The Darkened Veil

by K. D. Wren

  Chapter 13

  The walk back to the portal chamber took me a long time. I got turned around more than once. I felt numb. The events of the past couple of days felt unreal, like a dream. And yet, I had felt more alive than I could ever remember. I had never sought out dangerous activities. I had been skydiving once, for my eighteenth birthday, but that was about it. This was something else. I felt like I would be exhilarated, if I wasn’t so tired I could fall asleep on my feet. What was going on with me? I had just killed a man, well, kind of a man, and I was almost proud of myself.

  I reached the portal chamber in the dark. Luckily, this world had a large moon which cast a silver light through the circular aperture in the ceiling. I walked along the frozen archways and looked for something that reminded me of the Inter-Realm. Finally, I saw something. A scene with two moons. A mass of varied creatures all woven together in one group. It seemed a solid bet. Of course, I still had no idea how to open it. There were no obvious buttons or symbols to press. I looked over every inch, but there were no clues. I placed my hands on the wall under the arch and leaned into it. I dropped my head between my shoulders and closed my eyes. I pictured Finbahir, Herje, and the bridge by the lake. I tried to imagine myself standing there, watching the moonlight ripple on the little wavelets.

  The wall was gone. I lost my balance and tumbled forward. The now familiar chill flashed across my skin and I landed hard on my shoulder. I could feel long, soft blades of grass against my cheek. I breathed in the smell of green life. Smiling, I rolled over onto my back and saw the two moons set amongst the unfamiliar stars. Then I heard a sound like the heavy breath of a horse. I looked around me. I saw a set of four hooved legs. I followed the legs upward as they transitioned into a muscular human torso. Large, hairy arms crossed a massive chest below a bearded, frowning face. The ground trembled as a dozen more centaurs cantered up to where I lay. I was surrounded.

  The first centaur growled something at me. His voice was rough and deep. I pulled the book from my pocket.

  “How did you come here?”

  “I…I, uh, came through the portal.”

  “That portal has been closed for decades. No one comes through there.”

  “I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know how I got there in the first place. It was an accident.”

  The centaurs murmured among themselves. The book was unable to distinguish any one voice and so it remained blank. But the tone of their discussion was plain enough. I began to feel uneasy.

  A flash of light whizzed past my eyes. I scooted back a few feet, almost into the legs of one of the centaurs behind me. The light spun about the circle of horsemen and then stopped in the middle. Iridessa. She started yelling at them, flying up into the face of their leader. I was too amazed by the spectacle to even worry about trying to read what she was telling them. But whatever it was, the effect was immediate. The centaurs trotted off down a grassy hill. Iridessa flitted in front of my face, pleased with herself. I thanked her profusely and she gave a little curtsey in mid-air.

  I picked myself up and tried to dust the dirt and grass off my clothes. A futile effort. Across the field, I saw a tall, lean, dark-haired figure loping towards me. It was Finbahir. When he got close, a wide grin split his stoic face and he swept me up in a tight embrace.

  “Skylar, I am so pleased to see you alive. When the djinn attacked you in your apartment, I thought you were gone for good.”

  “I nearly was.”

  “You will have to tell us everything. Herje was frantic. She has been searching from realm to realm without stop since you disappeared.”

  “I promise, I will give you the whole story, but only after a bath and a long nap. And then, I want to start my training.”

  Finbahir smiled and then nodded to Iridessa, who led me across the field, past the myriad creatures of every realm, to my new room, to a new life, to a new world.

  Preview of The Darkened Veil - Part Two

  The Darkened Veil continues as Skylar begins her training. But life as a TRIP trainee is not what she expected. In order to succeed, she will have to draw on powers she didn’t know existed. And she will have to face a choice: continue facing the perils of fantastical monsters and worse, or leave it all behind and go back to the safety of the life she knew before.

