Chapter One: Echoes in the Vein
The rain came down like knives.
Even through the shroud of her coat and the warded bandages tight around her ribs, Mara felt each drop like a whisper from the void—cold, familiar, and unrelenting. The outskirts of Kharan Veil reeked of old iron, glyph-burnt stone, and the subtle, sickly tang of something long dead but still watching. The sky above bore down with charcoal clouds, its thunder silent yet shaking the earth like a warning.
Mara Park walked with practiced defiance.
Her boots crunched over shattered sigils scorched into the blackened road. Virelian ward-glyphs, once radiant and humming with protective light, now cracked and fizzled, leaking ash and memory. Buildings around her stood gutted, hollow like corpses hung on a pyre—but the true rot was deeper.
The Vein was breached.
She paused at the mouth of a chapel that had been cleaved open from the inside, its stained-glass saints melted into skeletal prayers. Inside, she felt it. That low, pulling hum in the marrow—the telltale resonance of a Choir node.
They were here.
"Park," came a voice behind her. Smooth. Measured. Annoyingly noble.
Jalen Caedra stepped through the veil of rain with his cloak held high and immaculate. His hair, dark as ink, fell just past his jawline, unbothered by the storm. He carried himself like a storybook knight, but his sword was real, and so were the glyphs dancing faintly across his gloved fingers.
"Tell me you didn't go in without me."
"I would've," Mara said, flicking a wet strand of hair from her face. "But I figured I'd need something pretty to point at the monsters before I blew them up."
Jalen rolled his eyes. "You know, one day your attitude is going to get you—"
"Dead?" she cut in, already walking inside. "Welcome to the line."
The air in the chapel was thick with glyph-rot—those slick, twisted trails where pure glyphs had been corrupted, their geometry rewritten by something blasphemous. A few brave scribes had tried to purify it; charred remains were all that was left of their efforts.
Jalen's eyes narrowed. "Residual Choir patterns. Ashmirror variant, maybe. Look at the curvature here—reflective dissonance. It bounced intent back at the casters."
"Poetic," Mara muttered. "They died praying to their own spells."
They moved in silence through the nave. Each footstep echoed like it didn't want to. The Vein was ruptured here. She could feel the wound beneath the floor, deep and pulsing. Glyph-lines bled through the tiles, shifting slightly, as if breathing.
Jalen drew Vael'Aran.
The blade rang quietly as it left the sheath, its mirrored surface catching light that didn't exist. Glyphs etched along its fuller hummed in sync with his heartbeat—radiant and steady. Mara hated how clean it looked. Her own weapon, a custom sling-glyph revolver stitched with unstable runes, looked like it might explode if you insulted it too hard.
They reached the altar.
Or what remained of it.
Blood, black and shimmering, pooled in an intricate glyph-circle that stretched from wall to wall, humming softly with menace. At the center floated a single mask—obsidian black, with six vertical eye-slits and thin, ivory teeth carved into a permanent grin.
Whisperstitch.
Jalen stepped forward, careful. "That's a Choir totem."
"No shit, Caedra," Mara muttered. "Didn't expect to find one this close to the guild lines. Thought Keswick was smarter than this."
The name made the room colder.
Alan Keswick. Once a brilliant Vein scholar, now the Veinbound necromancer behind the Choir. He hadn't just broken the laws of glyphcraft—he'd rewritten them in blood.
Mara stared at the mask. Her hand twitched. The air around it was wrong, like breathing shadows wrapped in silk. She'd fought one of Whisperstitch's echoes before.
It hadn't gone well.
"Jalen," she said slowly. "This was a summoning. But something went sideways. Feel that hum? It's unstable. It's not anchored."
He frowned. "Then what's keeping it here?"
As if in answer, the mask twitched.
They froze.
It didn't fall. It rose—slowly, as if carried by something unseen. The circle beneath it pulsed once. Then again, faster. The glyph-lines flared, shifting in tone from dark red to sickly purple.
The mask turned toward them.
Mara swore. "Move!"
She dove left as a wall of reflective glyphs shattered outward in a spiral, warping the air like a scream made of glass. Jalen stepped forward instead, planting Vael'Aran into the floor. A radiant glyph flared around him, pure and defiant.
"Shield mirror!"
The Choir burst from the circle.
Not a creature, not really—a swarm of stitched reflections, malformed silhouettes with whispering voices and teeth for fingers. It howled without sound, rushing toward them in mirrored fragments.
Mara landed hard, rolled, and fired.
Her glyph-slinger screamed in her hand, a blast of kinetic force laced with entropy glyphs slamming into the leading specter. It collapsed, writhing into a puddle of ink—but five more took its place.
Jalen pivoted, his blade carving light into the air. Each strike severed the glyph-threads controlling the swarm, disrupting its cohesion. He moved with elegance, precision, like the storm had taught him to dance.
Mara? Mara burned.
She twisted, channeling forbidden glyphs into her left hand, scrawling instability across the floor mid-combat. The glyphs snapped into place—and exploded.
The chapel trembled.
Light and shadow clashed. Jalen's shield glyph cracked, barely holding against the onslaught. Mara bled from her nose, her glyph-bandages sparking. But together, they moved like instinct.
And something inside the Choir noticed.
It hesitated.
Only for a second—but enough.
Jalen surged forward. His blade found the heart of the summoning glyph, cleaving through it with righteous fury. A shockwave burst from the altar, the mask shrieking as it was dragged back into the Vein, its grin splitting wider—
Then silence.
The swarm collapsed.
Mara staggered to her feet, coughing. "Well. That was fun."
Jalen looked around, panting. "We'll need a full cleansing crew. And someone from the High Glyph Office. This wasn't random."
"No," she said, wiping blood from her chin. "It was a test."
He looked at her.
She didn't flinch.
"They wanted to see how we'd handle a mid-tier node breach. How fast we'd sync. How far you'd go to protect me. How far I'd go to blow them up."
Jalen's jaw clenched. "You think the Choir's watching us?"
"No," she said. "I think Keswick is watching me."
Behind them, the last glyph faded.