Then farmland, but not the rich golden fields I remembered from my father’s trade routes.
This land was brown and withered, crops struggling up from exhausted soil, scarecrows hanging limp on their crosses like executed men.
Then the forest.
It swallowed us whole. Trees pressed close on either side. These were not the friendly oaks and maples of my childhood, but something older. Darker.
Their bark was black as char, their branches bare despite the season, reaching toward each other overhead until they formed a tunnel that blocked out the fading sky.
No birds sang. No insects hummed. The only sound was the soft thud of the Shadow-Steed’s hooves on the packed earth, and even that was muffled.
Absorbed.
His arm stayed locked around my waist, iron-steady, and every mile I burned.
Where his chest rested against my spine, sensation crawled. Not pleasure. Not quite pain. A sensation with no name.
The feeling of thawing.
Of frozen tissue being forced back toward life, nerve by nerve, cell by cell.
I didn’t want to thaw. Warmth hurt. Living hurt.
Every degree of heat was a reminder of what I’d lost, what had been stolen from me, what I could never have again.
Cold was safety. Cold was home. Cold was the stone slab in the mausoleum where I’d woken three months ago with dirt in my mouth and no memory of how I’d gotten there.
Cold was truth.
This warmth was a lie, and lies always ended.
“We approach the boundary.”
His voice startled me. It had been so long since either of us spoke that I’d almost forgotten what sound was, drifting into a dull doze.
I opened my eyes and blinked against the light filtering through the branches.
The forest had thinned. Ahead, the road cut through a wall of mist so thick it looked solid, a curtain of white hanging in the air like something ominous.
And beyond it, the colors were wrong.
Muted. Washed out. Gray stone and purple shadow and silver sky, like looking at the world through a veil of gauze.
“The Veil,” I murmured.
“You know it?”
“By reputation.”
Everyone knew the Veil. Every child in this region of Alia Terra grew up hearing stories about the boundary between human lands and monster territories.
Cross it, and you left behind the jurisdiction of human law. Human courts. Human hunters.
Cross it, and you belonged to the monsters.
The Shadow-Steed didn’t slow.
It plunged into the mist like a diver into deep water, and the world dissolved into white.
