Chapter 8 - A Glimpse of the Shroud

  “The surface world is but a veil. Beneath lies the truth, both terrible and potent.”

  — From ‘Whispers from the Fourth Dimension’, a restricted text

  The hush that followed Eike’s outcry was not the respectful silence of awe, nor the empty quiet of exhaustion, but the raw, animal hush that falls before flight or violence. In the echo of his words, nothing moved. Dust curled in the streaming snt of light, suspended mid-air, and every breath tasted of scorched grain and rising fear.

  He swayed, vision ringed with blue pinpricks—like flickers at the edge of a dying hearth—limbs gone sck and numb. Muscles sckened, refusing to hold him, and he had the brief, panicked thought that he might simply fall apart, come undone like sackcloth pulled too hard by careless hands. His tongue sat thick in his mouth, bitter as blood. I spoke, he thought. Nothing more. But the memory of power twisting through him—white-hot, then gone—set his heart to racing, mangling sense and self alike.

  Somewhere behind him, a chair cttered, iron shod leg ringing against stone, and the spell broke. Voices tumbled in, jagged and loud: cursing, weeping, warding prayers spat in the old dialect, three vilgers already pressed to the walls, hands fanned wide or clutching at amulets.

  Grayna was the first to reach him, elbowing past the stalled men-at-arms with a gre fierce enough to bend iron. Her fingers cmped his shoulder, squeezing until the bones ground together.

  “Fool boy,” she rasped in a voice made not for comfort but for keeping the living from being torn apart. “You’ll bring the Shroud down just by breathing. Stand, damn you. Don’t let them see you weak.”

  He tried, clutching the edge of the bench. His legs trembled, unsteady as saplings in a winter storm, his eye burning with unshed tears; more from terror than pain.

  Across the hall, the guards fanned out, faces shadowed by their helms, matching the vilgers’ fear with their own variety—painted in riveted steel and the uncertain bravado of men suddenly asked to confront the old world’s nightmares. Swords half drawn, they ringed the dais. Where once might have come a rough word or leering jeer, now only their eyes flickered white, pupils pinched, scanning for threats they had no names for.

  “Step back!” barked one—a red-jawed veteran new to panic. “No one touches him!” The command, brittle as frost on gss, went ignored by Grayna, who spat at his boots, more curse than gesture.

  “Don’t be daft, Beric,” she said, voice iron ft. “If the Shroud’s come, swords won’t do. You’d do better with a pinch of salt and the Lord’s own boots.”

  A murmur ran through the crowd—folk crossing themselves, others shoving away, creating a hollow round Eike, as if the grain’s colpse had ripped not just the sacks but the fabric of courage itself. He heard his name spoken in fearful patterns, a child’s frightened whimper under a mother’s hurried hush. One old woman dug in her apron for rusted keys—an old charm—while the smith muttered about fetching the priest, though the st one sent had choked to death the winter past.

  “You saw it,” someone whispered. “No charm—no proper words—just… said it and the grain died.”

  “He’s marked,” said another, keeping to the old ways. “Born under a crossing moon, or worse…”

  “Enough!” Master Rend thundered, his voice quavering only a shade—enough to betray that even the ledgers would not hold back dread this day. He thrust his tally-stick at the heap of ash. “We’ll have no tales, no mobs. The Duke will ask. Until then—let none leave.” He gnced to the guards, sweat shining at his high hairline. “Seal the doors.”

  Folk shuffled, pressing into the cracked stone, eyes gone rge and white as barn owls’. In the cold dimness, Eike felt the world contract—his pce at the center of an ever-widening ring of dread and suspicion.

  Jargev’s chair wobbled as he stood, both hands braced before him as if against a gale. “Boy,” he said, voice scraping low, “what have you brought? Speak. I would hear truth, or as much as fear allows this hall.”

  He meant to plead ignorance, but the words caught, sticking in a dry throat. His voice shrank to a whisper. “I didn’t ask for any of it. I just—I needed them to listen. That’s all.”

  “Save your prayers,” a fishwife snarled, voice torn by rage amplified by terror. “Once the Shroud cims a man, nothing will cleanse it. Will you have it lead us all to dust, my lord? Will you have all our children follow his—?”

  Amonvae’s voice rippled through the tumult, colder and more cutting than the wind spilling from the door. “Enough.” She moved from her chair to the center of the hall, the faint clink of gss or metal from beneath her cloak giving the only hint of her approach. “You will not feed the dark with superstition. What happened here is not contagion, nor curse. It was power—wild, unshaped, rare beyond naming. And left unchecked, yes, it can devour more than grain.”

  The vilgers shrank from her, too, eyes flicking from her foreign robes to the Duke, then back to Eike, as if the bond between all three was now as pin and inescapable as the marks left by winter on their flesh.

  Jargev, for all his weariness, seized on that note of expnation. “Then you know its shape, Amonvae? You cim knowledge—give us remedy. Give us reason not to fear.”

  She turned, studied him the way a cautious healer tests for fever that fever may well conceal. “I know only part, as any honest soul will admit when faced by the depths of the world’s veil.” Her gaze lingered a moment too long on Eike—so fleeting that even the sharp-eyed would question it, but a chill climbed his spine, as though her attention pressed against his very bones.

