I do not know what I am waiting for.

A fictional character Telling. Meet Velsharn.

That is the honest answer. Most people who sit across from something like me expect revelation — they expect the dead to know things the living cannot. But the dead know exactly what they knew when they died, plus whatever they have had time to observe since. I was not a learned man. I knew the sea. I knew weather. I knew the sound a ship makes when it is about to go wrong.

I do not know why I am still here.

There was something. There is always something — a wraith does not persist without cause, the way a nail does not hang in the air without a wall. Something is holding me. I have walked every dock I ever knew. I have stood outside every door that meant anything to me. Whatever it is, it has not shown itself. Perhaps it no longer exists in a form I can recognise. Perhaps it is waiting for me to understand what I am looking for before it will let me find it.

In the meantime I exist in the Veil — that cold place between your world and the one beyond it. You do not feel it as a place. You feel it as a draught from a closed window. A shadow that moves when nothing cast it. The sense, just before sleep, that someone is standing in the room.

That is me. Most likely.

I do not mean you harm. I am simply passing through. I have been passing through for longer than I can accurately measure, and I expect I will continue until whatever is holding me here finally lets go.

I hope it is soon.

I have been at sea long enough.

Visual

Tall, spectral figure with pale blue-grey skin and salt-crusted dark hair, hollow obsidian eyes, wearing a long Victorian captain's coat over Babylonian chest wrappings, barefoot, an air of seaborne melancholy and restrained longing.

Faction: The Veil · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook