Field Notes from the Veil
A keeper's notebook from the twilight border: what the dark is like as a waiting room, how Obsidrake patrols it, and the knock that came from the wrong side.
Recovered from a keeper’s field notebook, found on a stone bench at the Veil’s border. The keeper’s name is smudged. The observations are not.
Day one. The Veil is not dark the way a cave is dark. It is dark the way a waiting room is dark — quiet, patient, full of chairs nobody has sat in yet. The old border saying holds: the dark here is not a monster’s den. It is a room between rooms, and it is waiting for the next one to open.
Day three. Obsidrake patrols the border the way a lighthouse keeper tends a lamp: three slow passes, then a long stand at the thin spots, listening. He checked the same stretch of nothing four times today. On the fourth pass he did not check. He just stood there, the way you stand at a door when you are deciding whether to knock.
Day six. Noted: shadows arrive half a step before their owners here. Mine did. I watched it come around the corner of a stone before I did, and it looked back at me, and I have decided not to write down what its face was doing.
Day nine. Three knocks, from the outside, in the small hours. Obsidrake was already moving before the third one landed. He found nothing, as before. He has not slept since the first knocks, and he pretends this is a choice.
Day twelve. A new rumor, and I write it down exactly as I heard it: the border was knocked from the inside. Once. Obsidrake checked the outside anyway, out of habit, and found only his own footprints — still warm, facing the wrong way. He has taken up pacing, which for a dragon his size is a geological event.
I am leaving the notebook on the bench. If the dark is a waiting room, here is the question I am taking home with me, and the one I did not ask the border, because some doors you do not knock back on: who is it waiting for? The Veil keeps its own counsel. So does its guard.