  Inside her mind, the storm churned: Manifestation unframed, spontaneous—no catalyst, no marking. The true shroudborn, Adenar’s worst prophecy alive and loose, wrapped not in jewels, but in hunger and winter’s rags. The power is raw, votile… but hidden all these years? How? Not a flicker on any astral chart, nothing in the scrying pools even when the king’s own blood ran thin two years past. And here—here where no one would look, no one would dare to hope or fear in the right measure. The veil here is thin, indeed.

  She nodded, slow and deliberate, turning back to the Duke. “The boy is drained. To press him now would be folly. There are older rites for such things—if it is your will, I will see that he is isoted, watched. But do not mistake fear for wisdom.”

  Rend squared himself, recovering in the face of procedure. “Is it safe, then? To have him breathe our air? To let him walk free when the Shroud might use him as its vessel?”

  Amonvae’s tone shifted—her words now as clipped and cold as a drawn bde. “If you must fear, fear your own ignorance. He can no more summon a blight at will than he can undo winter’s own grip. What happened here…” She paused, choosing cardinal words, fletching them with just enough shroud-lore to sway but not ignite panic, “…is the result of pain. Of a power bound not by training, not even by will, but by grief too long endured. Events like this burn themselves out—unless stoked.”

  Jargev gred, lips twitching with the urge to refute or control. But terror, old and simple, kept him still. He cast a gnce downward at Eike—who, in that moment, felt more animal than boy, shivering, muscles clenching against the world.

  Grayna stooped, draping her shawl across Eike’s shoulders. She tugged him upright with a jerk, whispered at his ear, “Don’t speak, not to them. Let the learned ones wrangle each other bloody.”

  Eike’s vision blurred—half from spent power, half from panic. The crush of the crowd, the guards, the foreign woman whose gaze froze his breath even as it promised she saw more than the rest, all pressed upon him. Lucy, he thought, the flicker at the far edge of pain. If they struck at him, who would light her fire by night? Who would fend off the real cold?

  Amanvae motioned to a pair of sergeants. “Clear a space. You will all want answers, and I will strive to give them, but rumor runs faster than truth. Panic always wakes before reason.”

  One of the guards grunted, lips pursed in a whorl of frustration and growing suspicion. “If it’s not rot, it’s magic. Always the smallfolk pay for such games.”

  A vilger—a youth, younger than Eike by two winters—edged forward, hand trembling as he pressed a talisman of hollowed bone to the air between them. “I’ve heard the stories. Sometimes they burn a mark, just there—” he pointed, vague, forehead to jaw—“and before the night’s gone over, the Shroud leaves nothing but ash.” His eyes, huge and ringed with fear, darted from Grayna to Eike, getting no comfort from either.

  Eike forced himself to breathe, to steady pounding heart and bloody knuckles. He caught Amonvae’s eye, saw there not the contempt or terror of the others, but something deeper—complicated calcution, and an odd, unfamiliar pang of hope. He tried for speech, knowing it would fail.

  “I don’t… I never meant—” The words slipped out, thin and forceless. He bowed his head. “Just want to go home.”

  Amonvae saw him—from the outside, a trembling wraith in homespun, but behind the eyes was the echo of something vast, longing for shelter. The true threat, she thought, is not what dwells in the snow, but what will be called by their fear. I must move carefully. Too much pressure now, and he may split; too little, and the hidden hands—king’s, mage’s, or worse—may snatch what they would never nurture.

  She weighed options, gaze always flickering back to Eike. Already politics spun out—what to tell Adenar, what to hold back, which doors to seal and which to leave ajar. The old teachings rose unbidden: When the board changes, do not mourn the lost pieces. Study the board anew.

  To the Duke she said, her voice soft but edged: “If you value your peace, you’ll give the boy safe keeping, not shackles. Let him dwell—with guards, if you must—until the worst of the fear passes. Then we can talk of rites, of mastery, or of sending him far from here, where his life—and yours—may run on separate rivers.”

  The Duke’s face darkened—jaw working, hands tightening on the chair’s rim as if weighing chains unseen. “Enough. For now, the hearing is dissolved. Rilm, note the time and terms. Rend—you and the learned dy see to the boy. No violence, not unless he gives cause. If he does”—his gaze carved all softness from the word—“you will not hesitate.”

  Vilgers surged for the door as the seal was lifted, the space around Eike and Grayna now wide, superstitious hands tugging at children, pulling them clear.

  Outside, the day had burned down into a fretful dusk—the sky bruised purple above the hard white of endless ground. Eike stumbled—Grayna a firm, bruising gate at his back—past watchful eyes and whispered curses.

  Amonvae lingered in the hall as it cleared, her thoughts whirling cold and quiet. A gate opens in Winter Cw. What passes through depends on the keeper’s hand. Beware the hand that reaches blindly—or grasps too tightly.

  In a shadowed corner, Rend muttered, tally-stick trembling for once.

  And as the hush deepened, old stories seemed to breathe anew—whispering that hunger and debt never slept long in Winter Cw, each testing the veils that bound them.

  That night, the vilge slept uneasy, windows shuttered, boots set toes-forward by every door, salt scattered in greedy loops along the threshold. Yet no dream warded off the crawling chill beneath the earth—the whisper in the dark they all pretended not to hear.

  Above all, two watched the dark—Eike with fevered, sleepless dread, and Amonvae, pen in hand, noting the shape of the unknown, the secret bde now bared in Winter Cw.

  And beneath the crust of snow and rumor, something patient stirred—a waiting presence, eager for the day the veil would tear wide enough to let it through.