Page 35 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

The sky hasn’t begun to bleed yet, but I’m already awake. Still wrapped in lace and last night’s dirt, lying atop the covers instead of beneath them.

I’m not tired.

I’m carved out—like the night hollowed me, then lined the walls with iron.

My hands rest flat against the mattress, palms open. Ready. The shadows haven’t come. The bird hasn’t screamed. Even the keep seems to be holding its breath.

But I’m not waiting anymore. Let them crown me. Let them dress me in black lace and ritual. I know what I am now. And I know what I’m not.

The lace clings tighter this morning.

Or maybe it’s just me—more solid now, less willing to bend.

I dress without ceremony. No mirror. No preening. Just movement. One step into the black, then another. Tie it there, and there, and sigilweave to breakfast.

I’ve hardly set a foot on the silver script before I’m standing in the dining hall .

No one has arrived yet.

Maybe no one is left.

The thought lands in my stomach with nothing more than an echo. I sit at my usual table, collect my serving of fruit and porridge, and watch the door.

The women from the first Trial, the ones in silver whose food I gorged myself on, enter first, together. They don’t make eye contact with me.

I eat my porridge. And I watch. Listen.

A potential I haven’t spoken to enters afterward and she, too, avoids my gaze.

Selke is next—she at least gives me a tight nod—followed by Ashera. Not only does she immediately find my gaze, Ashera heads straight for my table instead of hers.

"I guess you made it," she says quietly. Her eyes are red rimmed. "Emile wasn’t so lucky."

She sniffs, and I cannot tell if she’s sincere or not, so thick are her layers of armor. Without asking, she takes the seat across from me and conjures food from the aetherglass.

"You’re sitting in Sevigny’s seat."

A crease forms between her perfectly arched brows as her shoulders—no—her whole frame sinks. "Such a tragedy," she says and quickly moves to the next seat but not before dabbing delicately at her dry nose.

She continues talking, unprompted. "When Emile failed her Trial, the Maiden Council sent her to Lord Sorrell’s estate as a kept mistress."

"The drunkard?"

Ashera nods.

Emile is smart. She’ll find a way to keep herself safe. Or she’ll end up dead.

The truth of the situation sours my appetite, and I push my bowl away .

"But I’m more worried about you. How are you handling…"

She doesn’t finish.

"You’ll have to be more specific, Ashera."

A flicker of something real. Surprise. She didn’t expect me to answer that way. "Your friend and vestige mate, Sevigny."

"What about her?"

"Did your attendant not inform you this morning?"

I don’t answer, as it’s self-evident.

"Amara, Sevigny’s attendant found her hanging by her neck just before the Trial began."

Cold washes over me.

The room goes still.

Quiet.

And something in me cracks.

Not loudly. Not with force. But a new pain climbs out of the hole it left behind.

The room spins, light fracturing strangely, and I’m in a memory.

I brace, expecting another cave memory.

Or Tyr, infiltrating my mind.

Except it’s not a memory.

The hall vanishes.

The logic of the world unspools, thread by thread, until I’m standing somewhere wrong.

The sky is broken.

Not cracked as I’m accustomed to—shattered. Like it fell once, and no one remembered how to put it back together.

Smoke rolls over the hills in slow waves. An aftermath.

And bodies.

Dozens. Hundreds.

Not soldiers exactly—but they died like they fought .

Steel sunk into flesh.

Magic gone feral.

Bones snapped sideways.

I should cover my mouth. I don’t. I don’t breathe. I don’t blink.

Because in the middle of it ? —

A woman hovers just above the ground.

Not dressed for war. Not dressed for any of this.

She wears no sigils, no housemark, no crown.

Her robes shimmer like oil-slick water, and her feet drip with blood and something thicker.

She moves between the dead, one by one, like she’s reading them. Like she’s choosing.

With each touch, some vanish. Others decay faster.

One ignites.

I take a step toward her, and the air goes rigid, pressing against my ribs like it wants to keep me out.

She lifts her head.

I can’t see her face, only the tilt of it. The pause.

Like she knows I’m watching.

The woman lifts her head.

And I’m gone.

No wind. No sound. No soft warning of return.

Just cold porridge.

My fingers tighten around the spoon like it might anchor me.

The dining hall buzzes softly. Voices return. Trays clatter. The world has the gall to go on.

And the shadows are around me again.

