The door remained closed.
Lior stood where she had left him, hand still hovering near the latch as if the room might reopen itself if he waited long enough. It didn't. The silence settled instead—thick, deliberate, heavier than before.
He exhaled.
The Veil did not loosen.
It pressed closer, not physically, not in a way he could point to or name, but like a presence leaning over his shoulder, watching to see what he would do next.
So this is refusal, he thought.
Not rejection.
Not failure.
A pause.
He stepped back into the room. The walls felt nearer now, their stone edges too sharp, too aware. Even the air felt measured, as though it was being rationed.
Lior sat on the edge of his bed.
For years, he had believed awakening was something that happened to people—an event, a threshold crossed in a single moment. The stories always described it that way. Light. Collapse. Power.
But this?
This felt like being weighed.
The Veil shifted again, and this time he felt it in his chest—a quiet resistance, as though something unseen had wrapped itself around his core and tightened, just enough to remind him it could tighten more.
"Fine," he muttered into the empty room.
The word didn't echo.
That alone unsettled him.
He closed his eyes.
Not to reach outward—but inward.
The cube rested where he had left it, dull and silent, its edges no longer humming but not entirely inert either. It felt… patient. As if it knew something he didn't.
You opened the door, he thought at it. Now what?
No answer came.
Instead, the Veil responded.
A pressure—then a pull.
Not forward. Not upward.
Down.
Lior's breath hitched as the room faded, not into darkness, but into stillness. The kind that existed before sound had learned to move.
He stood somewhere else.
Not a place, exactly. There was no ground, no sky—only layers. Layers of weight, of distance, of moments stacked atop one another like sediment.
And at the center of it all—
Him.
Or something shaped like him.
The figure was incomplete. Edges blurred. Features unfinished, as if the world had paused halfway through deciding what he was meant to be.
The Veil wrapped around that shape like a second skin.
"You're not blocking me," Lior said, though he wasn't sure how he was speaking. "You're… holding me back."
The figure did not move.
But something behind it did.
A presence older than names shifted in the deep layers of this place. Not a god. Not a voice. More like an expectation that had waited too long to be fulfilled.
The Veil tightened.
Pain flared—sharp, brief, purposeful.
Lior gasped and fell forward—
—and slammed back into his room.
He hit the floor hard, breath tearing from his lungs as the Veil recoiled at last, snapping back into something dormant but watchful.
He lay there for several seconds, staring at the ceiling, heart pounding.
So this was the truth.
The Veil wasn't denying him power.
It was testing whether he could endure being unfinished.
Outside, somewhere beyond the ordered streets of Valdoria, something ancient shifted again—this time without restraint.
Chains stirred.
Eyes opened.
And for the first time in generations, the stillness that held the world together began to crack—not loudly, not yet—
—but enough for those who knew where to listen.
Lior pushed himself up from the floor, hands trembling.
Whatever the Veil wanted from him…
Running wasn't an option anymore.