Chapter 11: The Shattering Veil
There are voices that don't whisper.
They scream.
Raen heard them when he slept. When he breathed. When he blinked too long.
After killing the First General and consuming the sea of nameless memories, his soul no longer echoed with silence. It was a battlefield. Each thought belonged to hundreds of voices. They wept, begged, cursed. They showed him flashes of wives hanged by divine decree, villages burned for not praying, infants taken and turned into seers with no tongues.
And all of it... lived in him now.
The Bleeding Tree had warned him of this.
Consume too much, and the devourer becomes what he eats.
---
Lyra noticed it first.
The twitch in his left eye. The long pauses before he spoke. The way he stood still for hours, staring at things that weren't there.
"Raen," she whispered one morning, when the sun bled gold across the cursed valley, "you're talking in your sleep. Names. So many names."