The Veiled moved through the kingdom like a disease without symptoms.
There were twelve of them. Not soldiers, not assassins, not spies ...though they could function as all three when circumstances required. They were something else. Something that the Church of Light had created centuries ago, in an era when the institution's public face of piety and compassion concealed a private reality of ambitious research into the boundaries between the mortal world and whatever lay beyond.
The Church had experimented. In secret chambers beneath its oldest cathedrals, in libraries sealed behind wards that burned the flesh of the unauthorized, in laboratories where the line between holy investigation and blasphemous practice was crossed so gradually that no one could point to the moment when it happened. They had probed the edges of reality, seeking to understand the forces that their scriptures described as divine and their enemies described as forbidden.
What they found was the Abyss.
