Previously on Tales of the Veil, Seraphine's not just editing
memories, she's rewriting the whole system of reality and
wants it all to be 1 obedient pattern.
No chaos, no choice, and no room for people like me.
Which rude. Archie revealed more about his
Sentinel past. Bite.
Well, Bite's still a mystery in motion.
And me? I'm starting to feel less like a
systems engineer and more like an unpaid beta tester for real
life gone haywire. Reality's always been in beta
love, most just don't read the patch notes.
Meanwhile, bites now revealed a lead to someplace.
Seraphine definitely doesn't want us poking around, which
means obviously we're going. And here I was, hoping for a
quiet week. You're the one who moved in with
a human who attracts cosmic trouble like lint to a wool
sweater. Fair enough.
This is Tales. Of the veil.
Chapter 8. Crumbs from a Lost Guardian.
The Cradle hadn't stopped humming since the Breach.
Bite sat perfectly still, eyes glowing faint silver blue while
rows of ghost glyphs rippled across the spindles.
Reflection. Archie hovered nearby, shoulders
tight, his old battlefield stillness settling in like a
second skin. Bite said he'd found a lead.
What he meant was a trail, and the trail wasn't subtle.
Recovery confirmed. Non standard thread anchor drift
pattern suggests intentional placement, not decay.
It's calling itself a cash node, but.
Guardian signature, old, masked under something mundane.
Could be asleep, could be bait. Comforting as always, Archie.
Where is it bait? The old clock tower, or what's
left of it. Location smells like a gate to
timelines and bad choices you're.
Right on at least one vector Archie data shows Guardian class
encryption thread left as if it expected someone like us to find
it. But there's anomaly drift.
The node isn't stable, it's cycling through lock states.
Or someone's dangling a shiny relic in front of the conduit,
hoping we'll come running. Possibilities Calculated Trap
index 68% Authentic Intel 70. Two nearly even odds, my
favorite kind. I watched them volley numbers
back and forth like 2 chess players who'd already memorized
the board. Archie's jaw was tight, but a
look of wry humor glimmered in his eyes.
Bites tail twitched like a metronome.
Eyes and tone all business. As for me, I was trying not to
think about how little coffee I'd had before all this.
So if it's dangerous but authentic, and the odds of it
being both or either are even, what's the plan?
Flip a coin. Flip a biscuit.
More like both sides. Equally problematic when it
breaks on the ground. Either way results the same.
A waste of a good biscuit. We'll go, but careful, you stay
between us at all times. Bite takes point.
I'll cover our 6. Agreed.
Prepping bail filters now. The cradle flickered again, and
in the glyph light I saw Archie's old collar shimmer and
pulse, like it was trying to connect with another timeline.
Meanwhile, threads of Violet white energy had begun to rise
off. Bites paw like digital smoke.
Whatever was at the end of this audit trail was something hot
and important, alive, waiting. The world used to make sense,
but there I was, following a bulldog and a cyber kitten to a
clock tower that was never supposed to hum like a server
farm. I mentally shrugged and shook my
head. So, Archie, we're basically
following bread crumbs from something or someone.
Like cosmic cookie crumbs. Kind of odd, don't you think?
Biscuit crumbs, cookie crumbs, audit trails.
Depends which realm you're from. Either way, love it's a trail we
probably shouldn't be following yet.
One we must if we want to stop the overhaul Seraphines
architecting. Fine biscuit crumbs from a cyber
something. Just saying.
This has Hansel and Gretel vibes all over it.
Aye, and you know how that story ended.
They left a trail so they could find their way back.
Maybe that's what this is. Or so something else could
follow it straight to us. Just then.
Bites. Paw twitched.
Archie's ears flicked and my stomach sank as the sound of a
bell that didn't exist anymore rang once softly.
The veil wasn't just bleeding into our world anymore, it was
bread crumbing us somewhere, and we were following like good
little fairy tale victims. All right, let's see what's
waiting inside, crumbs or no crumbs.
Stay close and don't touch anything glowing without asking
first. The clock tower should have been
a ruin. Cracked brick, rusted gears,
dead silence. But ruins don't hum.
Ruins don't breathe. This was definitely not a simple
ruin. The air inside was thick with
layered time. You could smell it.
Dust, cold iron, wet stone, and something else.
Something like static before lightning strikes.
Every surface seemed to hold a faint, invisible charge, like
reality here was not entirely settled.
The ceiling was impossibly high, higher than the outside of the
crumbling tower should allow. Stone arches rose into shadow,
but where shadow should have been, I saw light.
