Chapter 10 Hidden power
909 Words
The next morning arrived with low-hanging clouds and the scent of smoke on the wind. Though no fires burned within the camp, the tension in the air was as thick as ash. Whispers moved like wildfire through the ranks—rumors of magic returning, of villages marked with ancient blood runes, of Veilborn rising from the shadows.
Ryan Cooper stood in the command tent, his jaw clenched as he studied the newest dispatch from High Marshal Severan. The orders were clear: “Purge any suspected Veilborn activity. No exceptions. No mercy.”
It was not a surprise—but it was a line. One that Ryan had crossed close to before, but never so knowingly.
Ashen stood nearby, reading over the report with narrowed eyes. “They’re panicking,” he muttered. “Magic frightens them more than blades ever did.”
“Because it challenges their control,” Ryan said flatly. “Steel they can measure. But the Veil? That’s power they buried and swore would never return.”
“And now it’s in our camp.”
Ryan didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
Ashen finally looked up at him. “Do you trust her?”
Ryan met his gaze. “Yes.”
Ashen gave a quiet, dry laugh. “Then we’re already past the point of return.”
Jasmine sat alone on a stone near the creek just beyond the camp perimeter, her boots off, her toes dipped into the freezing stream. The cold didn’t bite like it should have. That was new.
In her lap rested an old cloth-wrapped bundle—notes, sketches, and pages salvaged from her mother’s hidden things. Writings she once believed were herbal remedies and folklore. But now, looking again with clearer eyes, Jasmine saw the truth. Veilworking wasn’t sorcery. It was connection—between life, between breath and root, between suffering and healing.
She opened her palm and took a breath. The air stilled. Her heartbeat slowed. She whispered words she had not spoken aloud in years.
And the water beneath her fingertips rippled in time with her voice.
Only slightly. Only for a moment.
But it responded.
Her chest tightened with both awe and fear. It had been so long since she let the Veil reach for her—so long since she’d allowed herself to feel that ancient warmth humming in her veins. The Dominion had taught her to fear it. But her blood remembered. The earth remembered.
And now it was waking up.
Behind her, a twig snapped.
She turned sharply, only to find Ryan standing several feet away, watching her—not with suspicion, but with a quiet, heavy understanding.
“You saw,” she said.
He nodded once. “I felt it before I saw it.”
Jasmine lowered her gaze. “I didn’t mean for it to happen. It just… answers when I call now.”
“I don’t want you to stop,” Ryan said softly.
She looked up, startled.
He stepped closer, his voice low. “The Dominion will call it heresy. They’ll hunt it, just like they hunted you. But I’ve seen what you can do with it. How you ease pain, how you restore life. That isn’t evil.”
She held his gaze, uncertain. “You say that now. But when they come for me—when they come for all of us who carry it—what then?”
“I’ll stand between you and them,” he said, fierce and certain. “I don’t care what they call me.”
A long silence stretched between them. The wind stirred the trees, and the stream gurgled softly at her feet.
“I think it’s growing stronger,” Jasmine whispered. “Not just in me. I think the Veil is waking up everywhere. I can feel it in the soil. In the wounded. Like the land itself is rising.”
Ryan’s mind flashed back to the village east of the Birchline—burned, blood-marked, and humming with something ancient. “The Reclaimed Front may already know,” he said grimly. “And if they do… they’ll use it.”
“They’ll try,” Jasmine replied. “But they don’t understand it. Not the way the old ones did.”
She stood, wrapping her satchel around her shoulder again.
“If we don’t act first,” she continued, “if we don’t guide it, teach it, protect it… the Dominion and the rebels will both destroy it. And all of us with it.”
Ryan looked at her, truly looked—at the quiet strength in her voice, at the magic coiled just beneath her skin, at the woman who was changing not just him but the war itself.
“I need to speak with Severan,” he said after a long pause.
She frowned. “To what end?”
“To buy us time. And to find out just how far the Dominion is willing to go.”
That night, Ryan wrote a reply to Severan by lantern light. The message was careful, measured, and loyal on the surface.
But laced within it were questions. Subtle, dangerous questions.
Questions the Dominion was not used to hearing from Iceblood.
He signed the letter with a steady hand, sealing it with his crest. As the rider took it into the darkness, Ryan knew something had changed.
He was no longer fighting a war for territory.
He was fighting for the soul of Velmora itself.
- Writer
