The Veil of Worms

Prologue

Before the fire, she saw everything.

They had sewn a silk band over her eyes when she was still a child. "To protect the world," they said. "To keep the sight from seeing you back." But the veil did nothing. The visions still came—slithering through cracks in her dreams, coiling in the hollow behind her ribs.

Ysmara spoke them aloud, obedient as a lamb: plagues that had not yet bloomed, kings not yet born, the day a statue would split down the middle and bleed. Each time, the High Flame would smile and say, "A gift from the Undimming Light."

But they never let her leave the sanctum.

She lived behind stone and smoke, her voice a thing borrowed by the faith, her body treated like a relic—useful, fragile, not quite human. She fasted on wormwood and prayer. She bled into silver bowls. She never asked why the relics sometimes rotted when she touched them, or why the doves cried when she passed.

Until the night she dreamed of the man made of flies.

He stood atop a mountain of ash, barefoot, with wings of smoke that beat like thunder. His voice was the cracking of bone under soft soil.

“Ysmara,” he said, like he had known her long before she was born.

“Bride of Rot. Open the gate. Let me in.”

She awoke with the taste of earth on her tongue.

And for the first time, she did not pray.