Previously on Tales of the Veil, we made it out of the Archive
and we're back home safe and sound.
Or so we thought. As it turns out, you don't need
to leave home for the Veil to mess with you.
Bite was still recovering from the Archive blast, Archie was
playing guard dog like the shadows were plotting something,
and Seraphine was busy tugging at memory threads until reality
frayed at the edges. In fairness, Love Reality's
edges were never very well stitched to begin with.
Yeah, well, they're looking even worse now that what we found
wasn't just a buried memory. It was a buried person, A
wreath. Valerius, a founder, a forgotten
name, one Seraphine erased, or tried to.
And the spindle. It didn't just store data.
It recognized me. We thought we'd rest, regroup.
But the veil doesn't wait. Not when there are truths to
unmake. This is Tales of the Veil
Chapter 7 between the threads. It should have felt like relief.
We'd made it out, we'd slept, we'd even laughed a little.
But that morning, if you could call it that, in a world where
light no longer behaved, the air in the flat felt wrong, like the
space itself was waiting for a system update that was overdue
and likely to end in a blue screen of death.
Still, the plan now was simple. We'd packed the essentials.
Yes to the salt, no to the paprika.
Turns out Archie was just joking about that.
Next up, follow the glyph trail and make it to this new old
subsection of Orleans Bridge before Seraphine noticed.
But plans don't mean much when the veils paying you special
attention. Back sorted, maps loaded.
Weather node says it's holding steady.
Well, if you ignore the bit about temporal shear near the
southern Ridge bite. How about you mate?
Bales sink holding at 87%. Echo patterns clean.
I'm stable but projection loops have increased by 12%.
Overall signal degradation pattern doesn't match natural
decay. Archie's ears perked and his
already formidable wrinkles seem to deepen, shifting into a new,
complex map of concern. He wasn't just a gruff old
bulldog, he was an alarm. And the network of his face had
just gone off. What's the source of the
anomaly? It's an external signal.
The harmonic signature is familiar.
But the sub thread, it's a phantom echo, a kind of digital
haunt layered over the veil score frequencies.
It's trying to ghost the network to get to our data.
Rate of intrusion. Accelerating.
It's a geometric progression. I've never seen such an attack
vector, and the longer we hold, the faster it will adapt.
We're running out of time to patch this remotely.
Realizing this back and forth meant we may not be leaving just
yet, I sat back down on the couch.
So something's tampering with the veil.
Not something someone signatures.
A bit synthetic, but not entirely clean.
It's splicing glyphs into our stored threads, masking rewrite
attempts inside caves archive information we just recovered.
Just then, a new hollow glyph flickered up from the cradle.
A triangle nested inside a spiral within a spiral, all in a
breathtaking burst of Violet light.
That mark, I've seen it before on a fail safe cash back during
the fracture riots. It only appears when the veil's
trying to recall a memory forcibly.
Recall huh? But the spindles still hard
wired here, still grounded, so it, or rather they shouldn't be
able to get past my firewall to get at the data.
My security game's on point if I do say so myself.
Yes, your security code is strong, but sorry to say it was
grounded now. Something's got it pinging
between anchor states, one foot in this space, the other in
something else, possibly a ghost thread.
Meaning it's possible they'll get around even your code.
I turned to the cradle for some reason, half expecting it to
speak this ghost in the machine Bite mentioned.
But then instead, all went calm, the glyphs quieted, and the hum
returned to normal. Huh.
Well, guess that's that. You're far too optimistic for
someone who now knows this world is a multidimensional OS and
that the administrator is actively trying to rewrite your
permissions. OK Mr. Grumpy Wolfington, So I'd
always thought reality was a clean, stable program, but now I
know better. Magic isn't something just for
tarot readers, fantasy blogs, or those shops with questionable
air freshener. Nor is it like in those books
where everyone's just living in a world layered with magic.
We're living inside a massive multi dimensional operating
system. The Veil is its core code.
Our world, our reality is just the user facing interface.
So yeah, I get it. What we see as glitches are bugs
in the system. Deja Vu, a cashed echo, a
feeling that something is off, a dropped packet, every potential
timeline, a process running in the background.
My whole life has been a lie, but it'll be fine, Archie,
Right? The Cradle must have blocked the
incursion, and I'm sure it will again if someone tries to get
into our network. Besides, we can take the spindle
with us. We should probably head out and
get going anyway. You did say we needed to move
fast. Suppose we ought to before the
weather decides it has conflicting opinions again.
He muttered something else under his breath, but Archie was
already triple checking the corridor maps, paw tapping at
the glyph surface of his collar projection with methodical
rhythm, so I headed toward the front door.
Then I noticed Bite, who'd been resting near the cradle as we
packed, now on all fours and completely still, hovering over
it like a librarian about to lock the Federal archive.
