Page 34 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

Shadows coil around him, shielding him as those words echo through me. My fingers quake with sudden cold, as if his admission leeched the last warmth of the night garden.

"What did you just say to me?" It comes out like a hiss.

The shadows part just long enough to bare his face—then slink back to the corners.

He doesn’t look away. "You heard me." It’s flat. Toneless.

My fingers curl inward until they dig into my palms, and I’m on my feet, away from him and pacing.

With every step, fury unfolds, and the words?—

They rush out.

"You? You did this? You watched me and my family struggle? Freeze? Then wrapped me in warmth like it meant something. You made my home a graveyard of ice, and now you sit here…"

I scream. Arms flung wide, fists clenched, a guttural release echoing up into the cracked-open sky.

Dama’s bloody chains. I let him touch my thoughts. I let him see me .

"You foul, detestable thing. You didn’t steal that memory. You let me forget you were the reason it existed."

At that, Tyr flinches.

Every moment returns—sharpened, re-cut, and wrong. Promising to keep me safe on the back of that horse. The nyrelith in front of all, claiming me as his. Every touch, every glimpse of flesh…

Was of the Frozen King.

So, what does that mean? What does that make me? If Tyr is both my protector and oppressor…

"Was I ever free? Or am I just another piece on your frozen gameboard?"

Tyr finally stands, putting himself in front of me. "You were never just a pawn, Amara. And you know that. Deep down, you do."

"Why? Why keep Tiriana caged in ice? Why pretend? Why any of it?"

Shadows creep closer, but I glare in their direction and they soon recede.

Tyr doesn’t hesitate. "I kept Tiriana frozen, so Lorien wouldn’t seal you in gold and ruin."

"And what in the shattered realms is that supposed to mean?"

Tyr grabs me by the top of the arms and forces a memory—his memory—into my mind.

Through his eyes I see the map from before, marked out with the vestige borders in thick, black ink.

All except for the central portion. The long swath of once-arid land in the center of the continent. That’s marked in red with lines hatching through the center. Like we don’t even deserve proper vestige markings.

"What is this?" I sneer.

"Watch," Tyr says quietly .

Lorien’s smooth, melodious voice drifts into my mind. "There’s only so long you can keep that land impassable, Tyr. And you know what happens when you do."

"Why don’t you remind me?" Tyr asks evenly, gaze fixed on the map.

Lorien sidles closer, and Tyr hates it. Hates the scent of him, the posturing presence, hates that Lorien thinks he deserves to share space with him.

I know that because Tyr hides no part of this interaction. He lets me into every layer, every thought.

"When my armies breech the Tirianan border, despite the ice wall, despite you cutting off the north and south of the continent, I’ll have a foothold in the north, and there won’t be anything you can do about it.

"And you know, once Tiriana falls, the other vestiges will cede their power to me and then it won’t simply be a matter of your forces against mine. It will be the continent against you."

Tyr looks up from the map for the first time and finds Lorien’s gaze.

I recoil, stomach churning, but Tyr holds me firm. "Look, Amara! See!"

I stare into the face of a Maggot King. Writhing and putrid, a ruin of slicked flesh, twitching with rot.

The Golden mask, the beaming smile and piercing gaze—gone.

What remains is crawling.

Teeming.

Crowned in worms.

I gag as Tyr continues to focus on him.

"He is the False Light, Amara. He’s only ever wanted to brutalize your village, to burn it to sunder so he can reach the north and unite the vestiges against me. "

He releases my arms, and the memory follows. I stumble backward, arms aching, tender. "Well, maybe he should."

Tyr raises an eyebrow at me.

"Maybe you should be dethroned. Even if it is by—" I can’t even say his name without bringing to mind?—

The face he keeps behind the mask of power.

"You think Lorien would make a better ruler? You think he’d have each vestige’s best interests at heart?"

Maybe not. At the very least, he wouldn’t have to pretend to save me. "Are you saying you do?" I look him up and down, and Tyr has the gall to smirk when I meet his eyes again. "It was judgment, not appraisal, you pig."

"Oh, I’m well aware. I still enjoyed it, though. But to answer your question, I do. I’ve maintained trade alliances with each vestige, while also being Shadowfell’s custodian and Frostspire’s King."

That makes me stop. "You’re not Shadowfell’s King?"

"I told you that."

"No, you dodged, like everything. When someone tried to introduce us, you said something to skirt around it. You never introduced yourself to me. I had to hear your name from bloody Lorien."

He nods.

"And what about when you asked about the shadows? I told you they aren’t mine. This is not my vestige. I’m but a keeper. A warden for the vestige."

"I don’t care which vestige is yours, Tyr!

You kept my family, my village, frozen for a generation!

You killed my father. You stole my mother’s youth, her beauty, the softness I only barely remember.

You robbed me of the life I was meant to have, then tricked me into thinking you saved me from it. "

"You’re right. I did those things. I won’t apologize for keeping the continent safe from Lorien—or for things I haven’t done. Like taking your memory?—"

The shadows rise once more. "You’re still trying to peddle that lie?"