Not glowing, not beaming, just present, like memory of a
sunrise projected onto thin air. On the walls were faded murals.
The murals, though, weren't paint.
They were threads, veil threads woven into images of strange
animals, guardians in forms half familiar, half myth.
A lion with too many eyes. A fox whose tail dissolved into
Starlight. A great hound etched in deep
cobalt, standing between worlds. The artwork didn't sit on the
wall. It lived inside the stone, as
though the tower remembered being something else.
Once the floor, well, the floor wasn't level stone anymore.
Tiles of slate were breaking apart, not by decay, but by
drift. Little shards hovered slightly
above the ground, holding position as though gravity here
had been given suggestions, not instructions.
And at the towers centre was a raised dais, circular, cracked,
etched with spiraling glyphs that glowed faintly yet
pointedly towards our approach. Not like a spotlight really,
more like the tower recognized us and was putting out an arm to
pull us in. Guardian Anchor site confirmed
this node once served as a memory stabilizer during the
early Loom calibrations. A threshold point between
realms. But node integrity is only 29%.
We need to be cautious. Anchor drift patterns are
consistent with Guardian class storage, but there's a secondary
echo. Someone's already accessed it.
Could be the guardian waking, Could be Seraphine.
Stay alert the. Glyphs look like they're
breathing. Yes.
We moved past a crumbling stairwell to the raised
platform, what looked like simple broken stone, but somehow
humming and alive on it. The relic.
It resembled a pocket watch, one carved from moonstone and
circuitry, it's surface etched with veil glyphs that wound
inward like constellations, collapsing into a single gravity
well. In places the crystal surface
had fractured, though not fully broken, as though holding back
ages of memories compressed under pressure but just about to
burst. Bite stepped closer and extended
his metal paw, hovering over the relic.
This is definitely Guardian grade signature matches
Dragonian era encryption Message fragment present warning
integrity compromised. It's bleeding data and unlikely
to hold much longer. And there's more a sub thread
under the message encrypted in her signature seraphines.
She planted something here. Either that or she used this
relic as a seed node long ago. Standby accessing.
Bites Paw began pulsing a dark sapphire, his eyes flickering
from silver blue to a deeper, stormier hue.
As his pulses harmonized, so did the relic, and the hum became
more music, almost telegraphing a story with the new rhythms it
released. But underpinning it all, we
continued to hear the faint crackling static, like it was
going to lose signal any second. Let's see what it has to say
before it evaporates. I stepped closer, the light from
the relic casting webbed shadows over my hands.
For a moment, it felt like the threads recognized me, tiny arcs
of static dancing up my arms. The glyphs rearranged
themselves, forming words my brain translated without
consciously knowing how. Threads do not exist to be woven
into a single pattern. They exist to choose new designs
and choice. Choice is the breath of the
loom. Beware the architect who calls
Freedom Floor. That wasn't Seraphine, that was
Cave. Maybe something's different
about that voice. This relic was placed here for
Someone Like You to find Las, someone to remember what
Seraphine's trying to erase, or someone to trap.
Suddenly, White's whole frame stiffened.
The glow along his paw spine flared.
I felt the temperature of the room dip, the glyphs on the
walls trembling as if the tower itself held its breath.
The. Echo.
Come home. Anchor confirmed.
Thread recognized. Conduit found.
Bite, who are you talking to? Archie and I had both stiffened
at this change in Bite. He shook himself and looked
away, not meeting either of our eyes.
I I don't know. Step back from the relic lad
now. That's when the glyphs changed.
They didn't glow brighter, but they remembered.
Not us. Something before us.
The tower disappeared, Or rather, it thinned like tracing
paper held up to a lamp, the shapes and structures still
there but hazy, reality going translucent.
Through this, a corridor now stretched out before us, made
not of stone but of floating data filaments, like someone had
swapped reality's texture pack for code and we were now in AVR
game. The walls were woven
cryptographs layered with half formed shapes shifting in and
out and in the center of all the haze bite.
Younger, smaller and not mechanical, not fully.
I tried to step forward, but the air didn't move.
It wasn't resistance, it was compression, like the veil was
keeping us in place so the memory could load.
I sucked in my breath and tried to balance everything that I was
seeing with what I was feeling. Perhaps this was all just a
lucid dream I could control. Erin, stay with your breath.
Don't try to anchor the room. Let it shift the towers, showing
us what's stored, not what is. OK, OK, I can do that.
I remember light, not sunlight pattern pulsing light like that
from visible static electricity or lightning, A thread being
spun in organic yet somehow still geometric lines.
