“Veil Drift,” she murmured, tasting the words like they were both diagnosis and sentence. The name hung in the air between them. “Well, then…” her eyes lifted to Auryn’s again, sharp as a hawk’s talon, “…it seems youaremore than just a symbol after all.”
The Glider female crouched, her golden feathers reflecting the fractured light from the Polis lamps like mirrors. The potent scent of salves and crushed herbs drifted from her—clean, sharp, and strangely intimate in the choking ash.
Lu’ma stepped forward, a barrier between them.
“Move, child,” the Glider said in a voice accustomed to obedience. “Unless you want your Host to die.”
“It’s…alright,” Auryn rasped from behind her, every word dragging over raw lungs. “She…means no ill will…”
Lu’ma’s hands moved in sharp, urgent bursts. 'Your Radiance, you cannot be so trusting!'
“I saw…another of…her kind today,” Auryn managed. “You did as well. He sought to spill blood. She…does not.”
A faint smile ghosted across the Glider’s face, as if she’d just been offered a child’s drawing in the middle of a battlefield.
“You should listen to your Attendant,” she said, circling a fraction closer. Her wingtips, mottled and ragged, brushed the wall with a whispering rasp. “Trusting me? Because I am beautiful and do not carry a glaive?”
Her mismatched gaze fixed on Auryn’s throat, lingering. “Or…is it because I have given name to that which you fear? Veins none have seen in millennia.”
Auryn balked. “You…know what this is?”
Thewariness in the Glider’s eyes swirled, one storm-bright, the other deep and earthen. “The Sky remembers. The winds have tasted creatures like you. And so, I know of it.”
“Who…are you?”
For a long moment, the Glider simply stared, searching Auryn’s face, a judge weighing a sentence. Her golden feathers shifted, whispering as they caressed the stagnant air. Her feathered tail dragged against the stone—a hunter's idle motion.
The scent of herbs and salves thickened. The Glider’s fingers brushed Auryn’s neck, tracing one of the blackened veins. Her skin burned—as if her hand had been pulled from boiling water—and Auryn had to fight not to flinch.
“I would give you my name…” The Glider tilted her head, “but with these veins choking the life from you, you will soon perish.” Her gaze lingered a moment longer, unreadable. “I do not speak my name to the dead.”
Lu’ma’s hands twitched—a silent, precise language of fury—as she stepped between them. Her shadow cut through the faint light, her stance wide, shoulders squared.
The Glider didn’t step back. Her mismatched eyes slid toward the Attendant with slow, deliberate appraisal, as if weighing how much trouble it would be to remove her.
Lu’ma signed a sharp sequence, every movement clipped and bristling. 'Step away. Now.'
From somewhere beyond the ruined passage, a clash erupted—shouts, steel on steel, the roar of something inhuman. All three of them turned toward it at once.
Auryn’s pulse jumped. The Bond flared to life in her chest—sharp, urgent.
Kail.
She latched onto the feeling like a drowning swimmer to driftwood.
Kail, I’m here!
The answering voice wasn’t in her head but in the echoing corridors.
“This way, Zarrek. I can hear her!”
Zarrek’s reply was a growl of disbelief. “Resh, you’ve gone mad with bloodlust. She’s back at the Lattice. You said yourself she can only portal one way.”
“That Voids-damned burst ruptured every mana channel from here to Selen,” Kailorien snapped, his voice like drawn steel. “Portals are misrouting.”
His words carried closer, and with them, the electric thrum of his fury through the Bond.
Kailorien emerged first, a dark monolith in the narrow passage, Zarrek a breath behind him. The tunnel protested their bulk—their heads nearly grazing the stone ceiling, and their shoulders broad enough to scrape the walls.
