Chapter 38
The Veil's interior was not darkness—it was unmaking.
Colors inverted. Sound evaporated. Kian's breath left his lungs but made no fog in the air. Jin Yue's Devourer arm thrummed with predatory energy, its void-claw carving faint trails in the static. Lian walked ahead, his poppies reduced to a single bloom clutched in his fist—its song a threadbare lifeline.
"Stay close," Kian said, his voice stripped of echo. "The Veil warps distance."
"And time," Lian whispered.
A shadow flickered—a village square, frozen mid-celebration, faces stretched in silent laughter. The Veil had preserved this memory like a fly in amber.
"They're echoes," Jin Yue said. *"Leftovers from the Veil's meals."
The Echoing Child appeared among them, her crystalline body now translucent. She pointed to a crumbling well.
"It wants us there," Lian said.
The Well of Absence
The well's stones were porous, oozing black ichor. Peering inside, Kian saw only his reflection—but wrong. His eyes were voids, his skin cracked with static.
*
"The Eclipsed Heart," Lian said. "It's using your guilt as a weapon."
Jin Yue's arm twitched. "Then let's break the damn thing."
She plunged her claw into the well. The Veil shrieked.
The Fractured's Ambush
Cultists materialized from the static, their masks fused to their faces, mouths sewn shut with gold thread. At their head stood the Discordant King—a towering figure clad in the Fractured's shattered armor, his voice a chorus of dead whispers.
"The Veil promised you to us," he rasped. "The Gardener's blood will feed the silence."
Jin Yue lunged, her claw tearing through cultists, but their bodies dissolved into smoke. The Discordant King laughed, driving a blade of fractured song into Lian's side.
"No!" Kian roared.
The Veil trembled.
The First Gardener's Blood
Lian collapsed, his blood pooling black and glistening. The poppy in his hand withered, its song dying.
*"Interesting," the Discordant King mused. "Your blood sings of the old world. The Veil will savor it."
Kian's merged energy erupted—a storm of light and shadow—but the Veil absorbed it, growing stronger.
"Stop!" Jin Yue grabbed him. *"You're feeding it!"
The Echoing Child crawled to Lian, pressing her crystalline hand to his wound. "First Gardener… remember."
The Memory
Lian's vision fractured.
He stood in a garden older than time, poppies towering like trees. A figure knelt in the soil—a man with Kian's face but Lian's eyes.
"You were never meant to serve," the man said. "You were meant to choose."
The memory shifted: the man tearing his own heart out, planting it in the soil. The first poppy bloomed.
"The First Gardener is the seed," the Echoing Child whispered in Lian's ear. "Sacrifice the bloom. Become the root."
The Sacrifice
Lian gripped the dying poppy. "I'm sorry, Kian."
He plunged it into his chest.
Light erupted. The Veil recoiled as Lian's body dissolved into roots, his poppies exploding from the earth in a chorus of defiance. The cultists screamed, disintegrating. The Discordant King fled into the static.
"Lian!" Kian shouted, but the roots coiled around him, gentle and final.
"Grow," Lian's voice echoed. "Without me."
The Aftermath
The Veil retreated, wounded. The Silent Zone dissolved, leaving the village restored but empty. Jin Yue's Devourer arm hung limp, its void-energy spent. Kian knelt in the soil, a single poppy sprouting where Lian had fallen.
The Echoing Child touched the bloom. "He's not gone. He's everywhere now."
Above them, the storm pulsed—weaker, but alive.