move," he said.
They darted along the shattered deck, boots whispering over wood swollen with damp, until they reached a yawning gap where the hull had split clean in two. The mists below churned, unnaturally restless.
"Down?" Kaelen hissed.
"They won't follow us into that," Orien said, already sliding down the splintered beams toward the mist.
Kaelen swore under his breath, but followed. The moment his boots broke the surface, the mist wrapped around him like wet cloth. The Sovereignty's lantern-light faded, swallowed. Here, in the heart of the Veil, the air pressed on his lungs, thick and cloying.
He almost missed it—the faint ripple in Orien's voice when he said, "Keep close to me." It wasn't fear. It was command. The kind of command that spoke of centuries, not years.
They moved through the whiteness, guided by the glow from Kaelen's cursed arm. The deeper they went, the more the mist began to spark—tiny motes of blue fire drifting between them like ash in reverse.
"Veilfire," Orien murmured. "Not seen since the days before the Sundering."
Kaelen frowned. "And you know that because…?"
Orien's jaw tightened. "Because I've read."
Kaelen didn't believe him.
They were about to push on when the mist around them heaved, as if the entire sky had drawn a breath. Far below, something massive shifted in the dark. The bone shard in Kaelen's arm flared so brightly it hurt.
"Tell me that was an island collapsing," Kaelen said.
Orien didn't answer.
Instead, his eyes—always sharp, always calculating—were fixed on the darkness beneath them, and for the first time since Kaelen had met him, Orien looked like a man who recognized what he was running from… and knew it wouldn't be enough.