  Chapter 1

  A gust of wind pelted my cheeks with fine grains of sand and ragged little pieces of gritty rock. The breeze brought no relief from the heat radiating off the amphitheater of orange stone surrounding me on three sides. Instead, it was like opening the door to an oven. What little moisture remained in my mouth evaporated before I could finish inhaling my next breath. I blinked away the particles of dust from my eyes, trying to will some lubrication from my clogged and dried up tear ducts. I wanted to rub them, but I knew it would just make things worse. Of all the realms I had been to as part of my Veilwalker training, this was definitely the most unpleasant.

  The first few weeks as a TRIP trainee were magical, but my life had settled into a slog. A steady rhythm of lectures, combat training, and veilwalking. Of course, the fact that I wasn’t any good at any of it made each day that much more difficult. Finbahir had told me that most veilwalkers were identified young, but that fact hadn’t hit home until I got into my first training class. I felt like it was my first day of college again, but instead of Intro to Biology, I had walked into a graduate course on differential equations. For the most part, I tried to keep my head down and listen, but when it came time for practical lessons, there was nowhere to hide.

  So, there I was, not hiding, standing in front of the whole group of trainees, trying to keep my eyes open against the furnace wind. A buda paced back and forth across my narrowed field of vision, about twenty meters in front of me. Its dense, spotted fur rippled in the gusts. At least seven feet tall if it stood up straight, it walked with a hunch, its heavily muscled arms hung to just above the ground; thick, curved claws drawing little trails in the coarse dirt. Red eyes stared right at me, never shifting, even as the creature stalked back and forth. Buda, or werehyenas, had always sounded terrifying in the folktales of Ethiopia, but seeing one in the flesh was another thing. Why had I volunteered for this? In the classroom, I had answered every question correctly. I knew everything about these creatures. When Baev asked me if I wanted to put my knowledge to practice, I should have declined, but I felt too embarrassed to say no.

  According to what I had read, buda were often associated with blacksmiths. They were supposed to be men who used magic to turn themselves into beasts and feed on the living or, in some stories, to dig up corpses and eat the dead. The latter tale was also linked to anti-Semitism, as many Jews in the Horn of Africa were blacksmiths and the target of accusations of grisly conduct. The creature treading the sand in front of me was not a Jew, Christian, or anything else. In reality, buda were not men changed into beasts or beasts changed into men. They were their own creatures. The tales of transformation were primarily slander.

  The buda snorted, a deep guttural sound reverberating above the hiss of wind driven grains of sand. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. For some reason, my first response to fear was to retreat into intellectualizations. I guess it was a way to get out of the moment, to wall off the overwhelming emotion of the present.

  I steadied myself, setting my feet on a bit of solid rock. I would have to be able to move quickly in any direction. Buda were fast and agile. They were also extremely resilient and immune to most forms of magic. Not that the latter was an issue. Despite the assurances of my instructors, I had yet to exhibit any hint of magical ability. Apart from veilwalking, I was just an average human. Which, in most realms, made me slow, weak, and fragile. Not the best qualities when going face to face with the terrifying mass of teeth, claws, and muscle in front of me.

  I shook out the fine silver net, making sure that it was free of tangles. Silver was not as effective against a buda as it would be against a werewolf, but it would slow it down. I looked behind me at the
faces of my fellow trainees. Most were impassive. There were some I was sure wanted to see me fail miserably. Some probably would be happy to watch the buda tear me to pieces. Anti-human sentiment ran strong in some of the realms. But Tevita gave me a smile. Tevita was a Veli. She was small, with thick, woolly hair that she kept in pigtails. Her nut-brown skin glowed when she smiled, which was often. She was my only real friend among the trainees.

  Tevita’s grin faded and fear blossomed in her large, almond shaped eyes. I spun around to see the buda charging. Cursing myself for turning away from it for even a moment, I tensed my body. It covered the distance in a few gallops. Even though it was primarily bipedal, it could run on all fours, the thick claws on its hands tearing deep gouges even in this harsh terrain. In an instant, it was on me. I tossed the silver net at its feet and dove to the side. By the time I rolled back onto my feet and faced the creature again, it had disentangled itself. Tossing the net aside contemptuously, it turned to face me again. I stood there, weaponless and clueless as to what to do next. I was frozen with fear. The buda charged again.

