"When we cross," I tell the others, "stay together. The Veil will try to separate us, try to isolate us. Don't let it. We're stronger together than apart."
They nod, and I feel the weight of their trust like a physical thing.
The Eclipse reaches its peak—that perfect moment when neither light nor shadow dominates, when the Veil opens wide enough for living people to pass through.
"Now," I say, and step forward into the shimmer.
Reality tears itself apart.
For a moment, I'm nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. I feel myself being unmade and remade, torn down to my component parts and reassembled wrong.
Then gravity reasserts itself with vicious force, and I'm falling through smoke and shadow and memories that aren't mine.
I hit ground that isn't quite solid, stumbling, my shadows flaring defensively. Around me, the others materialize one by one—Nesilhan gasping, Elçin cursing, Yasar looking pale.
And above us, below us, around us, the Veil Between stretches in every direction that shouldn't exist.
We're here.
Now we just have to survive the next three hours.
And somehow find Banu in this nightmare made manifest.
CHAPTER 19
ENTERING THE VEIL
Nesilhan
The momentwe step through the shimmering barrier, reality tears itself apart.
One second I'm standing at the threshold with Kaan's shadows anchoring my left side and Elçin's steady presence at my right. The next, the world inverts—up becomes down, solid becomes liquid, and every law of nature I've ever known shatters like glass beneath a hammer.
My stomach lurches as gravity releases its hold, then slams me sideways into nothingness. I'm falling and flying simultaneously, my body unable to distinguish between the two. Golden light erupts from my skin without permission—my twilight magic responding to this realm's dual nature like a tuning fork struck at exactly the right frequency.
"Nesilhan!" Kaan's voice comes from three directions at once, distorted by whatever physics governs this nightmare space.
The Veil Between.
Even the name sounds like a wound that never healed—the space between life and death, light and shadow, everything and nothing. The Twilight Eclipse has torn it open for exactly three hours, and we have until the celestial alignment ends to find Banu and escape.
If we can find anything in this chaos.
My feet finally find something solid—or what passes for solid here. The ground beneath me shifts like smoke given weight, neither entirely present nor completely absent. When I look down, I see through its layers of reality stacked impossibly on top of each other: past moments, possible futures, memories that might belong to me or to the countless souls trapped in this place.
"Stay together," Kaan commands, his shadows expanding outward to form a perimeter. But even his darkness moves wrong here—sluggish in some places, frantic in others, as if time itself can't decide how fast to flow.
Yasar materializes beside me, and the binding explodes to life.
Pain lances through my chest—white-hot and vicious—as phantom chains of silver light wrap around my ribs like a corset pulled too tightly. I gasp, one hand flying to my sternum, but there's nothing physical to grasp. The binding is visible now, glowing filaments that weren't there a moment ago, connecting my heart to Yasar's across the space between us.
"What—" I can't finish the sentence. The chains tighten with every breath, pulling me toward him with inexorable force. My feet slide across the smoke-ground without my permission, dragged by magic I can't control.
"The Veil amplifies all bindings," Yasar says, and I hear genuine regret in his voice beneath the careful control. His eyes glow with firelight as he watches me struggle. "I warned you itwould be stronger here. Everything unresolved becomes visible in this place."
"Get it off her." Kaan's words are a growl that reverberates through the air like thunder. His shadows surge toward Yasar, but the moment they make contact with the binding's light, they recoil as if burned.
"I can't." Yasar's jaw clenches. "It's not something I'm actively controlling—it's soul-deep magic woven by Erlik. Fighting it will only make it worse."
