Chapter 10: The Echoes of the Veil

Chapter 10: The Echoes of the Veil

Malakor’s parting words, “Enjoy the recovery,” hung in the sterile air like a curse. He dissolved back into the shadows he commanded, leaving behind a silence that was heavier and more suffocating than before. Elara stood trembling, a storm of fury, grief, and utter helplessness raging within her.

He had offered her mercy, wrapped in the chains of eternal servitude. And she had refused. She had chosen this path of pain for Liam, all for a sliver of hope, a spark of power she barely understood. The sheer, calculated cruelty of it—to wound the person she loved most and then offer her the cure at the cost of her soul—was an evil so profound it felt like a physical weight in the room.

The rage finally boiled over. It was a raw, primal scream of a thing, clawing its way up her throat. He was gone, but his presence lingered, a smug, cold stain on the room, on her life.

“You don’t get to just walk away,” she whispered, her voice a low, guttural snarl.

The warmth Alistair had helped her identify, the spark of power that was entirely her own, ignited in her chest. It wasn't the borrowed, icy power of the pact. This was hers. It was the ferocious, incandescent fury of a mother protecting her family, the despair of a wife watching her husband lie broken in a hospital bed. She reached for it, not with calculation or control, but with a desperate, instinctual need to strike back.

In the palm of her hand, darkness coalesced. It wasn't the fluid, passive shadow of the pact; it was a solid, hungry void. It pulled the faint light of the room into itself, weaving a dagger of absolute black. The air around it grew cold, the construct so alien it seemed to bend reality around its edges. It was the same weapon she had manifested in the training room, but now it felt sharper, heavier, humming with a power born of pure, unadulterated rage.

Malakor was gone, but the corner where he had stood still felt tainted. With a cry that was half-sob, half-war cry, Elara threw the dagger.

It flew through the air, silent as a wraith. It passed through the exact space where Malakor’s last wisp of shadow had vanished and struck the pale, sterile wall behind it.

There was no sound of impact. No clang of steel, no crunch of plaster.

Instead, reality tore.

For a single, horrifying moment, the world glitched. The steady, rhythmic beep of Liam’s heart monitor stretched into a single, distorted electronic scream. The air cracked with the smell of ozone and static, and a wave of vertigo washed over Elara, as if the floor had dropped out from under her. The view through the open doorway shimmered violently, the long, quiet hallway outside warping like a reflection in heated glass.

A small, round security camera mounted on the ceiling above the door let out a sharp pop. A shower of blue sparks rained down, and the small red recording light went dark.

The world snapped back into place. The heart monitor resumed its steady, reassuring rhythm. The air was still. But something had fundamentally changed. A seal had been broken. A bell had been rung that could not be un-rung.

Elara stood panting, her arm outstretched, the fury draining away to be replaced by a new and unfamiliar dread. This was not Malakor’s power. This was not his retaliation. This was something else, something impersonal, ancient, and vast. It was the sound of a system noticing an error.

Her eyes darted to the now-warped hallway. At the far end, near the nurses’ station, a man stood looking down at a clipboard. He wore a plain, ill-fitting grey suit that seemed to absorb the light around it, making him look strangely flat, like a cardboard cutout. He wasn't a doctor, not a visitor. He was just… wrong. As she stared, he lifted his head, and for a split second, she saw a face that was unnervingly blank, devoid of any distinguishing features. Then she blinked, and he was gone.

Her blood ran cold.

Panic, sharp and absolute, seized her. She had to get out. Now. She stumbled out of the room, casting one last, anguished look at Liam, sleeping, blessedly oblivious. She fled down the hallway, her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. Every reflection she passed seemed to hold a threat. In the polished surface of a floor buffer, she saw another grey-suited figure, this one a woman, standing motionless just behind her reflection. She spun around. There was no one there.

She didn't stop running until she was in the hospital parking garage, fumbling for her car keys with shaking hands. The concrete pillars cast long, deep shadows, and every one of them felt like it was watching her. She threw herself into the driver’s seat, locked the doors, and leaned her forehead against the cold steering wheel, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

Her phone felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. She found Alistair’s number, her thumb trembling so badly it took three tries to press the call button.

He answered on the first ring. "Elara."

“Something’s wrong,” she choked out, the words tumbling over each other. “I… I threw something at him. After he left. My own magic. The hospital… it felt like it broke for a second. The lights, the cameras… and I saw people, Alistair. Men. In grey suits. They weren’t real.”

On the other end of the line, the silence was heavy and grim. There was no confusion in it, no surprise. Only the weary sound of a man confirming his worst fears.

“Describe what you saw,” he said, his voice dangerously calm.

She told him everything—the warping reality, the static in the air, the featureless faces that were there one moment and gone the next.

“You did not just display magic, Mrs. Vance,” Alistair said when she was finished, his voice a low, somber tone that chilled her to the bone. “You tore a hole. Your innate power, the creation magic you possess, is a fundamental force. When charged with that much raw emotion and unleashed in a place so thoroughly mundane, you didn’t just make a ripple on the surface of The Veil. You punctured it.”

“What does that mean?” she whispered, dreading the answer.

“It means you’ve been marked,” he said, and the words tolled like a funeral bell. “The Veil is not a passive barrier. Think of it as a living organism, a self-healing membrane over reality. Your outburst was a wound, and the organism has deployed its immune system. The figures you saw are its enforcers. We call them Adjusters.”

“Adjusters?”

“They are constructs of pure law and order, drawn to significant breaches. Their one and only purpose is to maintain secrecy and stability by excising the source of the anomaly. They smooth over the ripples. They erase the evidence.” He paused, letting the weight of his next words sink in. “And they silence the source. Permanently.”

Elara stared at her own terrified face in the rearview mirror.

“The Chancellery has a term for those who have attracted their attention,” Alistair continued, his voice grim. “You have become an Echo. A lingering vibration of a forbidden act. And the Adjusters will not stop until they have dampened that vibration. They will hunt you, Elara. Not with malice or anger, but with the implacable, tireless efficiency of a natural law. They will not stop until they have erased you.”

She had stood up to a devil, rejected his offer, and lashed out with her own burgeoning power. And in doing so, she had traded one hunter for another. Now, Malakor didn't just want her soul. The very fabric of reality wanted her gone. The pressure was no longer coming from two sides; it was a cage, closing in from all directions, with the walls made of devils, broken family, and the implacable guardians of reality itself.