The Veiled Dominion: Episode II

The Circle of Thorns

The air in the lower archives is thick. The lamps burn low. Solenne moves slowly through a chamber alive with static energy. The sound of a thousand glass tablets whispering back and forth saturates the air.

She should not be here. The Index of Prohibited Verse has been sealed since the 7th Council. But the shard in her satchel sings like a beacon arrived.

On a stone dais near the wall lies a small obsidian tablet. Its surface is etched with spiraling script—sharp, looping, almost serpentine. At the top, a sigil she does not recognize; a ring of thorns woven through a circle.

She runs her fingers across the carved text. The lines glow a faint red as her touch warms the stone.

Fragment—Recorded Entry: The Circle of Thorns

(Recovered from the Deep Record, author unknown)

In the age before the Dominion’s silence, a rogue sect of priestesses gathered in the hollow beneath the world to sing creation forward. They stood in a circle of swords penetrating earth.

Each carried a seed of the Mother’s Breath in their body; each seed a spark of the first exhale. They fed the sparks with blood, heat, and longing. The soil beneath them stirred.

They believed they were completing the Mother’s Dream—but what they woke was her reflection.

Solenne blinks—

and the archive is gone.

The Vision

The chamber opens into blackness filled with red light pulsing through the ground. Twelve veiled women stand in a circle of black swords stabbed in earth, molten veins flowing through their blades. Their robes flowing, like liquid shadow.

They sing a song that vibrates in Solenne’s chest.

The sound is so low it feels like the Earth humming and breathing under her.

Each woman cuts her palm with a thorn and drips blood into the circle. The soil beneath them ripples—first red, then molten white.

Shapes rise from it; half-formed, bubbling up from the white liquid.

Faces appear then dissolve.

Hands reach up, grasping, then sink.

One of the women lifts her hands high, eyes hidden, lips trembling.

“Mother of Breath,” she whispers, “Dream through us. Reveal yourself.”

The ground convulses.

The air fills with whispers not their own.

Solenne feels the sound covering her, like it knows her name. The shapes flailing in the boiling milk begin to scream. The sound is not pain—it’s awakening.

The women falter. Their song loses rhythm.

The circle shatters.

From the broken thorns (swords) pours a blood red massacre. The voices in it echo, overlapping, searching. Solenne realizes they are asking for names.

Then a woman at the circle’s edge collapses, her body in spasms. When she lifts her head, her voice is not hers.

“You look like me,” the thing inside her says.

“Through your torn flesh—I enter.”

The thorns bleed molten light into soil and rock.

The song dissolves into chaos.

The vision breaks.

Solenne gasps awake on the stone floor. The obsidian tablet before her is cracked down the center, faint smoke rising from its core.

Her sigil burns beneath her throat.

She can still hear faint voices whispering.

“The circle broke. The Mother turned. The Veil remembers.”

The Outer City

The wind doesn’t whisper in the quarter beyond the Sanctum walls—it trembles. Stone sweats; the alleys smell of ash and forgotten blood.

Far below the broken spires, a stairwell coils into the ruins of a temple whose halls reverberate with the heavy moans of pleasure. A man, with wrists bound by red-silk ties, lay beneath and engulfed by the shimmering body of a woman who slowly twists and rolls with pelvic thrusts on top of him. She groans while licking his face like a curious animal.

Sa'har—exiled Red Shade High Priestess. Her eyes lazily lost in trance. Her short, dark hair stuck to the greasy moisture of her face. She slides her fingers down the sweat-slick curves of her breasts as she begins to slip away.

The whispers begin in her bones, racing up her spine before her ears catch them.

In her mind's eye, she can see shadows running in a fog of red mist.

A reflection grips the edges of a mirror and steps through, whispering a woman’s name—then takes it.

Sa'har hears a song whose melody is so entrancing, it lifts her out of her body:

“We bled the light to see Her face,

And found our own beneath the flame.

We tore the hush to hear Her heart,

And heard it speak our names.

O Mother of Veil, O Hollow of Dream,

Open your mouth and swallow the dawn.

If sin is sight, then vision be mine;

If mercy blinds, then darkness be my guide.

When the dream forgets our name,

And when the fire forgets our shape,

Remember us as smoke.”

Sa'har awakens.

Her body shivers as she falls back into herself.

She dismounts her pleasure-saddle—dripping, eyes wide and panting.

Her lips slowly curl into an open wound of a smile. The song wasn’t calling her—it was answering.

Her breath still trembles with the rhythm of the tune that carried her away.

She stands, wipes her forehead with a cloth, and steps toward the open archway.

From the street below she hears a woman’s voice—gasping, then laughing, then screaming.

She moves her eyes around suspiciously to the sound of scurrying footsteps.

The mirror in her chamber begins to blur.

Hands press against the glass from the other side.

Fingers trace her name into the mirror’s fogged face.

“We remember you,” the reflection whispers.

Sa'har’s pulse quickens, but she does not retreat.

She watches as the glass ripples outward, and from its surface a figure spills into the room—a body made of shadow and breath, half woman, half dark.

A Hollow One.

It moves toward her, trembling, and for a moment its face is hers.

“What are you?” Sa'har whispers.

“Almost, you,” the thing answers. “Hold still.”

The shadow lunges—then stops.

Between them stands her once-bound slave; his body glows faintly from within, light running under his skin in molten veins.

The air bends around him; the Hollow falters, shuddering as if struck by a silent note.

The reflection shrieks—a sound like a blade scratching glass—and evaporates into vapor.

The man doesn’t speak.

He simply looks at Sa'har, eyes blank, as if waiting for command.

