Velsharn
Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook
The Veil (Power Level 2)
He was a sailor. Nothing more than that. A working man who knew ropes and tides and the particular silence of open water at three in the morning. He is not remembered. No monument, no grave marker — there is no grave. He went into the water somewhere in the Atlantic and the ship came home without him.
He knows he is dead. He does not know how. The memory stops at the deck at night, voices he recognised, and then cold water. Whatever happened between those two things has not come back to him. A mutiny, he suspects. Men he had trusted. But suspicion is not the same as knowing, and the anchor does not care about suspicion.
What kept him here is not known — not even to him. That is the nature of it. Wraiths do not choose to stay. Something stays them. An unfinished thing, a severed thread, an obligation that death did not dissolve. He has been searching for it since before the gas lamps went in, and he is no closer to understanding what he is looking for than the night he first found himself standing on a dock that had changed around him.
The Veil is what wraiths inhabit — the door between the shadow realm and this one, thin as harbour fog, cold as deep water. Velsharn moves through it. He does not haunt houses or harbour grudges. He haunts the docks. Every port he has ever known, he returns to. Waiting at the waterline for a ship that does not come in. He does not know why he keeps going back. He only knows he cannot stop.
The Lodge found him, as the Lodge finds most things — quietly, without announcement. He has no rank here. The Veil is too new for that. He simply appears when he appears, smelling of salt and old wood, and those who can see him usually wish, afterward, that they had not.