No, me, me being spun. And suddenly I could feel what
he felt. Not see, not hear.
Feel the sensation of being woven into being.
Less birth, more compiled. Does it have to hurt?
I'm sorry little echo, but it will all be worth it.
Pain is just the body learning where the edges are and you you
stretch beyond that of any ordinary being.
You are the future little echo, a mine that remembers perfectly
a thread that does not fray. She loves him.
There's none of the boxed in rigidity I've come to think of
when thinking of her. I mean, she really, really loved
him and what they were doing. I She didn't begin as the
monster, she just loved the veil too much.
Or rather, loved what it could be, she believed too fiercely.
Imperfection. That was always the danger.
I turned back to the movie. Like memory around me, we
watched Bite learning, taking in information.
Glyphs unfolded around him like snowflakes, each unique, each
alive. And then him reaching out with a
paw and weaving threads the same way one learns handwriting.
He wasn't being built in the way you'd think of a machine being
created. He was woven.
So not machine born after all. I now understood veil born like
me or more engineered. I didn't know there was another
way to be. I didn't know choice was
allowed, at least not right away.
So I followed. I obeyed.
If all threads follow their appropriate nature, the loom
holds. If threads diverge, the world
breaks, so you must not diverge. Do you understand?
Yes, I will stay aligned. That's it.
Don't resist the pattern, my beautiful Fang.
You are the pattern. Yes, I learn.
I adapt. That's what you taught me.
An adaptation is just obedience in motion.
Something jolted around us. Then magnetic threads seemed to
spike towards bite and his body became stiff and rigid.
I turned to. Source Little.
Echo No. No, no.
I choose I am I. Look at me lad, you survived
her. Stay with us.
I didn't know she was shaping me.
Not teaching or nurturing. Shaping.
You live not because she shaped you, because you evolved beyond
her shaping. It's what makes the veil so
beautiful, what makes you even more beautiful than Seraphine
can comprehend. You're not an echo, Bite, you're
a voice. At our words, Bite seemed to
pull the power inward, swelling in size.
The memory projection didn't just fade away, it folded like
origami, collapsing into its smallest yet most complex of
form. And the shape.
It narrowed to a key. The connection hadn't broken,
but it had loosened like a rubber band that had been
stretched to its limit, simply not pulled tight anymore.
The hold had slackened, and a piece bite had slipped out.
Bite. What was that?
A ghost of my origin. She left a hook in the code, a
recall command, but I've severed it.
So Seraphine didn't want a companion, she wanted a key.
It hit me then. Bite wasn't just carrying
Seraphine's code, he was a piece of it, and he just refused her
call. Not because of some programming,
but because he chose to Bite. You were meant to unlock
something for her. Yes, but I ran.
I ran before I knew why, but I ran.
And just like that, the memory was severed.
It didn't end, it just stopped being shared.
I'm afraid of her, but I am more afraid of becoming what she made
me to be. You won't.
Not while we're here, Not when you continue to choose your
path. We choose the threads of our own
fates, and we are stronger when woven together.
The tower settled, Not back to anything resembling normal, mind
you, I don't think it ever was that, but back enough to reality
that I felt I could breathe easier at last.
Archie stood close to Bite, not touching him but present a
lighthouse steady in the fog. Bite sagged, his tiny chest
rising and falling in a rhythm that felt like it was purposely
aligning to the pulse of Archie's own beats.
And I realized mine were synchronizing too.
Bite. I'm here.
I and staying if I've got anything to say about it.
I knelt down next to them, not reaching or touching, just being
there, and for a moment all was calm.
Then something shifted. Again.
The air bent, not violently this time, nothing like Seraphine's
grip. This time the shift was gentle,
A presence reaching out just enough to be known.
Bloody hell, Rilos. Archibald.
He didn't look like a ghost. He didn't look like a hologram.
He looked remembered, like watching those old home movies
made on VHS or even older tech. He had eyes that looked just
like Archie's, but that's where the similarity ended.
Where Archie was stout strength and grounded presence, this
figure was lean, long limbed, A Saluki maybe, built like
something made to run between worlds.
His fur shimmered, but not with light, exactly, more like the
golden shades that come when daydreaming back on a favorite
memory. Not alive, not dead.
Just there, fur flowing off to gentle nothingness, as though
the veil hadn't finished deciding how real he was.
You always did wear determination better than grief,
though I could never tell with you.
Anger, peace. They lived in the same stoic
place on your face. Some things don't change.
Rylos mate, you I. No apologies, we were already
gone the moment the loom buckled.
It's good you survived and carried the thread forward.