That's when I realized I was the idiot who was about to forget
the most important thing. The spindle almost left without
it. Wait, no, Aaron, don't.
I didn't wait, though. I'd already turned and reached
toward the cradle, and the veil had reached back.
The air around me first felt like cold honey, thick and
resistant. My hand seemed frozen, hovering
just above the spindle, and I felt a pull not just on my arm,
but on my very core, like 2 magnetic poles finally aligning.
The room bent, reality slipped sideways.
Then my hand was on the spindle, but the rest of me felt like it
was falling. Wait, what?
The only way to describe what I was going through was, well, a
malfunction in physics. A gravitational anomaly, As if
invisible strings were pulling me through misty clouds without
leaving any moisture on my skin. Just a sense of heaviness around
me as I was pulled through. Erin.
Let go and back away from it now.
There's a breach. Archie, I'm trying, but I can't
shave. I can't shave it, I called out,
but somehow I knew my voice didn't actually make it back
through this weird breach. My arms wouldn't lift.
Shadows peeled themselves from the corners, manifesting into
organic shapes. Geometric became shifting,
impossible tessellations of razor sharp light.
Robotic turned into wiry Chrome threaded figures and faces I
didn't recognize but somehow remembered pressing in, watching
me pulling at the threads of my very essence.
Hold on, I've got you. I swear to the 9 threads.
Stay with me. For a moment, I didn't know what
was real. I saw my hand stretched toward
the spindle and then not. The whole room bent sideways,
warped like heat shimmer, and I was somewhere I'd never been.
But my bones remembered. Where am I?
I dropped into what felt like a fractured memory projection.
The scene wasn't on a screen, but of a screen, a moving
picture on a vast medieval parchment of code, its images
faded and warped by time. Code threads shimmered like
living glass, bridges across a void, urging me forward.
I could feel something both pushing and pulling at the same
time, the memories competing anchors tugging at my
consciousness. Then the weaver's sigil bloomed,
pulsing above the surface, a message left like a scar in the
code drawn skies. To weave is not to bind, but to
give form to truth. If you're hearing this, then the
veil is bleeding. Carries cave.
I And if the Sentinel still guards, then this thread may
survive. The watcher may forget, but the
thread remembers who bore the weight.
You'll know the mark. A spiral within, a spiral forged
for those who guard what must never fall.
Cave. Yes, that's what Archie had
called her. Warmer, less formal than Crees,
it suited this voice that kept echoing through the threads.
As Cave's voice faded, my vision blurred.
And then, through the static, a new image began to emerge, like
a photograph developing from the dark room of an ancient movie
producer's memory. Archie as the Star, a younger
version of him, standing at the edge of a collapsing corridor
node, veiled glyphs tearing apart around him.
His form was leaner, eyes sharper, braced against a force
too large to name, and his collar different than the 1 he
wore now. Older, its surface etched with a
faint patina of crackling gold runes and the scars of an
ancient duty, marked with spiraled glyphs that shimmered
with the unmistakable emblem of the Sentinel class.
The same sigil Cave had described moments before woven
into the memory thread like a signature.
I watched as this young Archie took a step forward.
We can't hold it you. Then remember it Archibald.
If the thread is lost, let the memory be its anchor.
They shared a look, not command, not duty, but recognition.
A memory shared between Sentinel and Weaver, bound in the quiet
understanding of those who keep watch over what others will
never see. But then the memory shattered
midstream. She wasn't fully there, more
signal than self, but I felt Seraphine's intent behind the
voice. Cold measured, like she was
already editing the memory even as I stood in it.
The threads around me started to collapse inwards and I felt like
I too was going to be crushed. But I was not about to give up
without a fight. With what breath I had left, I
tried to shout. Instead, it came out as a
whisper. I'm not leaving without answers.
Feedback Search for threads we've got to pull over.
You're not going anywhere without any legs.
Not. Today, Archie, those aren't
Guardian glyphs. Those markings under your fur?
They're anchor bound, not just protective.
Old work, archaic. That layer of coding woven
straight into your thread link is a recursive anchor lock.
How do you carry that key level? Sentinel class, little one.
I once held the lock to this sector, guarded it through
collapse and silence. Now I'll break the override, and
whatever follows, we face it together.
Ready. Understood Sentinel connection
stable coordinates re established.
Brace yourself, I'm coming. And then, with a roar that
wasn't of anger but of sheer force of will, he was there.
Not through the portal, but of it.
A stream of solid data and raw intent.
He appeared as his digital silhouette, a powerful bulldog,
a flash of old sigils glowing under his fur, his paws landing
with a resounding thumb that re anchored the very reality we
stood in. Stepping into the collapse like
an Admiral returning to his command on storm tossed seas,
except the waves were jagged streams of collapsing glyphs and
crackling lattice code. No hesitation, just command
glyphs lit beneath his paws, step by step.
