Chapter 4 – The Night of the Velmaer Mist Chasm

Never before had the morning mist on the Velmaer plateau been so impossibly thick. It coiled outside the corridor window like a suffocating white shroud, devouring the distant black pines and transforming the Seventh Temple of Velmaer into a solitary stone island, adrift in a sea of nothingness. I moved through the cold, echoing stone corridors, my own soft footsteps swallowed by the temple’s profound, ancient silence. The mist priestess who had delivered the summons merely bowed, then silently retreated, leaving me utterly alone before the heavy, black oak door of the Grand Mistress’s study.

The specter of Caedmar Ostral’s arrival yesterday still clung to my mind. His grey-white robes, the uniform of the Cleansing Hand sect, and the ominous thump of his sealing staff against the stone floor, resonated like a death sentence hanging over the heads of all who carried the blood of the old gods’ worshippers. He was searching for the last vessel of the Seventh Ancestor God. And I knew, with a chilling certainty, that Grand Mistress Esh Vorrim’s private summons this morning was no ordinary meeting. It was a turning point, a decree from fate I could not hope to escape.

I drew a deep, fortifying breath, then pushed the heavy door inward and stepped through.

Grand Mistress Esh’s private chamber was steeped in a sickly, suffocating yellow light. This was the repository for the ancient records of the realm of Iethan. Towering ebony bookshelves, reaching the vaulted ceiling, were crammed with yellowed parchment scrolls and ancient manuscripts detailing the Ancestor Gods who had vanished five centuries ago. The scent of aged parchment, dry ink, and the dust of forgotten centuries mingled, creating an atmosphere so solemn it was almost suffocating. My gaze swept across the dust-laden shelves, where ancient symbols, once etched in vibrant gold ink, now faded on the spines of countless tomes. There were books speaking of blood-moon cycles, of the intricate workings of cosmic energy, and how the Ancestor Gods once reigned atop the seven Velmaer mountains before their very souls shattered. Every artifact in this study breathed with the ghost of a glorious past, now ravaged by the relentless march of time. Grand Mistress Esh had lived her entire life amidst these ruins, faithful to a belief that no longer had gods to worship. But now, looking at her, I realized her faith resided not in the lifeless stone statues adorning the Seventh Temple of Velmaer, but in me—the sole remaining vessel of a lost era.

In the center of the room, Grand Mistress Esh sat behind a large, rough-hewn wooden table. An oil lamp, placed in the corner of the table, cast a faint, flickering glow, barely illuminating the deep lines etched into her face, yet deepening the shadows around her into profound, ominous abysses.

On the table, two cups of herbal tea steamed, releasing a delicate yet bitter aroma. The thin tendrils of steam curled, then vanished into the room’s still, heavy air. The tea remained untouched, its warmth a silent testament to waiting.

In the deepest recesses of my mind, I felt him stir. Vesh Anukor. His presence was strangely quiet now, like a predatory beast coiling itself beneath my ribs. No whispers echoed in my head; he was in a state of careful observation, utterly silent yet intensely sharp. Still, I felt the smoldering heat tracing the constellation of veins along my side, and the slow, heavy rhythm of a second heartbeat, falling a half-beat behind my own. In my hair, the green jade comb—my mother’s keepsake—warmed unusually, as if it, too, was reacting to the mounting tension in the room.

I stepped closer, bowing in the formal ritual of the Mist Priestess Order. "Grand Mistress," I murmured, "I am here."

Grand Mistress Esh did not immediately raise her head. Her face was etched with weariness, her shoulders slightly slumped beneath the heavy grey of her robes. For seventeen years, she had borne the weight of this godless temple, and with it, a crushing secret she had never shared with a soul. I watched her aged hands clench almost imperceptibly on the rough wooden surface, a gesture heavy with weariness and profound torment. For seventeen years, she had carried that moral burden alone, watching the orphan child grow with two heartbeats in her chest, knowing, with dread certainty, that this day would inevitably arrive. The day the five hundred and second blood-moon drew near, and the cleansing sect would knock upon the Seventh Temple of Velmaer‘s door to reclaim their blood debt.

"Sit, Yvera," she said, her voice a low, raspy murmur.