Tyr’s eyes harden. "Do not call me a liar again, Amara."

Gooseflesh rises on my nape. "Do not threaten me, Tyr."

I stand tall, staring up at him.

He doesn’t blink.

Doesn’t move a muscle.

I and know right then I have to leave his sight or I’ll do things I’ll most assuredly regret.

I storm past him, heading for the door back inside.

"You can’t reenter until the others have finished."

"Is that so?" I ask, turning on my heel and walking right by him once more. "Then I’ll fight my way through this poison garden before I spend another moment here with you."

Tyr doesn’t stop me.

Not as though I wanted him to.

I push my way through the garden, tall vining flowers and wild grasses scraping my bare legs as rocks poke the thin soles of my slippers. But I don’t care. I only need to reach the edge. Break free of this ridiculous garden and see what Shadowfell really is.

It can’t be a lush garden. That’s the spell, the mask like the False Light Maggot King himself. And I’m done playing the part of the girl who can’t see through the magic.

Aethermagic puffs in large plumes with each step, each stalk I bend and vine I trample. The sky, cracked and bleeding colors that don’t belong, watches until the plants begin to thin, more moss than trees and bloom.

Until I can’t feel his eyes, or his scent, or his warmth pressing in.

I have to reach the edge of the land, not just of the garden. I have to see where Shadowfell ends, and the rest of the continent begins.

I toss a look back over my shoulder and pause. The keep looms stark against the sky. The whole structure seems hewn from obsidian, not just the interior walls. Like a giant carved it from a single enormous slab of volcanic glass. Black stone juts in jagged lines toward the stars.

Ugly. Crude. All sharp angles and mismatched weight—like something built in defiance of the land. Shadowfell Keep, or castle or whatever its name is, doesn’t belong here.

Just like the strange flowers and cracked sky. The demons made it what they needed but also stole something vital, something foundational from the land. I shake my head at the keep and continue walking.

If Tyr thinks he can…

Dama’s chains, I hardly know what to make of?—

Any of it.

All I know is that I can’t stop moving. Stillness means I’ll have to feel it. All of it.

The betrayal, the twisted mercy of it, and the shame curled around all of it for letting myself feel something toward him, for letting him see me. Hold me in his mind and keep me warm in that dreadful cave.

I don’t know if I want to laugh or sob or scream until the whole keep cracks open.

So I walk, fists balled against the world.

I walk until my slippers wear thin, bare even. Moss and soil cling to my feet, but I don’t care. Until the wind grows harder with no garden to catch it.

Until I reach an edge.

Not one I was expecting.

Shadowfell Keep sits at the crest of a long plateau—maybe the hollow shell of that long dead volcano.

But beyond that—beyond the garden and the moss and the sheer cliff it all rests atop—sprawls the rest of the land.

Ebonhold, Shadowfell’s southeast border vestige, unfurls like scar tissue—spires hunched and knotted, their surfaces split with lesions—glinting mineral scars, and geodes—as if something vast had clawed its way out and left calcified memory as a reward.

No two structures are identical. Some are jagged, forged in the heaving crush of land that tore itself apart to be born. Others are smooth and bone-pale, half dissolved by time.

The whole vestige looks like it once screamed and never quite stopped. Like it absorbed a war, a betrayal, a memory so violent it fused with the land and kept rotting.

It makes me hug my arms around myself. Makes me take a step back.

I turn my gaze farther, beyond the twisted buildings of Ebonhold, where I glimpse a sparkling silver river cutting through the land.

It’s beautiful, glistening like ice in the sunlight.

It cuts through the continent like?—

My heart stalls.

Oh gods.

It’s not a river I’m looking at.

It’s Tiriana.

My breath catches and I fall to my knees.

My home, the border stretching out like a lovely silver corpse waiting for topsoil. Bile burns at the back of my throat, and my chest aches for all the people who never had a chance. For my father. For Vella and Mother. For Sevigny.

No wail would suffice. No string of curses could touch the rawness of seeing my village as he’s sees it.

As he made it.

A wall.

A defense.

I dig my fingers into the moss and dirt, trying to hold something real, something solid, as if touch alone might fill the places I’m coming undone.

I dig and dig until my nails break—until my fingertips scrape raw against hard stone.

I brush the soil away, searching for the hardness. The truth beneath it.

But it’s just more fucking obsidian.

Shadows rise from the ground slowly, as if seeping out of the rock itself. They linger at ground level before swirling and twining around my hands, my arms.

"Get away from me, you frostbitten liar!" I shake the shadows from my wrists and tumble back on to my ass.

The shadows remain, twisting and twining around themselves mid-air.

"I said get the fuck away from me."

They shudder—then dissolve to smoke and vanish.

I stand, rubbing my dirty hands on the dirty lace costume—just fabric now, just filth. I wipe the sweat from my brow, the tears from my cheeks, and head back to Shadowfell.

If they want a fucking Maiden, I’ll give them one they’ll wish they never crowned.