The Knotted Veil did not march.
They drifted.
Kaelen learned this on the first day. The band moved like scraps of shadow caught in a breeze—vanishing behind cliff-faces of floating stone, reappearing hours later from a completely different direction, their path a tangle no sane traveler would chart.
It wasn't just to throw off pursuers; it was a way of life. Every turn, every detour, felt like they were slipping between threads no one else could see. The sky itself seemed to resist tracking them—he would glance behind and find the mist thicker, the landmarks gone, as if the world had politely erased the trail.
Their leader, Iryndra, called it "moving in the weft."
Kaelen called it infuriating.
The air in the Veil's camp was thick with smoke—not from cooking fires, but from braziers packed with embermoss. The scent clung to his clothes, a biting blend of spice and iron. When he asked about it, a masked woman with eyes like wet coal said simply:
"It keeps the dead from hearing us."
No one explained further.
Nights were worse. They didn't sleep in one place twice. The Veil preferred cliff edges, the high and precarious kind, where the poison mist boiled far below. Hammocks swayed in the open air, ropes knotted to anchors hammered into the rock. When Kaelen lay there, suspended over nothing, the titan's heartbeat inside his own chest felt louder.
They were not a gentle people.
They trained with knives in silence, breaking only to drink something dark from tin cups. They laughed rarely, and when they did, it sounded like breaking bones. And yet… there was a strange safety here. They were bound by something invisible, and dangerous, and Kaelen—despite himself—felt it tugging at him.
Once, in the pale light before dawn, he caught Iryndra watching him.
"You're not one of us," she said, her voice soft enough to be stolen by the wind, "but the Knots are listening. Be careful which thread you pull."
He didn't know what that meant, but it stayed with him long after they moved on.
And as the drifting islands began to darken on the horizon, Kaelen realized the Knotted Veil were not just taking him somewhere. They were bringing him into something.
Something he might not be able to walk away from.