Page 127 of Kissed By the Gods
Fuck the Veil.
Vaeloria snorts and shifts closer.
“You’re doing very well,” the Elder says, as he makes another note on his parchment.
“Well?” I manage to squeak out between dry, cracked lips. “I almost got eaten by a creature that didn’t even have a mouth!” I try to shout, but my words eek out.
“The shadow of what could have been doesn’t linger.”
I can’t even manage a groan, butfuck. I hate his quips.
Vaeloria prances nervously beside me, hooves crunching the snow in tight, anxious patterns. She didn’t like that one bit either. I reach up and tangle a hand in her mane, grounding myself. Calming her. Calming us. I want to ask her what the hell that thing was, but we can’t speak here. Not outside the Veil.
I settle for sharing the flood of emotion instead—relief, gratitude, the aching, dizzy high of not dying. She answers with a pulse of her own: matching relief, and sharp-edged frustration that I was hurt.
Yeah. I know.I know.
I’m always getting hurt in the Veil. It’s a miracle—a divine accident, or a cruel joke of fate—that I didn’t die in the Veil long before I even knew what it was. That place is treacherous as all hells. I still don’t understand what it is.
None of us do.
It’s neither land nor sky. Not dream or death. It’s not made of rules or roads or borders. I couldn’t chart it on a map. I can’t even look at it the same way twice. I can’t claim it for Faraengard with flags or laws. I don’t even think the gods claim it as theirs.
The Veil just … is. It watches. It waits. It remembers. Sometimes, I think it feels like a memory trying to become real. Other times, it feels like grief that’s learned how to breathe.
And when I step inside it awakens. When I try to control it, it pushes back, as if it’s testing whether I’ll survive the shape it chooses to take that day. And today? Today it nearly ate me.
I slam my fist into the nearest tree trunk with a frustrated scream, a volatile mix of emotions exploding inside me. The trunk groans under the pressure, shudders violently?—
“The Veil makes you less stable,” the Elder says calmly.
—and then the tree snaps in half with a violent crack. Branches snap as snow bursts into the air in a fine spray.
I cradle my now-throbbing hand against my chest, gritting my teeth. It’s already swelling.
Vaeloria snorts, unimpressed, and rolls her eyes in that extremely unhelpful way she’s mastered. Then she turns her back to me entirely and goes to stand beneath a different tree, next to Sigurd—who, like the Elder, looks completely unbothered by my minor emotional outburst. The Elder’s faravar often stands, patient and still, with a vague detachment, his gaze locked on some distant horizon only he can see. He didn’t so much as shift when the tree fell. Now, with a low breaththat stirs the snow, he makes room for Vaeloria beneath the branches.
The Elder doesn’t look up from his writing.
“I believe the Veil may be imprinting on you,” he says mildly. “Given that you've described it as unstable, dark, and reactive, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that repeated exposure is disrupting your mental state.”
“Well, that’s great,” I mutter, cradling my hand. “Was the last veilstrider a moody bitch, too?” In all of recorded history, there have only been three of us.
The Elder’s lips twitch. He has a sense of humor, though it’s so dry it’s practically a desert. We’ve progressed into a certain familiarity these last few months. I’ve stopped bowing to him. He’s stopped with his air of indifference. Now, if I could get him to tell me his actual name so that I don’t have to call him “Elder” all the time, we’d finally be getting somewhere. So far, though, I’ve got nothing. These people are weird about names and titles.
“I couldn’t say,” he tells me. “I’ve no memories of the previous veilstrider.” He purses his lips, clearly thinking back. “But after reading Aerion’s journals, I don’t think he was as powerful as you. And I don’t think he spent nearly as much time in the Veil as you have been these past few months.”
I’ve been reading Aerion’s journals, too, though much slower than the Elder. The last veilstrider was afraid of the Veil and hardly used it at all. And the first one died young—apparently in the Veil. There’s not even a record of his name.
“Let’s try something else. Something simpler,” the Elder says.
Anger flares, bright and hot. He doesn’t understand.Just go here,he’ll tell me, and point to another room or across the expanse. But I never make it—even something as simple as crossing a room is impossible to me through the Veil.
I swallow my frustration as the Elder points with his stick of charcoal toward an outcropping of rocks that’s so close I can reach out and touch it.
“Try to move to that rock,” The Elder says. “Just that rock.”
Because being contrary is practically a survival skill by now, I push to my feet and take one exaggerated step so that I’m standing onthatrock. The Elder bites the inside of his cheek, as if he might laugh, but he doesn’t. He raises an unimpressed brow, instead. “Through the Veil.” He moves his charcoal stick a little more to the left. “To that rock, then, through the Veil.”
