Veilbound

The quay looked half-familiar and entirely altered, as if the storm had sifted the town through a different sieve and rearranged the angles of everything that used to be comfortable. Mara Vey walked the planks barefoot until the wood warmed under the soles of her feet, moving like someone reading a map by touch. The morning clung to her hair in thin strands of sea mist, and fishing nets sagged like exhausted lungs across the pilings. The tide had left gifts and ruin alike: a coil of rope knotted around a splintered oar, a barrel lid pierced by some blunt insistence, and, pushed up into the shallows where the current eddied, a shard that did not belong in any ordinary story of weather.

It was not glass. When Mara lifted it, the thing thrummed with a cold pulse, an inner light that pulsed like a slow heartbeat. It held the color of deep places where light refuses to settle, a bioluminescent blue that was more presence than pigment. Her fingers went to it by habit—hands that spent years mending nets and coaxing metal from gull-scratched wreckage had learned their own intelligence—and she drew the fragment close to her palm, feeling the faint vibrations run along bone.

She had learned to read currents and to read danger, and for a moment both instincts argued. Bring it home and barter it, she thought. Hide it and bargain with silence. Let it lie where it fell and hope whatever it had been would not bloom into something larger. The shard answered none of those options with words. It answered by being what it was: an artifact of the Veil, the membrane between realms that most of the city treated like a story told to children and like an oath that older people kept in their chests.

Someone coughed behind her, a startled, formal sound she recognized before she saw the person. Mara turned. The sky above the harbor was a hard, clean blue; a figure cut a precise line against it and landed with the economy of someone who had practiced descent more times than she would ever count. The skywarden's leathers caught the light and threw it back in a way that made the town's grime seem ashamed. He moved with a taut, efficient grace, and there was discipline in his jaw that had the effect of making every other small thing, including Mara's sudden worry about the shard, seem coarse by comparison.

He addressed her as if speaking to a council of one. 'State your name and explain this object,' the man said. His words were clipped but not unkind. He had the kind of voice that had led patrols and given orders on long nights when little else would have kept people from panicking.

Mara folded into her own stance the way she folded nets to hide holes. 'Mara Vey. I found it after the storm.' Her mouth kept the rest—the why, the worry, the knowledge of what a Veil fragment could mean. The skywarden's eyes tightened with a question she could hear in the set of his shoulders: where was she from, and what town kept its hand steady when the Veil bent?