Lyralei raised her palm at a moss-covered rock a few paces away. The moss and stone compressed like bunching fabric. Then, Lyralei made a fist. The rock crushed into itself, and an explosion sent pieces popping away like fireworks. The Veil itself had simply decided the distance didn’t exist anymore.
My eyes remained wide with disbelief.
"Now you try. Feel the space between us. Find where the Veil maintains the separation. Then convince it that the separation is unnecessary."
I reached out with senses I was still learning to trust. The Veil shimmered in my awareness, holding everything in its proper place. I touched it carefully, remembering the wolves I’d accidentally erased, the tower I’d nearly unmade.
The fabric resisted. Insisted that fifteen feet meant fifteen feet, that distance was real and permanent.
I pushed harder.
The space buckled. Twisted. For half a heartbeat, I felt every dimension stacked against each other, reality's layers pressed so close I could fall through, but Lyralei stopped me with a soft hand on my shoulder.
"Gentle," Lyralei said, and the steadiness in her voice pulled me back. "Compression, not rupture. You're not tearing the Veil, you're folding it."
I tried again, this time imagining the space as cloth instead of stone. Something flexible. Something that could bend.
The distance between the rock and me collapsed.
I stumbled forward, suddenly falling onto my knees. Lyralei had hopped just high enough to clear both feet off the ground the moment the Veil shortened the distance, landing softly. My stomach lurched and my vision swam, but I hadn’t destroyed anything.
"Good," Lyralei said, extending a hand toward me. "That same principle, taken further, becomes a weapon. Compress thespace inside an enemy until there’s no room for their body to exist."
The casual violence in her tone jarred against Vaelthorne's gentle beauty, but I understood. I grabbed her hand and got up.
"Can you show me one more time?" I asked.
She did. A practice dummy across the training ground suddenly crumpled inward, its wooden form compressing into a sphere the size of my fist. Then nothing. The space it had occupied simply closed, and the dummy ceased to exist.
Lyralei’s control and manipulation of the Veil was clean, efficient, absolutely terrifying.
"Your mother preferred this method," Lyralei said. "She believed enemies who threatened her people deserved no chance to reconsider or retreat. I prefer another method. My way leaves a reminder for the enemy."
Lyralei strained her fingers, her hands forming a blade. She pointed both hands at the practice dummy next to the one that had just vanished. I felt Veil magic condense. She separated both her hands in one swift motion. The practice dummy split apart, straws flying in every direction.
I imagined something like that applied to a living being and realized what she meant by a “reminder.”
I thought of the ritual chamber, the mages who had carved targeting sigils into my skin. The guards who had dragged me to cells and bound me in iron. King Aeron, who had executed my mother and tried to turn me into his weapon.
Part of me wanted to learn these techniques just to imagine using them on them. The other part remembered Daemon's warning about becoming the monster they claimed I was.
"What else?" I asked, pushing past the reminder of my past.
"Dimensional sourcing." Lyralei’s expression shifted to something more serious. "The Void is only one dimension beyond the Veil. There are others, without entities, that are benton dominating our world with tyrannical rule. This is something I excel at, and something your mother had trouble with."
She gestured toward the edge of the training ground where ancient trees grew. The air shimmered, and I felt the Veil thin in a way that didn’t trigger alarms in my instincts. This time, instead of destruction, there was creation.
This was a door, carefully opened.
Green light poured through. It wasn’t the darkness of the Void, but vibrant energy that smelled like spring rain and new leaves. The trees responded, growing several feet in seconds, branches extending, roots deepening. Flowers bloomed across their bark in iridescent colors.
"This energy comes from Thalynward, the Verdant Ward," Lyralei said. "The Verdant Ward doesn’t corrupt or consume. It gives freely to those who understand how to ask. This is how the Nightwood and the surrounding forest were created. The energy you feel, and that makes you sense the Nightwood differently from any forest you have come across, is borne from the Verdant Ward’s energy."
I stared at the transformed trees, feeling something unlock in my chest. All this time I’d thought my power only destroyed. That being Veil-touched meant being dangerous, monstrous, and wrong.
But this was creation. This was beauty weaponized, nature turned into an ally instead of a victim.
"I want to learn this," I said.
