Behind the Veil of Faith

Chapter Two: The Others

Three years is a long time to survive on nothing but a vow and a vision you don't fully understand.

I spent them the way I imagine most hunted things spend their years — moving often, trusting no one, keeping my visions to myself because the one time I'd let a stranger see me flinch through one, she'd tried to sell me to a passing Order patrol before sundown. I learned quickly. Silence was armor. Distance was survival.

The visions never stopped. If anything, they sharpened — the iron door from the night Eli was taken kept resurfacing, closer each time, more detailed, like something pulling me toward it whether I wanted to go or not. It was the door that finally led me to the ruins outside Marrow Hollow, an abandoned monastery the Order had burned decades ago and never bothered rebuilding, believing nothing worth finding could survive out there.

They were wrong. Three people were living in that ruin, and every one of them made my skin prickle with a kind of recognition I didn't yet have words for.

The first I saw was a woman, sharp-eyed, arms crossed, watching me from the shadow of a collapsed archway like she'd already decided whether I was a threat before I'd said a single word. That was Selene. I'd learn later that her stare wasn't just intimidation — she could bend what people saw, plant images in their minds so convincing they'd swear on their lives they were real. She used that stare on me too, that first meeting, though I didn't realize it until much later.

The second was a boy, younger than me, with the kind of tired eyes that belonged to someone who'd spent too much of his life patching up other people's pain. Toma barely spoke that day. He didn't need to. When Selene's suspicion nearly turned violent, it was Toma who stepped between us, palm raised, and something in his touch alone seemed to settle the air itself.

And then there was Damaris.

He didn't rush to meet me the way the others eventually did. He simply stood at the edge of the ruined courtyard, arms folded, watching me with an unreadable stillness that unsettled me more than outright hostility would have. He was built like something meant to withstand a siege — broad, scarred, utterly unbothered by the blade Selene had drawn in my direction. I would learn, in time, that unbothered was exactly the right word. Nothing physical could touch Damaris. Not blades. Not fire. Not fists. His skin simply refused to break, no matter what met it.

"Another stray," he said, not unkindly, though it landed like an accusation anyway. "The Order's getting sloppy. They're leaving more of us alive than they used to."

"I'm not a stray," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "I'm looking for a door."

That got his attention. All three of them went very still.

"What door?" Selene asked, her blade lowering half an inch.

I described it as best I could — the iron, the sigil, the smoke that hadn't yet happened when I first saw it. When I finished, no one spoke for a long moment. It was Toma who finally broke the silence, his voice quiet, careful.

"She's seen the Vault," he said. "She's seen it, and she's still standing."

"That's not possible," Selene said. "No one survives seeing the Vault unless—"

"Unless the power inside her is old enough to survive looking at it," Damaris finished, and for the first time since I'd arrived, something shifted behind his eyes — not welcome, not yet, but something close to it. Recognition, maybe. The particular recognition of people who've spent years assuming they were the only ones like themselves left alive.

"What is the Vault?" I asked.

"The reason the Order still exists," Damaris said. "The source of every drop of stolen power they've ever used to call themselves holy. If you've seen it in a vision, unprompted, without ever having stood before it—" He stopped himself, some old caution rising behind his expression. "Then either you're the most dangerous asset we've ever encountered, or the most dangerous threat."

"Can't I be both?" I said, before I could stop myself.

For the briefest second, something almost like the ghost of a smile crossed his face before he crushed it back into stillness.

"She stays," Toma said simply, glancing between the others. "We need her. Whatever else she is, we need her."

Selene didn't look convinced. Neither, honestly, did Damaris. But neither of them argued either, and that night, for the first time in three years, I slept somewhere that didn't feel entirely like waiting to die.

I didn't yet know that trusting these three strangers would be the second most dangerous decision of my life — or that the first person among them to truly earn that trust would also become the hardest person in the world for me to keep at arm's length.