Page 19 of FoolSilver
The Veil hung from the sky to the ground, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, so vast its edges vanished into the earth’s curve. It shifted constantly, shadows rolling inside shadows, surface rippling as if something enormous moved beneath. Occasionally, a pulse of deep crimson flickered in its depths, there and gone.
Terrifying. Splendid. I wondered if anyone else saw what I saw. Nobody knew much about it, only that the Q-bomb tore the Shimmers apart. Realms that had existed in parallel for millennia—Fae, demon, human, and whatever lurked between—crashed together. Dimensions never meant to touch twisted, blended. In their midst, the DarkVeil emerged. Some called it the world’s wound, sealed but never healed. Others named it the Hellgate on Earth.
With demons crawling out of it, that theory didn’t feel far off.
Good job, White Witch. Truly. Excellent work,I snorted.
Excellent!
The voices from within the Veil swelled like echoes in a canyon.
My steps slowed. I turned to face the vast darkness, its shadows rolling toward me like waves reaching for the shore.
Max! Max!
Coldiron hummed in my bones, desperate for contact.
My mind raced. Coldiron could carry intent across distances. A river of it inside the Veil could be the bridge between the Oracle and me. If I got closer, the connection would strengthen. I could find out where Missy was. If she was being fed. If she was still alive.
The thought of her gone nearly ripped my heart out.
Missy was six and a half. Left alone in Crimson Ridge when I escaped. I’d planned every detail, promised to go back. A month. Two at most. Instead, the worst predator had plucked her from the slave mine like a flower from a withered garden.
A bargaining chip with my sister’s face.
Guilt and fear squeezed my lungs. In daylight, surrounded by Spartans and schedules, I could hold it at arm’s length. Here, alone in the gray dawn with the DarkVeil chanting my name, the distance collapsed. Nothing left but cold, drowning terror for what was happening to my sister while I ran laps on the wrong end of the continent.
I jogged straight toward the Veil.
Closer than anyone in camp ventured voluntarily. The Spartans kept a full block back. I could see the sentries—squared shoulders, tight grips. Every thirty seconds, their gazes flicked toward it, held, snapped back. Checking it was still the same distance away.
Warriors who’d fought mutants and wyverns without flinching. The DarkVeil made them nervous in a way enemies with teeth never could. It wasn’t an enemy. It was a wrongness. Standing near it felt like standing at the edge of a bottomless cliff where the fall would never end.
But I didn’t feel that wrongness.
What I felt was recognition. A genetic memory.
In the mine, survival demanded numbness. But ever since the heirs pulled me from the Scorched Wastes, my feelings had been waking—Aelindor’s knuckles on my jaw, Caspian’s mouthon my cheek, Nikolai’s breath on my throat, Drakken’s fire on my skin.
I’d held the flood back with the discipline that kept me alive. At the Veil’s edge, I couldn’t hold it anymore. It stripped me raw.
Everything broke through. Fear for Missy. Guilt. Longing for the heirs—a need so consuming it terrified me. Grief for my parents, for Rogue, for the years I’d lost in the dark. Fury at a broken world that left its pieces sharp for people like me to cut themselves on.
For a former slave, freedom was the most terrifying thing of all—caring so much it could kill you.
I stood three feet from the shifting shadows.
Yes, yes, Max! Come!
“Cadet Max! What the fuck are you doing?” A Spartan’s voice cracked across the dawn. Boots on hard dirt—someone running toward me, fast and furious.
The pull hooked my ribs and drew me forward. The DarkVeil was a mouth, and I was about to walk into its throat.
Behind me, the boots closed in. “Stop! Max! Fucking stop!”
Don’t stop. Come, Max!Coldiron sang through me, pulling at the armguard, pulling at the desperate need in my blood.
I reached the wall of shadows.
