Chapter 32 — The Fractured Veil
He woke up standing.
Not lying. Not seated. Standing.
His feet pressed against smooth stone—cold, but not the biting cold of real stone. It was a weight, a presence beneath his skin rather than temperature.
The hallway stretched endlessly in both directions.
Pitch black. Yet he could see.
Perfectly.
The floor was polished obsidian. The walls—same glassy blackness. Seamless. No seams. No doors. No light source. Yet shadows flickered and danced across the surfaces like reflections in a warped mirror.
Lucien turned slowly.
Behind him, no end. No beginning. Just endless black folding into black.
He took a step forward.
No echo.
Another step.
Still nothing. No breath. No creak of his joints. No scrape of skin on stone. It was as if sound simply did not exist here. His footsteps might as well have been illusions.
There was no smell. No current. Not even silence—because silence implies sound that isn't there. This was different. Nothing.
He kept walking.
That's when it began.
The glitching.
At first, subtle—a flicker in his vision, like a frame skipping in a broken recording. One moment his left foot lifted; the next it was halfway forward.
Then it happened again. His whole body lurched forward, the corridor blurring past like he'd sprinted a dozen steps in an instant.
He stumbled.
The world snapped back.
Movement returned to normal. His breathing—if breath still existed—was steady. His heart didn't pound. His body didn't ache. It should have. But it didn't.
He stared at his hands.
They looked the same. But something was wrong.
Like a memory of pain trapped inside their shape.
He moved forward again. Slower this time.
Seconds passed. Minutes, maybe.
Then everything slowed.
Painfully.
Each blink stretched on for years. His legs moved as if through tar. The hallway ahead lengthened, a tunnel of molasses dragging every motion into eternity.
He grit his teeth—but the sensation never reached his mouth. No pressure. No friction. Just the thought of it, detached from flesh.
What is this?
The question didn't form in words. It just was a knowing—an undeniable awareness of confusion.
Suddenly, everything snapped forward again.
He hurtled down the corridor—vision blurring into jagged frames.
His eyes caught glimpses: walls glitching, skipping back and forth like corrupted data. Cracks appeared in the floor, then vanished, then reappeared.
Like the world was trying to remember itself.
Trying—and failing.
Something had gone wrong.
He stopped.
Or maybe he was made to stop.
The space around him froze.
No cold. No heat. But wrong.
Like being inside a vacuum—not just devoid of air, but devoid of the idea of air.
Lucien clenched his fists.
He wasn't hallucinating.
He knew that feeling. He'd tasted fear, starvation, heatstroke.
This was different.
Sharper.
Cleaner.
This is the Veil, he thought.
But not the one he'd been in before.
That terrified him more than anything.
Because the Veil never repeated.
It never doubled.
He tried to shout—not for help, but just to prove he still existed. To make noise. To feel something.
His mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Not even the shape of sound.
Time shattered again.
He didn't fall.
But the space around him cracked.
Lines of pale white light split across the hallway like lightning trapped beneath glass.
They didn't illuminate.
They didn't move.
They just hovered. Unchanging. Unreal.
He reached toward one of the cracks.
His hand passed through.
No resistance.
The light stung—not on his skin, but deep inside. His teeth. His spine. His marrow.
He jerked back.
And for a moment, he saw something.
A flicker.
A face?.
The outline was strange, but the eyes hollow, the body blurred.
Like someone trying to remember, but forgetting halfway through.
Then it vanished.
The crack sealed.
The hallway returned to normal—or whatever passed for normal here.
Lucien stood still.
His chest rose and fell, though there was no breath to take.
He tried to calm himself. To order his thoughts.
He'd been in the chamber.
She'd given him the vial.
He'd heard the latch.
Then… this.
Something had hijacked his Trial.
That's what it felt like.
As if he had stepped off one path and into a space between worlds.
A Trial… within a Trial?
But that wasn't possible.
Was it?
He didn't know the rules.
No one did.
That was the cruelty of the Veil—its shape changed for every Called.
But even still, this place felt broken.
Bent inward.
Wrong in a fundamental way.
He began to walk again.
Not because he knew where he was going.
But because standing still felt like inviting something worse.
With each step, the hallway twisted.
Not the ground—his sense of it.
Up became down for a second.
Left stretched sideways, then folded.
He walked and walked—and never moved.
The pressure behind his eyes built.
Not pain.
Not yet.
But something like it.
Something whispering: You're not supposed to be here.
He began to feel… watched.
Not by a person.
By the space itself.
By something too big to be seen.
Too large to wear a face.
The Veil.
No—not even the Veil.
Something behind it.
He stumbled again.
His knees hit the floor.
His hands caught himself against the seamless obsidian.
He waited.
No voice spoke.
No monster came.
No pain followed.
Just silence.
Perfect.
Vast.
Terrible silence.
Lucien sat there.
Hands splayed.
Breathing without breath.
And for the first time since entering the chamber, he felt it.
Fear.
Not the panicked clawing terror of death.
Something deeper.
The fear that something had found him.
And it didn't even know what he was supposed to be.