The skiff groaned with every push of the current, its patched sails straining under a wind that smelled faintly of metal and ash. The water beneath wasn't truly water anymore — just the upper skin of the Veil's creeping mists, swirling with sluggish currents as if something far below was stirring them.
Kaelen kept his eyes forward, jaw tight. The shard in his chest pulsed irregularly, each beat carrying a whisper just below hearing. Not words exactly, more like the weight of meaning — promises of strength, threats of annihilation.
Orien stood at the bow, his coat snapping like a banner in the wind. He didn't look back, didn't speak, only adjusted the sail lines with a precision that made Kaelen certain this wasn't his first time crossing cursed waters.
The fog pressed closer. Shapes shifted inside it — tall, thin, human-like, but boneless in the way they moved. Kaelen gripped the rail. "We're being followed."
"I told you," Orien said softly, "don't answer if they call to you."
One of the shapes reached the edge of the skiff's wake, leaning forward until its face — if it could be called that — slid into view. Hollow eyes. A mouth far too wide. And then, in a voice that was his mother's, it whispered: "Kaelen, come home."
His chest tightened. The shard pulsed hot, reacting, as if it knew the voice was a lie.
Orien finally turned, and for an instant Kaelen saw it — the faint, flickering mark beneath his right eye, like a sigil etched into his skin and hidden beneath shadow. It vanished as quickly as it appeared.
"You see now why we don't linger," Orien said, voice low. "These waters… remember you."
The skiff surged forward as if some unseen hand pushed them on. Behind them, the figures in the mist began to sink, their voices dissolving into the roar of the wind.
Far ahead, through a break in the fog, the first lights of the Hollow Market flickered like embers in a furnace.
"Almost there," Orien muttered. "Almost safe… if anything in this sky still counts as safe."