  A shadow passed in front of the sun, obscuring its harsh, white light. A giant crow, so black it seemed to drain the light around it, dropped out of the sky and landed between me and the charging creature. In a puff of dark purple smoke, the giant bird disappeared and in its place stood a tall woman, dressed in a form-fitting coat of black feathers arrayed like armor. Her skin was so pale, only her bright blue eyes gave any indication that she was in a world of color at all. She raised her hand at the charging creature and uttered a blood-curdling scream. Even though I was not the target of the cry, I felt my bowels turn to ice. Baev’s cry is fear. The hulking, clawed, slavering buda was reduced to a quivering mass at her feet, its fierce, clawed hands covering its face.

  Baev calmly walked over and retrieved the silver net, gently placing it over the buda’s cowering form. Then she turned to me. The look in her eyes frightened me more than the growling buda huddled under the shining netting. Baev was a demanding teacher. Her high, pointed cheekbones and long, narrow nose accented her aquiline features, but it was her eyes that were the most unsettling. When they focused on you, it felt like she could peer into everything you thought hidden or secret.

  “What did you do wrong?”

  I stared down at my feet, not wanting to meet her eyes.

  “I looked away. I lost focus.”

  “True, that was foolish. This creature requires full attention. Especially for you. But that was not your biggest mistake.” Baev looked at me expectantly. I spun the scenario back in my head, trying to uncover any other errors. I was at a loss. She turned to the rest of the trainees. “Skylar is dead, torn to pieces by a buda. Why?”

  A dozen heads looked around at each other, none daring to offer a wrong answer. I looked them over, the faces of creatures that had leapt out of books and into my world. Or had I leapt into theirs? Tevita’s little shoulders gave a shrug and she cocked her head to one side.

  “She should have had a better weapon? Something to wound or disable the buda before she tried to net it?”

  “She could have, yes. But, why? Are we supposed to harm a creature when it is not necessary?”

  “No,” the class murmured.

  “No. Injuring or killing a target creature is acceptable only if there is no other option, and she had other options.” Baev waited patiently for someone to speak. Finally, she sighed. “She should not have volunteered. As an agent of TRIP, you have to know your limits. Your lives, and the lives of others, will depend on knowing your strengths,” she turned her head to me, her bright blue eyes focused down her avian nose, burning a hole right into me, “and your weaknesses.”

  I felt like I had been punched in the gut. All of the disappointments of the past few weeks, all of the failures and humiliations, all came rushing up into my throat, choking off my breath. Despite the desiccating wind, I felt tears well up in my eyes. I had never felt more useless. I wasn’t strong like Orag the ogre, or fast like Chireana the centaur. I had no magical talents like Tevita or Saira the faery. Even Conor, the only other human I had met apart from Doctor Orban, had extraordinary senses and was a skilled hunter and trapper. I couldn’t fight, couldn’t hunt, couldn’t do magic. I could barely even control my veilwalking.

  Mercifully, Baev did not elaborate further. She ordered us back to the Inter-realm and returned to the nightmarish creature that still lay quivering under the silver net. I saw her squat down next to it, entirely unconcerned, and lift the net. Then I stepped through the Veil, felt the familiar flash of cold, and I was in the courtyard of my building.

  I stood there for a few moments, lost in thought. What was I even doing here? I remember when I was in eighth grade, my family moved in the middle of the school year. The math class in my new school was way ahead of the one I had been struggling in all year. I felt lost, hopelessly behind. It was like they were speaking a totally different language. But that was nothing compared to what I felt now. Even though the Common language was fairly easy to learn, I still felt like a foreigner.