I don’t know when they came, or if they ever left. They rise from beneath the table like steam from stone, coiling around my wrists, my spine. Not touching. Just close.

"What in the Dama…" Ashera murmurs .

I don’t respond.

Not yet.

The shadows wait, too. Patient. Listening.

Finally, I look down at them.

"I don’t know what they are," I say, voice low. "I don’t know why they keep coming."

Ashera stares like she wants to ask something else. But she doesn’t.

No one does.

I lift the spoon. I don’t eat.

My hands feel too far away. Like they belong to someone still wholly human, so I set it down.

Ashera shifts beside me but doesn’t speak. Her gaze flicks from me to the shadows, then back again. Measuring.

There’s calculation behind her eyes. But beneath it?—

Something else.

Recognition.

"You saw something," she says at last.

I blink at the wall across the room. "Yes."

"What was it?"

The words form and collapse in my throat.

I think of the woman. The way she moved through death without flinching.

The way the air tried to stop me from getting close.

"A graveyard," I say softly. "And something that didn’t belong in it."

The shadows pulse once. A slow ripple against the floor.

Ashera rises, smooth and silent. "You should tell him."

I finally look up. "If by him you mean Tyr, then he already knows."

She tilts her head like she wants to press further—but she doesn’t. She just nods.

And walks away.

The garden is empty when I step through.

No bleeding sky today. Just the velvet darkness of night. Soft. Holding.

I walk until I find the tree with the fiery orange blossoms—the one from the first night. The one I refused to sit beneath.

It feels right now.

I kneel.

Stones lie scattered in the moss like waiting teeth. I pick them one by one, stacking them into a small cairn. A shrine. A headstone no one else will know to read.

"For Sevigny," I whisper. "For the one who saw what this place was and tried to survive, anyway."

I don’t cry.

I fold the lace dress—black, silken, soft—and place it beneath the final stone.

Let the gods take their Maiden.

I’m not wearing this anymore.

I rise in undergarments and bare feet.

The shadows do not move.

They watch as I stride across to the sigilweave. No destination. Just will.

It delivers me to my chamber.

Not on the script in my doorway, but before the aetherglass wardrobe. Pale skin. Dark eyes. Nothing left to mask.

"Show me something better," I say.

The aetherglass ripples.

Not lace or silk or anything I’ve worn before.

Something darker.

I fall asleep atop my linens.

Nude .

Morning breaks, and I’m awake to see it. No one comes to dress me. No one orders me to the dining hall. So, I do neither.

I conjure a meal—more than just porridge and bitter berries.

"Give me something better to break my fast," I say to the aetherglass at my desk, and a silver dish appears.

Not polished. Not the usual dining hall fare. This plate has weight. Depth. Its surface is patinaed—green and copper and even black where the grooves deepen.

Two golden-yolked eggs sit atop a slice of delicate bread. Steaming. Perfect.

I had eggs once in Tiriana. The guards gave them out only once. One per person. And as I spear open the yolk, watching it bleed across the bread and silver, a part of me doesn’t want to eat.

A part of me sees that egg for what it is. A warm meal, nutrition. A delicacy for some.

But I also see what that egg was. What it might have been if the conditions were different.

What we all might’ve been…

I stab the yolky bread, push it onto the tines of my fork, and let the golden richness slide down my throat like a balm. In a few bites, the eggs and bread are gone, and I move on to a thinly sliced vegetable I don’t have a name for.

Pale green inside with a thin dark green skin. Tastes watery, fibrous. Refreshing. As I spoon the last part of the meal into my mouth, a cold creamy, slightly tangy pudding of sorts, I stare outside at the rising day. The cracked sky leaks colors I never used to have the names for—but now I know.

That swath of light greenish blue just over the horizon is cyrne , and the pink below is pherin .

The green is aurelime.

And the sheen across all of it, the shimmering refracted layer, is aetherlume .

I don’t know why I know these words. Or the other words I’ve used when describing colors, like bloodrich. I was raised in shades of dirt and ice and haze. I’ve never seen colors like this before now, let alone held their names.

With just the thought, the aetherglass takes my dish away. I bathe quickly, dress myself, and leave my room with no purpose, no destination.

No friend to meet in the garden.

I walk until I find Sevigny’s room. We hadn’t spent time there, preferring the garden.

I pause, take a breath, and push the giant stone door open to find…

Nothing.