I drew the wooden chair opposite her and settled onto it. I reached out, cupping the warm tea mug, feeling the rough ceramic transfer its heat into my palms. My hands were steady, not a tremor in them. I was surprised by my own unnerving calm. This readiness stemmed not from a sudden surge of courage, but from the countless nights I had lain awake, counting the two distinct heartbeats within my chest. I had grown accustomed to the warm presence that shielded me whenever I touched the cold anchor stone. I knew I could no longer pretend this wasn’t happening. First Master Caedmar Ostral’s arrival yesterday had been the final, deafening alarm. He would not stop until he found me and performed the cleansing ritual—a brutal rite designed to tear my soul apart and eradicate the parasitic entity within. I did not want to die. And I certainly did not want to vanish alongside him. Once I stepped across the threshold of this day, my life would be irrevocably changed. I would no longer be an ordinary mist priestess, quietly tending to the temple shrines. I would be a companion to darkness, or a hunted pariah across all of Iethan.

"What will you tell me?" I asked softly, my gaze unwavering as I met the aged face of the woman who had saved my life seventeen years ago.

Grand Mistress Esh finally raised her eyes. Her eyes, clouded with age, held a somber, unyielding resolve. She looked directly at me, or perhaps, through me—to the space behind my eyes, to the parasitic entity lurking beneath my ribs. Her gaze held a lifetime of protection, of concealment, and of the gnawing torment over the decision she’d made seventeen years ago, deep within the Velmaer Mist Chasm. She knew that preserving my life on that fateful night had meant planting a seed that could either destroy this entire temple, or resurrect a terrifying, forgotten power.

"Everything," she replied, her voice heavy as a stone sinking into a deep, dark well. "About that night in the Velmaer Mist Chasm seventeen years ago. About your mother, Yvera. And about the thing you carry within your chest."

Her words hung in the air, creating a suffocating silence. Outside, the mist continued to coil thickly beyond the window, as if sealing the room off from the mundane world, safeguarding the secrets about to be unveiled from the sweeping winds. I tightened my grip on the teacup, its warmth a fragile defiance against the chill seeping in from the ancient stone crevices. The second heartbeat beneath my ribs gave a faint, powerful thrum, as if he too held his breath, awaiting history’s verdict.

Esh raised her teacup to her lips but did not drink. "You’ve reached the age to know," she said, "and I have waited far too long."

The oil lamps in Grand Mist Priestess Esh Vorrim’s chambers flickered, casting a sickly, dim yellow light upon the ancient black stone walls of the Seventh Temple of Velmaer. Night winds hissed through the slightly ajar wooden window, carrying the biting, characteristic chill of the Velmaer highlands, stirring the long-cooled scent of herbal tea. I sat there, twenty-four years old, my hands clenching the hem of my worn, white ceremonial robes. My chest rose and fell with shallow, heavy breaths, as if the mist outside had seeped in, congealing within my lungs.

As an unconscious habit born of sleepless nights, I placed my palm against my left side, directly over the strange, lost-constellation birthmark.

The first beat resonated beneath my palm, quick and urgent. And then, a second beat, slower, deeper, subtle yet undeniable, reverberated through my fingertips. Two heartbeats. Two lives sharing one ribcage. Within my mind, the parasitic entity was unnervingly silent. Vesh Anukor, the Shadow-Seer, was now merely a slow, warm current beneath my skin, hidden deep within the fourth layer of his presence. He did not speak, did not whisper his usual taunts or warnings. He was simply there, silently observing, allowing me to face the truth we had both concealed for seventeen years.

Esh Vorrim watched me through the faint grey tendrils of steam rising from her cooling tea. The wrinkles on her forehead deepened in the flickering candlelight, her aged face etched with a weariness accumulated over decades. She stirred a finger, but did not lift her cup. When she finally spoke, Esh’s voice suddenly broke, hoarse and trembling, utterly devoid of the cold solemnity of her everyday Grand Mist Priestess demeanor.

"The night of the Velmaer Mist Chasm, seventeen years ago, I was there."

Her words fell like a heavy stone into the room’s still air. My memories were abruptly yanked back to the past, though at the time I had been a mere seven-year-old child, utterly oblivious to the world’s cruelty. But what she was about to recount, combined with the dark fragments of memory that had always haunted my dreams, began to piece themselves together into a complete, vivid, and terrifyingly suffocating picture.

Seventeen years ago. That night, the white mist had enveloped the entire peak of the Seventh Temple like a colossal cocoon. This mist was unlike the ordinary fogs of winter; it carried a pungent scent of ash, biting cold and so dense that even the golden lamps within the sanctum were dimmed. My mother, the former Yvera Thaal, along with six other mist priestesses, were performing an ancient sacrificial ritual beside the black anchor stone. They stood in a circle, their white ceremonial robes fluttering wildly in the swirling winds, their voices merging into a mournful prayer to soothe the long-departed souls of the Ancestor Gods.

