The storm did not begin with thunder.
It began with whispers.
Low, layered, overlapping voices—so soft, they barely moved the air. Yet they echoed in my mind like old songs half-remembered. I heard them in my sleep. I heard them when I was awake. Always behind things. Beneath things.
Voices under the veil.
---
Kadven was shifting.
The sky hadn't brightened since the breach. It hung overhead like a ceiling about to fall. Heavy. Pale. Sick.
Magic behaved differently.
Spells stuttered. Charms reversed. One student tried to summon a light orb and instead brought down a rain of ash. Another woke up speaking in languages no one recognized—not even the elder archivists.
The instructors called it "ambient destabilization."
But I knew what it was.
The veil wasn't just thinning.
It was unraveling.
---
They gathered me at dawn.
The remaining members of the Thirteenth Circle—those who hadn't gone silent or mad—met me in the courtyard.
The same place I took the seat.
Only this time, no symbols glowed. The stone was cracked. The Veilfire was gone.
One of them stepped forward, their mask broken across the left side.
"Something is speaking through the breach," they said. "We've traced it to the Sorrowed Archives."
That name alone made the air drop five degrees colder.
No one went to the Sorrowed Archives.
Not even the Circle.
They weren't sealed with magic.
They were sealed with forgetting.
They gave me a relic.
A chain of bone-white stones, warm to the touch and always slightly moving.
"The voices won't touch you while this is on," the masked one said. "Or, at least, not all the way."
Comforting.
The Sorrowed Archives lay beneath the academy. Deeper even than the Mirror Vault. Past old cells, past frozen halls where time didn't flow right. It took me half a day just to reach the first seal.
There were seven in total.
Each one older than the last.
Each one resisted my presence until the seal on my chest began to burn again, unlocking them in silence.
Finally, I stepped into the archives.
It was not a library.
It was a grave.
Stone shelves stretched into darkness, filled with scrolls and tomes and jars sealed with wax and string. The air was heavy with dust that had never moved.
But there was sound.
A gentle humming.
Voices.
Not shouting. Not calling.
Whispering.
Weaving.
They came from all directions—and none. Sometimes I felt them crawl through my ears. Other times they spoke from the back of my mind, using my own memories.
"He left you."
"She hated you."
"You were never meant to be."
I pressed the bone chain tighter.
The voices grew angry.
I walked slowly.
Looking for a source.
A pattern.
Then I found a door that shouldn't exist.
Not wood.
Not stone.
But stitched flesh.
It pulsed slightly. Breathing.
A single symbol burned above it—the same one that marks the Thirteenth Seat.
Mine.
I stepped through.
And entered a different kind of space.
Not a room.
A memory.
It wasn't mine.
It was Kadven's.
I saw the first gatekeepers.
Thirteen of them, standing in a ring, robes torn, eyes hollowed from sealing something far beneath. Their voices cracked as they chanted. They bled not from wounds, but from guilt.
"We bind the hunger."
"We bury the truth."
"We curse our names."
One looked directly at me.
And whispered: "You are the echo."
Then the image shattered.
I stood in a small chamber. No shelves. No books.
Just one figure.
Hunched. Pale. Mouth sewn shut. A mirror hung above it, cracked but glowing.
The source of the voices.
The first Gatebearer.
The one who failed.
He reached for me, blind and slow. But his presence was enormous—like standing in the eye of a storm.
The seal on my chest pulsed.
And then the voices poured into me like floodwater.
Memories not my own.
Battles in dead kingdoms.
Lovers betrayed.
Oaths broken.
Children born cursed.
One word echoed over and over:
"Azraleth."
I fell to my knees.
Hands to my ears.
The bone chain snapped.
The voices surged.
I saw everything.
The truth of Kadven.
Of the veil.
Of me.
I was not just chosen.
I was built.
Made from fragments of others. A vessel designed to survive the gate.
To replace the ones who couldn't.
To hold what shouldn't be held.
The Gate wasn't just cracking.
It was calling me home.
Then the mirror shattered.
The figure vanished.
The voices cut off.
And I was alone again, gasping, soaked in sweat, the broken chain in my hand.
But something new burned across my arm.
A sigil.
Older than the veil itself.
Not a mark of power.
A warning.
When I returned to the surface, the sky had darkened further.
A line of fire traced the horizon.
And in the distance, bells rang.
Not from Kadven.
But from beyond the veil.