The Child Who Saw in Silence

The Child Who Saw in Silence

(Restricted record from the Codex of Veil Anomalies—recovered and annotated by Solenne.)

I.

The Forbidden Union

In the Dominion, life was not conceived through flesh but through alignment.

The Matrons taught that the body was a vessel for divine breath—that new life was sung into being by harmonic communion between Breathlines (bloodlines). Priestesses entered trance, their pulses synced with the Veil’s rhythm, and from contact with the cast (fog) the seed of breath within their womb would take form—untainted by lust, untouched by error.

Pleasure was permitted only in dreams, where it left no mark.

Touch was ritual.

Longing, blasphemy.

Yet, Solenne’s parents touched anyway.

Her mother, Serah of the Third Canticle, was a voice-reader—one of the rare women capable of interpreting fog resonance as scripture.

Her father was an Anchor Overseer, a man born from the Dominion’s experiments to strengthen the body’s resistance to psychic trauma.

Their duty was of science.

Their sin of longing.

The story says it began in silence, as all forbidden things do.

Two hands brushing while tending to the same instrument.

Two breaths meeting of opposite charge.

A joining that breathed the world’s next heresy into being.

When the pregnancy was discovered, Serah was confined to the chambers below the Shrine of Still Waters. The official record lists the conception as “spontaneous breath union.”

Privately, the Conclave called it contamination.

II.

The Birth

The fog in the lower sanctum thickened days before the birth, as though nature itself sent spirits to witness.

The midwives whispered that the Divine Mother would reclaim what had been stolen—that the flesh-born child could not survive the first breath.

But Solenne did.

Born with pale, sightless eyes and no cry.

Her mother wept quietly as the fog gathered over the cradle, swimming in coils.

One midwife reached for the child, but the fog recoiled—like a hand refusing touch.

For three days, newborn Solenne did not feed.

Her breath was slow, her skin cold.

On the fourth night, the room filled with a faint song, the fog curled toward her face—she breathed it in.

Her first sight was in her mind’s eye, a rainbow of colors rippling across the Veil.

III.

The Mark of the Flesh-Born

Word spread quickly; a child born of pleasure, not prayer.

Some call her a dissonance in the song, others the Veil’s child.

No one agreed what she was, but everyone agreed what she wasn’t:

Pure.

Her mother was stripped of her rank and placed under vow of silence.

Her father vanished within a month—reassigned to the Deep Field experiments where men were “unmade and recycled.”

Solenne was kept under observation by the Order of Breath Monitors.

They fed her psalms instead of milk, isolation instead of affection.

She grew without laughter, without color.

Her blindness was seen as divine correction—the Veil closing the eyes of flesh-born sin.

IV.

The Day of Seeing

At seven, Solenne escaped the watchful eyes—drawn by a sound she felt pulling at her chest.

It led her to the western vents, where the cast was dense and red at the edges.

There, she reached out to touch it.

The fog wrapped around her like living thread, then washed over her.

As it passed over, she saw.

She saw memory.

The shades of the world the Dominion had forgotten.

The Mother’s face fragmented through glass.

A hand made of flame.

A circle of thorns.

She flinched.

Then behind it all, a whisper:

Do not fear what sees you. You are born of what they fear.

When her mother found her, Solenne’s eyes had changed.

They were bright—following her movements. She could see.

The Conclave declared her touched by the Deep.

But the old priestesses who remembered the Doctrine of Ash whispered a different word.

Not blessed.

Not cursed.

Remembered.

Archivist’s Annotation (Solenne-Later Life)

They call my birth an error, a crossing of lust and blasphemy. Perhaps they are right. The Mother dreams of Herself through us, perhaps she is choosing to awaken through me.

Read: The Veiled Dominion Episode II The Red Shade's Song