No trace of her.

Just a room. Opposite to mine in arrangement—a bed and a desk and armoire.

Nothing of Sevigny remains. Not that I expected there to be anything tangible. We were kidnapped and transported here. It’s not as though we packed mementos.

But I thought, maybe…

I let the door close and continue walking. Down the hall to the end, I turn left down another hall and find its end where I make a right. I do that endlessly, one right, one left, switch-backing through the maze of corridors in Shadowfell.

I see no one. They’re all still at breakfast. The shadows don’t even follow me this morning.

On my next right turn, a sigil flickers over a door. It’s not the typical sigilweave script. It’s not the sigil for the nether bay .

It’s something new.

A shadow unspools from beneath the stone door, beckoning. I lean in before my feet take over, aiming me at the door.

The door opens on its own.

The room is silent, dimly lit by only the aetherveins in the stone walls. As soon as I’m in, the door shuts behind me, and the shadows gathering at my feet and along the walls dissipate.

There is only one thing in the round stone room.

A mirror. Tall and ornate, it’s affixed to the wall. Swirls of magic ebb across its surface.

But in it is not me.

It’s Tyr.

And Shoreena.

And it’s not a mere reflection.

I’m peering into whatever room they’re currently in, like that first conscious day with the potentials in the bathing suite.

Shoreena stands with her arms crossed, brow pinched. She’s prettier than I recall. Hardly much older than I am. "A potential reported finding a lace cloak and dress buried under a stone in the west garden." She says it accusingly. As if Tyr had left it there.

"I know," he says evenly.

"Well?"

"Well, what, Shoreena?"

"You cannot allow her to?—"

Tyr pins her with a hard stare.

She clears her throat. "That is to say, Majesty, that you’re not shaping her."

He pauses, casting a furtive glance to the mirror. To me. "Oh? And what am I doing then, by your measure? "

Shoreena lets out a long breath. "By allowing her?—"

Tyr raises a hand, stopping her. "You do not understand, Shoreena. This isn’t about allowing. It’s about becoming."

Shoreena stares at him like she can’t fathom him feeding her the same horseshit meant for us.

She takes a moment, a breath, and tries again. "What I mean is you can’t accept her rule breaking. Even if she’s mourning the unfortunate loss of?—"

I leave the room. Not wanting Sevingy’s name in the air.

The following morning is the same. As is the next and the next.

For a week, I keep demanding decadent meals of the aetherglass, then roaming the halls of Shadowfell, and no one cares.

No one insists I join the others or be anywhere specific.

I don’t see the green bird or Sinea or anyone in the halls.

I also don’t see anyone in the mirror.

After I’ve finished a lunch of poached pears, charred root vegetables, and a beautiful, juicy leg of lamb, a knock at my door draws my attention.

"Enter," I say, lounging back in my chair.

It’s Selke, her hood and veil around her shoulders. "Can I come in?"

I nod.

She pushes the black stone door closed behind her. "I wanted to make sure—What in the shattered realms are you wearing?"

"This?" I lift the hem of my tunic. "Something I conjured so I don’t have to wear a costume stitched from someone else’s myth."

Selke takes a moment, looking me up and down. "Well, I—I came to see if you were doing all right after Sev?—"

I hold up a hand, and the look I give her keeps Selke from saying her name.

She swallows, giving me a slight nod. "We, um… We just haven’t seen you in the dining hall and… Are you all right?"

I lean back in my chair, uncertain how to answer.

Am I?

"No. I don’t think I am, Selke. I don’t think any of us are."

She pauses, letting the weight of my words thicken in the room. "Is there anything I can do?"

The corners of my mouth rise. It feels like a smile, but I know it isn’t.

"That’s kind of you." I’m about to tell her no, I don’t need anything, but instead, I wave my hand over the aetherglass, and another chair, the twin to mine, appears.

"Why don’t you tell me what Ashera’s been keeping busy with," I say, gesturing for her to have a seat.

Her brows pull together, and she takes a step back. A small one. "I don’t think I should."

I lift a shoulder. "It’s up to you."

Another foot retreats behind the first.

"I should go. Take care, Amara."

"Selke," I say her name just before she reaches the door. "Watch your back. I’d hate to lose another friend."

Her head dips as she hides her expression. But I still catch the grief painted there.

She shuts the door quietly behind herself.