Not caves, not mine. One's uniquely his.
Hey there lass, seasoning up well.
I've been better, but his gentle reminder with wit had already
lightened my spirits and I was indeed feeling better.
Understandable. OK, here's what we need to do.
First, stop fighting me and trust my signal.
As he said that, I realized my own glyphs were at odds, almost
pulling away from his. That wasn't going to work, so
with a deep breath and a moment of forced mental clarity, I gave
into his signal and let my own veil borne frequency start to
match his. For a moment, it felt like a
system reboot on a cosmic scale. His mind wasn't just a signal,
it was a map, and my own consciousness was the cursor.
As our frequencies aligned, I felt a deep, resonant pulse, a
foundational server thrum old as time, begin to run through my
own veins. The blue glow of my smartwatch
intensified, pulsing with a bright crystalline light that
spread up my arm like a network of fine, glowing veins.
I could suddenly see the collapsing threads not just as a
threat, but as an elegant, broken code.
And the universe, glitchy and unreadable before, now seem to
be humming along in a strange, familiar kind of harmony.
And the Sentinel returns. He's reforged the link.
The Dragonian spark has been lit.
The Weaver finds her conduit. If you find this, don't look
back. The past was never meant to stay
whole. Cave.
Yeah, I've heard her voice several Times Now.
She. But the memory stability wasn't
going to give us more time to talk just then.
Sounds like we're out of time. Let's move.
He twisted the collapsing gliff lines, anchoring them long
enough to shove me clear. His paw pressed against the
digital twin of the spindle, light spilling through fur and
metal like molten gold, sealing the rupture, stitching the veil
shut with his will. With that, Archie pushed us
through the collapse. So it wasn't just a guardian.
He'd been something more, something the veil itself
remembered. And in that moment, it listened.
Archie. You all right there?
Yeah, I think so. Shit, what was that?
Old threads, old duty, new rules.
Confirmed rollback of the incursion, but Seraphine's
signature was adaptive. She'll know we fought back.
I didn't have words yet, just the echo of Caves warning and
the certainty. Seraphine's game wasn't over.
And Archie, he wasn't just my companion anymore, wasn't just a
guardian. He was a lock holder and a key.
Time didn't so much pass as settle.
The cradle stopped fighting. The room stopped tilting.
My heart stopped trying to claw its way out of my chest.
Archie lay in his favorite knit blanket, eyes half closed but
still tracking me like I might disappear if he blinked too
long. Bite and I were on the couch,
him curled up next to me, a faint rhythmic thrum running
through his tiny frame, me still just trying to take the past few
hours, days, weeks all in. His satisfied purr rumbled
through it's low harmonic frequency, somehow also sending
a soothing vibration through the veils frayed threads.
It was a perfect counterpoint to help calm the wild thumping in
my own chest. My brain though, continued
whirring faster than a quantum computer.
I mean, I'd been inside other people's memories before, but
this one didn't just have teeth. It bit back.
Thankfully the response from these two, their bite had been
harder still. So many unanswered questions.
I sighed, then winced as a pain shot through my side when I
shifted. I loved my couch, but as old as
it was, there were springs in it that weren't necessarily in the
right place these days. And muscles in my body felt like
I just tried to run the Iron Man race and participate in a boxing
match all in the same day. You're wondering how?
You read Minds now. Only the noisy ones.
Her thread stability is back in the green, but there's residue.
Old glyph layering. Sentinel coding, not standard
Vale weave. And there it was, the opening I
didn't know I'd been waiting for.
Gee, thanks Bite. Good to know I have glyph
residue in my veins now. Or was it Sentinel coding, did
you say? Time to spill the beans, Archie.
What was that in there? Cave and I, we were there before
the veil had its shape, before the 1st thread was ever drawn.
We stood at the edge when time was just a suggestion.
She wove, I guarded, we held locks.
No one remembers now until today.
Before the veil. That sounds like older than time
itself. Come on, Archie, there's no way
you're that old. He's not exaggerating, Aaron.
Sentinel class protocols that old.
They weren't just defensive locks, they were foundational
root keys. If Archie was anchor bound that
early, he wasn't guarding A sector, he was guarding origins.
I laughed a little weird uncertain quack.
My brain just had a kernel panic trying to run a hard reboot and
put the pieces of my personal code base back together after
that. Yeah, but that's like.
Old, old. Old dear girl, what a human
notion. You measure years by the sun.
Here's the truth of it. We measure them by the threads
we've sealed. Time isn't a river here, it's a
fractal. And a sentinel's duty is to hold
fast at its many bends. My body's a relic, yes, but the
code? The code is eternal.