  A hand touched my shoulder and I spun around, my heart racing. I was still jumpy from the encounter with the buda. But it was just Eachan. Eachan was a kelpie, or at least that’s one of the names for his kind. Stories of water-horses can be found in dozens of human cultures. Some of the tales were true: he could appear as a man or a horse and he was incredibly strong. But in most stories, kelpies were regarded as malevolent creatures, dragging children and young women to watery deaths. Eachan was nice, almost gentle. He was tall and broad shouldered. His coal black curly hair hung down to his shoulders and always appeared slightly damp, as if he’d just toweled off from a swim.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.” He paused, apparently expecting me to say something back, but I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to think of what to say. “Try not to get down on yourself, Skylar. Everyone here was new once, you will figure it out.”

  “Oh, what do you know about it? It's all so easy for you. You’re strong and fast and have been doing magic since you were a…foal or whatever. You have no idea what I’m going through.” I instantly regretted my outburst. I didn’t even know where it had come from. Eachan was always kind to me. Tevita said he was into me, but if so, he wasn’t doing a good job of showing it. Though he was good looking enough, in his human form, I wasn’t about to complicate my life any further by entertaining any romantic interest from a guy who was a horse half the time. But regardless, he didn’t deserve to be the object of my own frustrations and self-doubt.

  I felt awful for what I’d said, but the pity I saw in his eyes just made me angrier. I didn’t want to be pitied. I hated feeling weak, clumsy, slow, and ignorant. The fact that my instructors and some of my classmates like Eachan and Tevita were so convinced that I had some hidden talent, that I was something more than what I had shown so far, made my failures that much more galling.

  Sometimes I thought my only special skill was in deconstructing my feelings. But that wasn’t some gift; it was just the product of the countless hours my parents made me sit with the counselor. Not a lot of help when it came to dealing with creatures that counselor had helped me convince myself didn’t exist.

  Chapter 2

  My room was on the third floor of an elegant tower overlooking the long lake. I stared out the window and watched the moonlight play on the ripples and wavelets running across the surface as the evening breeze came down from the hills above the city. I had been living in the Inter-realm for nearly three months, but I still hadn’t gotten over the sense of wonder. The moon, far larger or closer than the one on Earth, lit up the curving, disordered streets below with a bright silver light. The buildings were arranged with little order, each styled in a unique architecture, as if each realm had arrived and plopped down a building of their own in a random location. The effect was disorienting and captivating at the same time. There was something living and organic in the flow of the city.

  I followe
d the road that hugged the lakeshore as it turned into a tall, arcing bridge and I thought back to my first conversation with Finbahir. I wondered whether my initial instincts were correct. He seemed convinced that I was going to make it as a TRIP agent, but everything I had experienced over the past few months had demonstrated that I was not cut out for it. I got lucky with the djinn, mainly because he was overconfident. That didn’t make me some kind of warrior. Every one of my fellow trainees were better than I was, TRIP didn’t need me. If I just went back home, maybe all of this would just go away.

  I shook my head. No, none of this would just go away. I had been attacked, twice, when I was home on Earth. The Opener of Ways, Lord Vepramet wanted me for some reason and was probably not going to stop just because two of his agents had been killed. If anything, it would just make him angrier. I was being pulled between two forces I didn’t understand. Both of whom placed some kind of value on me that I was pretty sure I didn’t deserve, and I was certain I didn’t want. Hopefully Finbahir would be convinced he was wrong about me by my continued embarrassments in training, but how could I show the Opener of Ways that I wasn’t the one he wanted? Especially when I didn’t know why he wanted me at all?

  A knock on the door took me out of my reverie. Tevita opened the door and walked in without waiting for permission. She always reminded me of a little girl with her short stature and her hair in pigtails. I had to remind myself that she was the same age as me and considerably more powerful. Not that she ever made a point to remind me of that, she was constantly friendly, encouraging, and supportive. To the point of being annoying. It was difficult to wallow in self-pity when she was pulling me up all the time.