EPISODE 4: THE VERTICAL SINS OF VELDRAKE ## Chapter One: The Wound That Had Learned to Stand The Shroudlands did not welcome travelers; they inhaled them. Selene Veyra felt the change the moment the wagon—still impossibly rolling on axles that should have snapped three leagues ago—crossed the invisible seam where the world remembered its own name. The air thickened, not with mist, but with the sour-sweet perfume of wet vellum left too long beneath a corpse’s tongue. Every breath tasted of ink that had not yet decided whether to be blood. Behind them, the howls of the ink-wights had thinned to a patient, papery rasp, as though the monsters had learned the virtue of restraint. They no longer needed to chase. The land itself had begun to conspire. Captain Torin Vale rode at the head of their ragged procession, shoulders squared beneath a cloak that had once borne the royal crest of Aetheris. Now the crest bled downward in slow black tears, the crowned stag dissolving into nothing more than antlers floating in void. He kept one gauntleted hand on the reins and the other on the hilt of a sword that no longer remembered how to sing. “Eyes high,” he said, voice low and scarred. “The ground lies.” Lirael the Unremembered sat beside Selene in the wagon’s bed,...