Chapter 2
Part 3
The priest's words hung in the still air, neither boast nor plea:
"You are her."
Velrona said nothing.
The name was a weight, one she had carried once like a banner, later like a chain. To hear it offered again—without accusation or fear—tilted the world at an angle she hadn't prepared for.
She stepped closer, Erlin's body moving with a sharp elegance he never possessed. The priest noticed. She saw it in the subtle narrowing of his eyes.
"You've done your research," she said. "I've heard my name whispered like a ghost's. You, though, you speak it like a beginning."
Father Lirn tilted his head. "Because you are."
The shrine behind him was ancient—a collapsed stone ring, sunken into the hillside, overgrown with thornvine. The center platform still bore the faint outline of a seal, nearly erased by weather. Not one of hers. Something older.
Velrona's gaze lingered there. "You pray here?"
"I listen here."
"To what?"
He didn't answer right away. That, in itself, was an answer.
"To the pause between names," he said. "To the spaces where memory should be, but isn't. I listen to what the world forgot after they burned you."
Velrona watched him with the quiet scrutiny of someone used to breaking people down to parts. He did not sweat. He did not blink too often. His hands were steady at his sides.
Not just a priest.
A survivor.
She circled the ruined ring, walking the perimeter as she spoke. "And what is it you remember, exactly?"
"I remember that you built the Veil as a refuge, not a weapon," Lirn said, tone neutral. "That your rites were never meant to dominate, but to contain. Death was never the goal—only the doorway."
Velrona said nothing. He went on.
"I remember that the traitors twisted your oaths. That your daughters—your handpicked heirs—used your rituals to gain dominion. And when you tried to take it back, they killed you."
He said it without ceremony. As though it had always been truth.
Velrona stopped.
She stood at the edge of the shrine's ring, where the boundary was marked with iron nails—old warding remnants. Her eyes narrowed.
"You sound very certain for a man who wasn't there."
Lirn nodded. "I read the records that survived. The scrolls they tried to erase. I traced every lost disciple I could. And I listened to the dead when they whispered the wrong names."
"And you believe you're the first to see this clearly?"
"No," he said. "But I believe I'm the last willing to say it aloud."
She stepped across the ring's center.
The moment her foot crossed the circle, the air changed.
It thickened—not like fog, but like intention. A subtle pull on her borrowed flesh. Old wards, still barely functional, flickered across the seams in the stones.
Velrona raised her hand—Erlin's hand—and held it over the center seal.
The stones hummed faintly. Resonance.
Her body responded.
And not just Erlin's.
Her spirit, half-unmoored, pulsed against the bindings of the host.
It wanted out.
Lirn stepped forward, alarm flashing across his face for the first time. "This place was bound to silence what you were."
"It failed."
He nodded slowly. "Because you were never meant to stay dead."
She dropped her hand.
The resonance stopped.
But the seal smoked slightly. A line of vapor—barely perceptible—rose into the air like breath from cold lips.
Lirn exhaled. "You are bound to this region still. Even after death."
"I was never just flesh," she said.
She turned toward him again.
"And if I told you I had no interest in rebuilding the Veil?"
He didn't flinch.
"Then I would ask what you do want."
"To understand who still calls my name. And why."
Lirn hesitated.
Then reached into his sleeve and removed a folded parchment.
Velrona took it.
The ink was old, but not fragile. Symbols drawn in black-blood script, her own symbology bastardized and re-stamped over with another mark: a burning shroud inside a ring of swords.
"This isn't mine."
"It's Ythara's," Lirn said. "One of your daughters. She runs a sect of fire worshipers beyond the borderlands. They claim you as martyr and myth. Their scriptures—her scriptures—say you chose the fire. That your death was your final act of sanctification."
Velrona stared at the paper.
Ythara had once knelt at her bedside every dusk to record dreams Velrona didn't have.
And now she was rewriting them.
"She claims my death was a ritual?" Velrona asked.
"She claims it was divine."
Velrona folded the parchment.
"I'll need a map," she said. "A list of all the names still claiming pieces of mine. You'll make it."
"I already have."
She arched an eyebrow.
Lirn handed her a second scroll.
"This contains all known heretic sects born from the Obsidian Veil. The names of their leaders, territories, primary rites, and factions."
She unrolled it slightly. Kassien. Siloh. Ythara. Liris. Names etched in a hand that matched hers in ritual form, but none of the meaning.
"They left me ash," she said. "And now they wear it like perfume."
Lirn bowed again.
"What will you do?" he asked.
Velrona met his eyes.
"I'll ask each of them one question."
"What question?"
Her lips barely moved.
"What did I do to deserve this?"
That night, she didn't sleep.
Erlin's body rested. His nerves dulled. But her spirit coiled tighter, more awake than she had ever been in life.
She stood in the shrine's inner ring, the stars above her glinting cold and unfamiliar.
And for the first time since rising from the grave, she spoke aloud—not to Erlin, not to the system, but to the night itself.
"You thought you buried me."
She let the silence answer.
"I was never below."