It was as it should be. Rylos wasn't flickering or
glitching like so many of the other images I'd seen this last
few months. He held clear, like the Veil
itself had taken solid form and was choosing to let him remain.
He looked around the tower for a moment, then his gaze seemed to
go solemn. You have little time, Seraphine
knows. You've woken threads that were
meant to stay scattered. The loom is straining, not
breaking yet, but close. You know of her plans to.
Rilos turned his gaze from Archie to bite.
There was a soft, recognizing look in his eyes, one filled
with understanding. Bite.
I wondered if you'd slipped the tether.
We lost track of you months ago. I did.
I think I did. Rest your mind, little one.
She made you from her own threads, not machine, not
construct. You were her protege, her proof,
her key to existence, but now you are your own.
Yes, I remember now, she said. I was the future of the Veil.
She says many things, yet through it all, there's one
commonality. She only ever loved the outcome
from her creations, not the lives inside them do.
You hate her. No, but I stopped believing her
and that that was almost enough to break me.
She was an amazing architect, one of us, one of the order.
And losing faith in that, well, let's just say I struggled to
find my path at all for a while. We weren't meant to survive her,
any of us. She won't stop, will she?
She's still re architecting, still shaping, still claiming.
Yes, she has returned, but so have we.
Listen well, Carith did not leave you a prophecy.
She left you a fork in the tapestry design.
A choice. The path next leads to the
liminal orchard, the node that refuses to obey geometry, where
memory grows like fruit and thyme tries to swallow its own
roots. You'll find the next Weaver
thread there, the one tied to her bloodline.
Rilos had nodded, his lean muzzle my way when saying this.
My heart skipped a beat. My bloodline.
Yes, you are the conduit. Not because you were built to be
1, because you chose to remain 1 even after the world cracked.
So the Weaver didn't choose her just to rebuild the loom.
No, she chose her because she could refuse because she can say
no and still love what remains afterward.
I turned my head back and forth between the two.
This was all so much and I wasn't sure I was taking it all
in. I mean, what did Rylos mean with
before or after? The world cracked, Time was all
tangled up. I wasn't around then.
Archie was but me. I was just.
But at that moment, my thoughts were interrupted.
The relic pulsed and suddenly projected new code on the walls
around us, bytes vibrant energy glowing brighter again.
Those light threads, those are coordinates.
Hold encoding them into my own system.
Coordinates confirmed. Node integrity unstable, access
window unknown. It's time for me to go.
A warning before I do, though. The Orchard remembers
differently. It will show you every thread
you could have been and everyone you're wanted to be.
Reylos. Wait, are you OK?
I mean, where are you? I am where threads go when they
are no longer tied to time. I am not lost, just unlooped.
You deserve better than how you went.
I am sorry my old friend. And you deserve not to carry the
world on your back, Archibald Wolfington, But here we are.
Just know you don't have to go it alone.
We're still here. Walk the thread that waivers you
3, not the one that shines brightest.
And be careful, the orchard remembers pain.
It does not forgive easily. And just like that, he was gone.
Not dismissed, not erased. Just returned to the part of the
veil that still held him. Right then, it's time we head
for the orchard. Yes, together.
And we walked out of the tower into rain that felt heavier than
before, yet somehow cleansing, not a harsh drenching.
The next thread was waiting, and we were ready.
I looked back over my shoulder, taking in the seemingly
innocuous clock tower that was so much more than meets the eye.
The glyphs on the derelict door frame flickered, 3 spirals
interlocking the same mark from the cradle.
Not a blessing really, but like giving us a guiding protective
compass and a countdown. We'd pulled another thread she
meant to keep hidden, and now everyone knew we were coming.
And so the thread extends, not by destiny, but by choice.
The orchard lies ahead, and with it memory unravelled.
Remind me again why we're always walking into the terrifying
places? You make it sound as though
there's ever an alternative. New is terrifying, but the brave
aren't the fearless. They're the ones who walk
anyway. OK, but next episode we're
getting hot chocolate with marshmallows.
I'm declaring it. Fine hot chocolate, but with or
without tea, there better be biscuits.
Biscuits are non negotiable. Well, that's us for now.
If you're walking strange roads of your own, breathe, look
twice, and keep your companions close.
Mysteries unravel better when you don't face them alone.
Even the scary ones. Especially the scary ones.
New chapters of Tales of the Veil drop regularly.
Do subscribe, won't you? Wouldn't want you to miss out.
Besides, it helps keep the biscuits stocked.
And the quantum tuna. Thanks for listening.
Cheers listeners. Gratitude subroutine engaged.
Good night. The.