Deep beneath the Grand Temple of Piera in High Silpatra, there was a chamber no priest would ever admit existed.
The air was dry and cold, preserved by old Ether seals that had outlasted the hands that cast them.
Walls of black stone rose into shadow, carved with symbols that hurt the eye to follow—lines that bent inward, circles that refused to close.
No torches burned here.
Light came only from a single sphere of pale silver suspended at the center of the room, turning slowly, casting no warmth.
Nine hooded figures sat in a perfect circle around it.
They were not priests in the common sense.
Their robes were plain gray wool, unmarked by temple insignia.
Some were old, some middle-aged, one barely past thirty.
To the world above, they were scholars, archivists, minor nobles, quiet clergy—people who moved through courts and libraries without drawing notice.
Here, they were the innermost circle of the Keepers of Continuance.
The silver sphere pulsed once, and the eldest among them—an archivist named Thalion whose hands shook from age—spoke first.
"The null child has begun to move."
A murmur rippled through the circle, soft as dust falling.
"He is seven years now," Thalion continued. "Stronger than any child has right to be. The hunter Rogan trains him in silence. The king watches. The sister protects."
A younger voice, calm and precise, answered from across the circle.
This was a woman called Sereth, one of the Hands—field commander, dragon-binder, killer of three border lords in a single night years ago.
"And the Veil?"
Thalion inclined his head toward the silver sphere.
All eyes turned to it.
The sphere was not metal.
It was not stone.
It was a fragment of the Veil itself—captured, compressed, preserved.
A relic from the time before the world accepted the story it had been told.
Thalion reached out one trembling hand and brushed the surface.
The light dimmed.
Images formed within the sphere—not clear pictures, but impressions, memories older than any living mind.
A world without glow.
Cities of plain stone and wood and iron.
People who walked, worked, fought, and died without light beneath their skin or humming in the air around them.
Monsters—vast, ancient, intelligent—roamed freely, and humanity survived not by gifted power, but by cunning, endurance, and raw strength.
Then came the breaking.
A cataclysm no record above ground dared name.
The sky tore.
Something vast and formless spilled through.
Reality itself buckled.
In the chaos, certain survivors—scholars, warlords, priests of forgotten gods—found a way to seal the tear.
They did not close it.
They covered it.
They wove a Veil.
Aura and Ether were not gifts from benevolent Piera.
They were the threads of that covering—systems imposed over a wounded world to stabilize it, to keep the tear from widening again.
Aura became the force of will made manifest, binding body and intent.
Ether became the structural lattice, holding reality together where it had cracked.
Humanity was taught—slowly, carefully, over centuries—that these forces were natural.
Divine.
Necessary.
Children were born already threaded into the Veil.
Those who manifested strongly were raised to rule.
Those who manifested weakly served.
Those who manifested not at all…
Were quietly removed.
Because a being untouched by the Veil was a reminder that the covering was artificial.
A tear in the tear.
A place where the old world could leak back through.
The images in the sphere shifted.
A figure stood at the edge of the original cataclysm—a silhouette only, vast and indistinct.
It reached toward the tear as if to pull it wider.
Then the Veil settled over everything, and the figure vanished.
The light brightened again.
Thalion withdrew his hand.
"This is what the temples teach," he said quietly. "That Piera, in mercy, granted Aura and Ether to shield us from the chaos of the old world. That without them, we would fall to monsters and madness."
A dry chuckle came from one of the hooded figures—a nobleman whose public face smiled at royal banquets.
"The truth is simpler," he said. "We could not fix the break. So we hid it. And we made hiding it sacred."
Sereth leaned forward.
"And the null child?"
"He is not broken," Thalion replied. "He is unthreaded. The Veil does not touch him. He exists as people once did—before we wrapped the world in lies to keep it from bleeding out."
Silence settled heavily.
Another voice—this one from a quiet priest who spent his days copying approved scriptures—spoke for the first time.
"If he lives… if he grows… others will notice that the Veil is optional. That strength can exist without it. That survival does not require submission to the systems we built."
Sereth's tone was cold steel.
"Then the Continuance demands action."
Thalion shook his head slowly.
"Not yet. He is still a child. The king protects him—for now—out of blood pride or curiosity. The court fears him but does not yet understand why. We watch. We wait. We learn how deep the absence goes."
The silver sphere pulsed again, softer this time.
One final image flickered within it: a small boy in a forgotten courtyard, shifting his weight at the last instant to let a boulder roll harmlessly past.
No glow.
No hum.
Just flesh and instinct and refusal to break.
The circle watched in silence.
At last, Thalion spoke the words they all carried like a wound.
"The Veil saved the world.
But it also imprisoned it.
And now something has been born outside the prison.
We must decide—before the world decides for us—whether to mend the tear he represents…
Or to widen it."
The sphere went dark.
Above them, in the bright halls of the temple, evening prayers began.
Thousands of voices rose in thanks to Piera for the gifts of Aura and Ether.
Down below, nine hooded figures sat in the cold and remembered what the world had chosen to forget.
And far away, in the eastern wing of the palace, Kael Silpatra slept the deep, unmoving sleep of a body that was growing into something no one had permission to name.
He dreamed of nothing.
But his stomach growled even in sleep.
And somewhere in the dark, something older than the Veil listened to the sound.