Page 3 of Orc's Veil

Sleep, my love, while stars keep guard…

I take it.

The memory tears free from the boy’s mind and floods into mine, bringing with it the warmth of the fire, the smell of wood smoke and lavender, the absolute certainty of being loved and protected. For a single, searing moment, I have a mother. I have safety. I have home.

Then the Veil snatches it from me, hungry and greedy, consuming the stolen moment as payment for the boy’s passage. The boundary shimmers, settles, steadies. The tears begin to close.

The child goes still beneath my hands.

For one horrible heartbeat, I think I’ve killed him. That the extraction was too much, that his fragile mind couldn’t survive the loss. But then his chest rises. Falls. Rises again. The bleeding stops. The black pools of his pupils begin to contract, revealing pale blue irises, ordinary and untouched by shadow.

He’ll live.

He’ll never remember the melody she sang.

I sit back on my heels, trembling with exhaustion, sick from carrying another person’s grief. The memory is gone—fed to the Veil—but echoes remain. A phantom warmth in my chest. A melody I can almost hear, playing on repeat at the edge of my consciousness. This is what happens when you steal pieces of souls. They leave traces. Scars.

I carry dozens of them now. Dozens of strangers’ most precious moments, living inside my head alongside my own fading memories of a childhood I barely remember. First steps and last words. Wedding days and deathbed confessions. The taste of someone’s grandmother’s bread. The sound of a father’s laugh.

None of them belong to me. All of them refuse to leave.

You chose this. You could have let him die.

But I couldn’t. Not really. Not ever.

Mercy is a crime, according to the Veil-wardens. The memory tithe is forbidden because it cheats the boundary of its proper payment, gives the Veil less than it demands, creates debt instead of balance. Every time I save a life this way, I weaken the barrier a little more.

I do it anyway.

Because the alternative is watching children bleed out at my feet while the boundary drinks its fill. And I’ve done a lot of terrible things for the Veil. I’ve given it years of my life, rivers of my blood, the silver in my hair and the hollows beneath my eyes. But I won’t give it that.

Some things, I keep for myself.

THREE

EIRENE

The boy sleeps.

I’ve carried him back to my cottage—if you can call it that, this single room at the edge of the stones with its leaking roof and perpetual smell of herbs and blood. He weighs almost nothing, this child who stumbled through the Gate. Light as a bundle of sticks. Someone hasn’t been feeding him properly.

The fire died hours ago, and I haven’t had the strength to relight it. The cold seeps through the thin walls, through my sweat-damp clothes, through the bandages wrapped around my palms. I should eat something. Should rest. Should do any of the hundred small things that might keep me alive long enough to bleed another night.

Instead, I stand at the window and watch the stones.

Someone was singing him to sleep. Someone loved him enough to chase away nightmares.

He’ll remember that someone loved him. He just won’t remember the song.

I tuck a blanket around his thin shoulders and return to the narrow window, staring out at the Veil stones. They’re quiet now. The boundary has accepted the tithe, however inadequate, and settled into its usual restless hum. But the air feels wrong.

The air is too still.

I wrap my arms around myself, ignoring the throb of my bandaged palms. The cuts are deep tonight—deeper than usual. I’ll have new scars by morning, more thin white lines to add to the ladder climbing my forearms. At this rate, I’ll run out of unmarked skin before I’m thirty.

If you make it to thirty.

The thought is old, familiar, worn smooth by repetition. I don’t dwell on it. Dwelling takes energy I don’t have.