Sa'har steps close, studying him.

The red glow beneath his skin has formed a sigil—not of the Dominion, but something that looks older.

“The voice cannot claim what is already hollow.”

Her voice thins with awe rather than fear.

She touches the mark glowing at his throat.

He does not flinch.

“Looks like you have more than just one use. You will be my instrument.”

Outside, the bells of Vethra ring—uneven, discordant, as if the city itself were choking on its song.

Sa'har smiles again. “The Veil is singing.”

The Council of Breath

Within the Atrium of Still Light, nine veiled figures are seated in a crescent of stone. Behind them are mirrors of frosted glass—each etched with the sigil of her order, each veiled against reflection.

At the center stands Matron Serath, her veil spun of silver thread so fine it moves when she breathes. Attendants move beside her with styluses poised above liquid-glass tablets, recording the words that will shape doctrine.

A younger priestess kneels before the council, head bowed.

Aide: “By the census of the midwives, this cycle of the fog’s fertile mist has yielded forty-three births of the Anchor (masculine) strain—more than the Breathline itself.”

A long pause follows.

Councilor Rynna: “The fog forgets its place. Men are tools, not heirs.”

Councilor Dartha: “If the Mother breathes them, then she seeks balance, not blasphemy.”

Rynna: “Balance is a heretic’s word. The Dominion was founded to correct imbalance.”

The debate grows taut, every phrase a wrapped blade.

Serath raises her hand.

Serath: “Purpose may yet be punishment. We will watch this imbalance closely. For now, no Anchor shall rise above the rank of laborer or guard.”

The decree is written into glass, cooling into permanence.

The doors burst open—soundless.

An attendant kneels at the threshold, trembling.

Attendant: “A priestess of the Third Canticle has been found without breath in her chambers. No wound, no sign of struggle.

A susurrus of veiled voices fills the chamber.

Rynna: “The Red Shade stirs.”

Dartha: “They were erased generations ago.”

Rynna: “Ash remembers flame.”

Serath’s fingers tap against her chair.

Serath: “Seal the Scriptorium. And burn whatever names (memories) remain.”

Rynna’s tone softens to silk.

Rynna: “There is an archivist among the flock who listens far too closely to forbidden voices for my liking. The half-born, they call her—Solenne of the split line. Her mother was inseminated by an Anchor. She is not purely of the Breath. A debauchery that would’ve never been tolerated by a priestess under the old Dominion. A Daughter of our beloved Mother. Such mixture invites fracture—and it's time it be held up to the light.”

The other priestesses murmur. The darkness bends toward the gathering— its interest peaked.

Serarth presses back in her chair and does not answer.

And the orchestra of strings played in sharp, suspenseful stabs.

The Shadows that Whisper

The city seems to tilt and wobble with Solenne as she walks out into the open world from the archives. Maintaining her balance is now a task she must consider. The echoes of her out-of-body experience cling to her like damp silk—every breath tastes of soil, every sound a remnant of song.

The city feels strange.

Like the dimension she returned to isn’t the one she left.

A reflection of the old that doesn’t care to hide behind vanity.

There’s a serpentine trail of red smoke out in front of her that wafts in every visible direction.

The lamps lighting the paths flicker, stretching the shadows who appear to have humans attached to them. The shadows open doors, retrieve objects, communicate, while the person behind them appears to mime.

Solenne stops beneath an arcing structure, staring at a woman who crosses her path ahead. The woman’s shadow moves faster, breaking from her feet and climbing a wall like smoke. Then it looks down.

The woman turns to Solenne—her eyes pale and dim, like the fog moves through them.

Solenne presses her palms to her temple.

The shard in her satchel begins to pulse.

“Stop listening.”

The voice comes from behind her ear, soft and breathless.

She spins. Nothing.

“You opened the door Archivist.”

Her knees buckle. She drops her satchel, the shard clattering on the stones.

Its surface glows—spilling red light across the cobblestones in delicate, trembling circles. Within the glow, shapes crawl; hands, faces, reflections pressed against the glass.

Solenne wraps the shard and runs.

The narrow corridors of Vethra twist like arteries.

Doors slam in the distance.

Laughter echoes where no one stands.

By the time she reaches her threshold, her lungs are burning.

She fumbles the latch, steps inside, and presses her back against the door.

Silence.

Solenne exhales, then forces herself to her desk and opens her ledger—the one bound in grey vellum and sealed with the Archivist’s mark—an arrow within a circle.

Her hand shakes as she writes.

“The Circle of Thorns...twelve women, voices in harmony. Blood into soil. Faces forming from mist and shadow.”

The quill drags. Ink pools in the groove of her letters.

She dips it again.

“After the song broke, I saw them—women clutching their bellies, blood like molten glass—”

Solenne can’t feel the quill in her hand anymore.

Though it is still writing.

Her hand moves across the page with deliberate grace, forming letters she does not command.

“The were called Tear Bearers.”

She whispers the words aloud.

The ink continues to flow.

“When the Veil was first torn, its wound was of sky and flesh. The Daughters began to bleed in rhythm with the Moon’s shade. Their blood marked the turning of the Mother in Her Dream. Their pain became the pulse of time.”

Solenne tries to pull the quill away, but the ink clings to it like a thread of spider silk, stretching, trembling.

“Each cycle, they bear Her sorrow. Each drop a memory of the breach. The Tear Bearers keep the world from forgetting what was broken.”

Solenne can feel something dark stirring around her.

She snaps the ledger shut.

A single line of ink bleeds through the cover, faint but legible in the candlelight:

“The world remembers through your blood.”