OK, but sorry, I'm still not putting all the pieces together
here. Why?
Why were you guarding them? And what happened to create all
those collapses? The why is simple, lass.
Some things must be guarded, not because they are evil, but
because they're too fundamental to be changed.
And if they change, a little bit of the veil forgets itself and
us with it. OK, well, leaving the whole
Father Time thing on the back shelf for a minute, I didn't
know if I was really up for that full realization just yet.
Anyway, this forgetful veil thing that rings a bell?
Cave said something about that in the collapsing memory string,
and then Seraphine cut her off. So what's her part in all this?
Her part, eh? Well, like you know, there came
a time when she was my partner, a visionary architect with a
dangerous certainty. She saw the veils fraying
threads not as a problem to be patched, but a system to be
completely rewritten. For most of the architects it
was about quiet academic pursuit.
For Seraphine though, research into the Veils instability made
her believe that the Weaver's chaotic nature was the root
source of the problem. More glitches, more changes,
more disruption all led to the Fracture Riots.
At the time, no one knew what or who was causing it, so we ran
missions on her theories. Grey Barrow, That was one of
them. We were searching for relics of
the Foundation's original loop to patch the Veil.
Her theories were sound, but her methods not so much.
Wait, so the missions you ran together, Grey Barrow, Black
Spire, they were her way of proving her theory?
I They were her grand design and I was foolish enough to believe
she could do it. She was convinced the Veil
needed to be molded into something flawless, a
masterpiece of perfect sculpted design.
But the fluid world of magic we all live in, it thrives in the
wild, untamed. So what began as a scholarly
endeavour took a dark turn as her very self warped into
something unsettling. You see, she merged with the
Veil's source code. Bite was sitting up on his
haunches, alert and leaning forward, his head tilted as if
processing a complex data set, ears high and perked, eyes extra
bright. Archie is right.
The Fracture riots were a period of great systemic instability.
The veil score frequencies were chaotic.
Seraphine, in her misguided mission, saw an opportunity to
bring order to that chaos by re architecting the system in her
own image. In her mind, she was saving it.
She didn't just want to fix it, she was perfecting it.
Bite you talk like you were there.
Is that where her plans began to unravel?
He ticked his head a little, and for a moment I thought he looked
uneasy, but then his normal silvery moonlight mech glow
returned. Exactly 1 good thing about
today's little cradle venture. I recovered more than just
fragments. Seraphine's not trying to patch
and preserve the veil, she's trying to make it forget.
Not just interrupting memories, she's rewriting the lattice
itself. She's pulling from the oldest
archives, splicing pieces into a singular structured network
where every thread runs to 1 anchor hers.
No variants, no wild strands, no freedom.
The veil won't breathe. It'll obey.
And once it obeys, it stops living.
Turns out she calls it Harmony and from what I found in the
data strings to her Harmony means no glitches.
Yes, but also no variance, no unpredictability.
That means no love, no choice, no balancing forces.
She'll curate reality like she's pruning corrupted files.
And anyone like you, Erin, Organic, Adaptive, Different,
she'll patch out entirely. Mother of all reboots.
OK, then we need to figure out what she's trying to rebuild
after that and why. Erin, she's not rebuilding,
she's re architecting 1 design, one path, no phrase, no freedom.
And if she succeeds, if she finishes the veil and everyone
in it won't remember choice. I seriously didn't like the
sound of that, not one bit. Then we'd better start looking
for answers where she doesn't expect us to find solutions.
I think I know just the place. His piercing blue eyes held a
certainty that cut through the lingering fear, and in that
moment, as the rain pattered on the window, I knew our brief
time of rest was over. The game had just moved into its
newest DLC, so now I know Seraphine's not just pulling
strings, she's rewriting the whole damn Loom and somehow I'm
on her list of unacceptable system errors.
Then we make certain she finds we are not so easily deleted.
Good, because I've got a lead shell hate and it's perfectly
imperfectly complicated. Aren't they all?
The veil remembers. It also forgets, but what's lost
isn't always gone. Yes, Silas, the Veil definitely
does, remember? Let's hope our listeners do too,
shan't we? To all you fine listeners, a
good day, and thank you for walking the line between tech
and trickery with us. New chapters of Tales of the
Veil drop regularly. Do subscribe, won't you?
Wouldn't want you to miss out the next time we decide to go
where we obviously weren't supposed to be.
Permissions haven't stopped us before, but you never know when
that might change and you find yourself in a new dimension
without the right lock key on hand.
Besides, it helps cover the biscuit budget.
And if you happen to be sending quantum tuna for bite, perhaps
include a nice hearty bone for yours truly.
One endures, you see. Thanks for listening.
The.