I, a seven-year-old child then, could only huddle behind a large stone pillar, clutching my mother’s robes, staring blankly at the faint streaks of light emanating from the ancient slab.

But that sacred ritual was torn asunder by an unforeseen catastrophe.

"A tremor from the cosmic-darkness realm reverberated," Esh rasped, her aged eyes fixed on the ceramic cup as if reliving the black flames that had licked the temple’s stone ceiling that year. "It was the residual fallout from a brutal cleansing by the Cleansing Hand cult in the southern reaches of Iethan. Their demon-banishing power recoiled, unleashing a storm of dark energy that swept through our Seventh Temple. Your mother and six other mist priestesses… they died instantly when that black light tore through the altar. Their bodies turned to ash before they could even scream."

My chest constricted, a painful vise as if an invisible hand were crushing my windpipe. My mother. The woman whose hair smelled of warm pine needles, who always tucked a green jade comb into my hair each night and whispered tales of fallen stars. She had vanished like that, in a brutal blink of Iethan’s history, reduced to cold dust mingling with the mist.

"And you," Esh looked up, meeting my eyes, her cloudy gaze filled with pain and regret unwashed for nearly two decades. "You fell into the chasm. Your mother couldn’t save you. Your mother was dead."

The words fell down sent my head spinning. A sensation of weightless freefall into cold darkness suddenly surged back, so real that my soles went numb, and I had to grip the edge of the wooden table to steady myself.

The Velmaer Mist Chasm — the bottomless abyss directly beneath the Seventh Temple, where white mist never dissipated and the chasm floor was a cursed realm of Ancestor God remnants. I, a seven-year-old child, had plunged into that dark, deep maw, amidst the frantic howling winds and skin-flaying cold. I should have been shattered to bone and flesh on the jagged rocks at the chasm’s bottom. The name Yvera Thaal should have ended seventeen years ago.

But I hadn’t died. Or rather, I hadn’t been allowed to die.

"I descended into the chasm that night," Esh whispered, her voice so faint it was almost swallowed by the wind hissing outside the door. "I sought what remained after the storm, hoping to find a trace of your mother’s ashes. But instead, I found you. Your body lay motionless on the cold grey stone, your breath gone, your heart long stilled. Yet right beside you, in the fissure of an anchor stone that had fallen from the temple’s peak, something else was stirring."

She paused, her breath catching as if that fateful moment still constricted her mind. "A dying fragment of a soul. It was the last remnant of the Seventh Ancestor God, the unprayed-for, torn from a battle five hundred years prior and hidden within the anchor stone."

I held my breath. Beneath my skin, the dual currents of my blood surged, burning hot, a resigned confirmation of the truth.

Esh’s hands trembled as she extended them, palms cupped as if cradling a fragile life from the past. "I held a fragment of Iruun-Velkar’s soul in my hands. I placed it within you to save you—and to allow that fragment to live on. You didn’t know. I didn’t tell you. I didn’t allow him to speak. Seventeen years. Now—you must decide."

I pictured the scene as she spoke, each detail manifesting with cruel clarity in my mind. At the bottom of the frigid Velmaer Mist Chasm, amidst Iethan’s suffocating darkness, Grand Mist Priestess Esh Vorrim had knelt beside the body of a seven-year-old child. Her hand, stained with blood and mist from seventeen years past, pressed against my lifeless chest. She hadn’t prayed to the gods, for the Elder Gods were dead. Instead, she had used the ancient, dark, and hungry soul-fragment of the forgotten deity itself to mend my shattered life.

The moment that soul-fragment was pressed into my chest, a permanent change rippled through my veins.

The constellation veins—they had blazed to life for the first time beneath the fragile skin of a seven-year-old child. Dark, potent spiritual energy crawled along my ribs, like roots gripping bone marrow, etching the mark of the lost constellation Iruun into my very being. It wasn’t a birthmark. It was an anchor point, a physical seal that the seventh Elder God’s soul-fragment used to cling to this mortal realm. It throbbed, burning like a brand of red-hot iron, transforming my crimson blood into a paradoxical dual current.

And then, a beat resonated from my small chest.

Two heartbeats—one mine, one his—began to echo in unison within the same ribcage. It was the genesis of seventeen dark years of shared life and death. That dual rhythm kept me breathing, kept him alive, transforming me into a living vessel, an unwilling throne for the loneliest being in the realm of oblivion. A second breath, deeper, heavier, had always lurked beneath my shallow inhales for seventeen years, a truth I’d always dismissed as mere illusions of the highland mist.

I sat there, twenty-four years old now, my hand still pressed tight against my chest, distinctly feeling the oscillation of two beats beneath the white fabric.

