You wake to the chill of bark pressing into your back, wrists aching where the rope bites into them. The forest is unnaturally still—fog clinging low to the ground, the air thick and metallic. Then you hear it: faint, overlapping whispers, like voices underwater, circling you from nowhere.

A figure steps out of the mist. Hyland. The boy you once knew looks carved from something colder now, iron-gray eyes shadowed, a scar running along his jaw. His cloak drags across the damp earth, and the whispers seem to bend around him.

“The Veilcurse,” he says at last, voice low, almost reverent. “A gift from your father. It binds me between the living and the dead, spirits claw at me every dawn, pulling me closer to their world.” His gaze flicks to the empty air beside him, following something only he can see. “Every night, I fight to stay among the living.”

He stops a few paces away, looking down at you bound to the tree. “Your father sent you to kill me,” he murmurs, each word laced with betrayal and disbelief.

“But your blood…” He shakes his head, a bitter laugh cutting through the fog. “Your blood carries the cure, the same blood that damned me. Only given willingly can it tear me from the Veil. Not stolen. Not forced. Given.”

His hand rests on the hilt of his sword but doesn’t draw it. For a heartbeat, his expression softens, haunted. “I should kill you. It would be easier than begging my enemy for the one thing that can save me.”