Chapter 35: Chapter 35: Small Gods and Trapped Worlds
"Can I ask something," Alex said, "that isn’t about ranks or kingdoms."
Vespera looked at him. "Ofcourse Alex."
"The shimmer. The veil." He pulled his finger back from the edge of the map.
"You said the religious explanation is that it’s divine protection. You said you found the fanatics annoying." He looked at her.
"So I want to know what you actually think it is."
Eclipse glanced between them, the expression of someone who had learned that her mother had opinions on this but had never heard them stated at full length.
Vespera was quiet for a moment.
Not the uncertainty from before.
Something else.
The quiet of someone deciding how honest to be with a five year old, and then deciding the five-year-old in front of her probably warranted the honest version.
"I don’t know what it is," she said.
"I want to be clear that I’m not pretending to know. I have a hypothesis, not a conclusion." She paused.
"What I don’t believe is that it was made to protect us. Everything I have seen of the veil suggests it was made to contain us. A protective structure faces outward. It keeps threats away from what is inside. What I felt when I approached the veil faced inward. Whatever is outside, the veil is not facing it."
"It’s keeping us in," Alex said.
"That is what I believe, yes."
Zara had gone very still again.
"So whatever is outside," Alex said carefully, "is either something that needs to be kept away from us, something that needs to keep us away from it, or something that just doesn’t want the door opened." He paused.
"And the creatures that guard it, are they keeping people away from the veil? Or are they keeping something on the other side from coming through?"
Vespera looked at him for a long moment.
"I have never heard a five year old ask that question," she said.
"That’s not an answer, mom..."
"No," she agreed. "It isn’t, because I don’t have one. The creatures appeared when I approached. They drove me back, not through. Whether they serve the veil or simply exist near it the way animals exist near a river, I cannot tell you." She folded her hands.
"The Night Order has more data than I do. But the Night Order does not share freely."
"You said Astaria Elysian is looking for something specifically," Alex said. "At the veil. You said it like you had reason to believe it wasn’t just curiosity or research."
Vespera paused.
"She has been sending people to the veil for centuries," she said.
"Not in a pattern consistent with research. Researchers vary their approach, try different locations, adapt method. Her operations at the veil follow a very specific geographic pattern. She is looking for something in a specific place." A pause.
"What it is, I genuinely don’t know. But a person with her power and her intelligence does not spend centuries on a search without having a reason that is considerably more important than academic curiosity."
’She lost something,’ Alex thought.
’Or someone told her something before they died. Or she knows something about what the veil is that no one else knows. It has to be something important enough to drive her towards it so much.’
The warmth stirred.
This time it was not amused. It was something different.
Something that felt, if he had to name it, like recognition.
’What are you,’ he thought, at the warmth directly, ’and why does the veil make you react like that?’
Nothing answered him in words.
But the warmth pressed back like a hand against a door, briefly, before receding.
Alex put that away somewhere deep and didn’t think about it in his face.
"The people who say the All-Mighty made it," Zara said, breaking the quiet in a way that suggested she had been turning something over in her head and reached a conclusion she wanted to say out loud.
"I grew up hearing that. That the shimmer is proof of divine love. That we are chosen and protected." She paused.
"I stopped believing that before I could explain why. It just never felt right. You put it right just now when you said, would a divine put their creation in a cage. It was always the cage part that felt wrong. Not the divine, just the cage."
Vespera looked at Zara with an expression that was quietly warm in a way that felt like approval.
"You have good instincts," she said.
Zara blinked.
Then looked away, which for Zara was the equivalent of another person turning red.
Eclipse noticed this and visibly stored it for future use.
Alex noticed Eclipse noticing it and decided that dynamic was going to be interesting to watch.
"The fanatics," he said, redirecting.
"The ones who preach the divine cage as a gift. Are they dangerous? Or just loud?"
"Both," Vespera said. "They are loud, which makes them powerful in ways that don’t require combat ability. They control what common people believe about the veil, and therefore they control how much political will there is to study or challenge it. Anyone who publicly advocates for approaching the veil or breaking it runs directly into the institutional weight of the faithful, who have had centuries to build temples and influence and a narrative that frames the veil as sacred." She paused.
"The Night Order has been called heretics for centuries. Astaria Elysian has been called a demon, an apostate, someone who serves a force opposed to the divine. It has not stopped her. But it has complicated her."
"Makes sense," Alex said. "If I were trying to keep people from investigating something, I would make the investigation itself a sin."
He looked at the map one more time. "Whoever built the veil had a long time to plan."
Vespera looked at her son.
The room was quiet, and outside the window the light had shifted toward the colour of late afternoon, the kind that turned the stone walls of Winterfang Palace from cold grey to something almost warm.
"That," Vespera said softly, "is the most unsettling conclusion that I have not been able to argue my way out of."
Alex nodded once.
Then he said: "What are the creatures like. The ones near the veil. You said there are recordings."
Vespera’s expression said: that is a conversation for another day.
Her mouth said: "Another day."
Alex accepted that.
He had enough to work with.
He looked at his hands.
Small hands, still.
A child’s hands on a body that was working very hard to catch up to what the mind inside it needed it to be.
’This continent is a sealed box,’ he thought.
’Someone sealed it. Someone is keeping the lid on. And the only person actively trying to understand why has been betrayed by her own people and spends her nights sending soldiers to the edges of the world.’
He breathed in.
’Right,’ he thought. ’Training first. Then we’ll worry about the rest.’
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