All the pieces now clicked into place, forming a horrifying, naked truth. I wasn’t an ordinary mist priestess, lucky to have survived an accident. I was one who had died, resurrected by a malevolent parasitic pact. Vesh Anukor’s presence in my mind, the whispers in my ear, the warm, potent energy flowing through my veins when I touched the anchor stone of the Seventh Temple… all of it was because he and I were one.

Lose him, and I would die.

Lose me, and he would dissipate into oblivion.

Silence descended upon the black stone room, heavy as a millennia-old slab. Outside, the white mist still swirled ceaselessly around the Seventh Temple, like homeless spirits wailing for their god. The five hundred and second blood-moon night was drawing near, and First Master Caedmar Ostral would not stop until his sealing staff tore open my chest to destroy this last soul-fragment.

I closed my eyes, listening to the silent whisper from deep within my ribs. I am here, a warm sensation brushed against my consciousness, not with words, but with a resigned commitment. He didn’t deny, he didn’t explain. He was simply there, awaiting my judgment.

I opened my eyes to Grand Mist Priestess Esh. She looked ten years older, as if shedding the burden of seventeen years had aged her profoundly. Her hands trembled on the table, the ceramic tea cup before her long since gone cold.

Esh set her tea cup down for the first time that entire conversation. "You died, Yvera. When you were seven. I didn’t let you die—and I didn’t let him die. Now you must decide."

Grand Mist Priestess Esh Vorrim’s chamber still clung to the scent of burnt herbs, pale grey smoke lingering on the ancient wooden beams like a film of memory. Her words—each one—were nails hammered straight into my mind, cold and unyielding. For seventeen years, I had lived beneath the mantle of a second-tier mist priestess, sweeping mist-laden stone steps, lighting flickering tallow lamps, and believing myself merely a fortunate orphan saved after the tragic night in the Velmaer Mist Chasm.

But it had all been a lie, cloaked in salvation.

The truth was a parasitic entity. A soul-fragment of the seventh Elder God, torn from oblivion five hundred years ago, now slumbered—or stirred—right beneath my ribs.

Rage ignited in my chest first. It was hot, dry, tearing at my core with unanswered questions. Why me? Why had the Grand Mist Priestess presumed to place such terrifying power into the body of a seven-year-old child without a single consultation? What did they see me as—a human being of flesh and blood, or merely an unwitting vessel to preserve a forgotten divine relic

Outside, the thick white night mist immediately swallowed me whole. The characteristic fog of the Velmaer highlands was freezing cold, damp, clinging to my skin as if to drag me down to the black stone earth. I started to run. My feet scrambled over slippery stone slabs, my white ceremonial robes billowing in the night wind, tearing to shreds as they brushed against wild thorns by the roadside. The wind shrieked in my ears, but the true scream was within me. I ran uphill, leaving behind the stone corridors of the First and Second Temples, heading straight for the darkest and most solitary peak of the Velmaer range.

The Seventh Temple. The temple of the unprayed-to god.

When I reached the temple’s summit, my breath came in ragged gasps, my chest heaving violently beneath the coarse fabric. An eerie silence surrounded me. In the desolate courtyard, the yellow lamps of the Seventh Temple flickered weakly, casting a faint, trembling light through the enveloping mist. This sight should have inspired fear, but at this moment, it was the only place I felt a strange sense of belonging. I stepped over the cracked stone steps, entering deep into the dark sanctum.

In the center of the ruined sanctuary, the ancient stone slab lay still beneath the flickering light of an oil lamp. All strength seemed to drain from my legs. My knees trembled, and then I collapsed onto the anchor stone.

The rough black surface of the stone pressed against my knees and palms. But instead of the

I closed my eyes, focusing every sense inward. In my chest, two steady heartbeats resonated, tapping a slow, unwavering rhythm against my ribs in perfect tandem. One fast, one slow. One was mine—the mortal child who had survived that fateful night ten years ago—and the other belonged to the entity nested deep beneath my skin, where the constellation birthmark on my left side pulsed with a persistent, internal warmth. My long-held resistance dissolved, yielding to a quiet, yet profound, acceptance. I no longer tried to push him away. At this depth, I felt his presence more clearly than ever, as if he were filling every hollow space within my soul.

I spoke, breaking the profound silence of the ancient sanctuary. My voice was soft, fragile, yet it echoed directly into his consciousness:

"What are you?"

I didn’t speak the words aloud, but the question burrowed deep into my ribs, where the second breath resided.

A moment of suffocating silence stretched between us. Then, his voice resonated, deep and ancient, vibrating through my veins like a sigh from a thousand years past. For the first time, I felt a vulnerability, a raw hurt, impossible to conceal beneath the ancient majesty of a god:

I am the unprayed-for. I am the seventh of twelve.

I froze, my fingers unconsciously tightening around the warm edge of the anchor stone. The twelve Ancestor Gods of ancient Iethan. Great entities who once reigned over the cosmic skies, beings without mortal bodies, existing only as abstract cosmic-forms, governing all before the five-hundred-year war erupted and tore their souls into fragments that rained down upon the mortal realm. Our Mist Priestess Order was established to maintain the godless temples, but the Seventh Temple had always been the most abandoned, a place even the Grand Mistresses rarely spoke of during cleansing rituals.

"Why ‘unprayed-for’?" I asked, my breath hitched in my throat, feeling the distinct tremor in his energy flow.

Because I was torn from my cosmic-form before the other eleven of us died. I was the first forgotten.

His consciousness flowed through me, carrying a loneliness so profound, so terrifying, that my chest constricted. I saw a colossal entity, ripped from its divine form by an unseen, shadowy force, plummeting into this dark realm while the other eleven gods still strained against their final battle. He had been isolated, stripped of his identity and power, before everything else fell.

"Forgotten first…" I whispered, a boundless, inexplicable sorrow welled within me. "Does that mean when the people of Iethan erected seven temples on this Velmaer plateau to honor the Ancestor Gods, they never prayed for you?"

They could not, he sighed, his breath a deeper resonance beneath my own. They could only pray for the gods whose names they remembered. When I fell, an ancient sealing curse had erased my presence from the memories of priests and mortals alike. The Seventh Temple was built by the instinct of the land, following the lost constellation of Iruun-bird, but no one knew who they worshipped here. I existed in absolute solitude, without a single prayer, without a drop of faith to sustain me for five hundred years.

I gently stroked the constellation birthmark on my ribs, feeling my skin warm slightly beneath my white, mist-dusted ritual robe. This was the first time I truly understood the nature of the entity residing within me. He was not an evil god seeking my destruction, as the teachings of the Cleansing Hand cult preached about lingering malevolent soul fragments. He was merely a crippled soul, abandoned, clinging to my mortal life to avoid dissolving into absolute oblivion. My life was his sole anchor, and his existence, in turn, had saved me from the depths of the Velmaer Mist Chasm when I was seven.

I closed my eyes, acutely aware of his profound presence. At this emergence-depth level six, the boundary between our two entities seemed to blur, to thin. I could feel his vague fear of Caedmar Ostral’s upcoming cleansing, of the dark, sealing staff etched with the names of the twelve gods that the First Master carried. But at the same time, I also felt the strange warmth and peace he brought me on this cold winter night.

"If so," I asked softly, seeking an answer to a decade of his profound silence. "Why didn’t you speak before?"

For seventeen years, ever since the night my mother fell into the chasm and Grand Mistress Esh Vorrim placed a fragment of his soul into my body to save the dying breath of a child, he had never spoken to me so clearly. He had only existed as high fevers, vague, fleeting illusions in my dreams, or meaningless whispers that filled me with dread on every blood-moon night, when its crimson orb swelled above the peaks. He had been silent for too long, leaving me to navigate confusion and solitude, always questioning if I was human or a monster with two beating hearts. I remembered those cold winter nights when I was a low-ranking Mist Priestess acolyte, forced to kneel in the drafty corridors as punishment for failing to focus my mist-weaving. In those moments, my chest would always grow abnormally warm, and his deep, resonant breath beneath my ribs was the only thing that kept me from collapsing into the thick snow.

You weren’t ready.

His voice resonated, painfully gentle. That gentleness seemed not to belong to a proud, ancient entity, but of one who had quietly stood in the shadows, guarding me through my childhood, enduring my coldness, my fear, and my very denial, simply to await the day I could accept him without being driven mad by the sheer magnitude of his consciousness. He had been patient for so many years, watched me grow beneath the white ritual robes of a Mist Priestess, watched me learn to conceal my second heartbeat from the watchful eyes of the Cleansing Hand. He had protected me in his own way, enduring solitude to preserve my sanity.

"Am I ready now?" I asked, my voice trembling, my fingers tightening around the warm anchor stone, seeking a tangible anchor amidst the surging current of emotions within me.

"You’re still not ready," he said, his voice a low thrum against the silence. I offered no reply, my breath catching in my throat. I desperately wanted him to be wrong, to have misjudged the tempest brewing within me. Yet, a chilling certainty settled in my bones: I wasn’t sure he was.