Part II: The Eight Schools
Veilcraft
The Art of Shadows and Illusion
Power is patient. It will wait until you are ready to pay.
Veilcraft — The Art of Shadows and Illusion
What Walks in Your Wake
Find a dim room.
Not darkness—your eyes should still work. A single lamp. A screen’s glow. A slice of streetlight leaking through curtains like a cut that never quite healed.
Stand where the light can find you, and look down.
There. On the floor. On the wall. On the ceiling, if the angle is wrong.
Your shadow.
Watch it for a moment. Lift your hand, slowly. Notice how it follows. Not perfectly. Not precisely. There is always the smallest delay, a fraction of a heartbeat between your decision and its obedience. Turn your head. Sometimes the shadow turns just a little too late, as if it had been looking at something else.
This is where Veilcraft begins: not in grand rituals, but in that thin shiver of not-quite-synchrony between you and what walks in your wake.
People who don’t know better call Veilcraft “shadow magic,” as if it were nothing more than darkness shaped into knives and cloaks. That is like calling language “mouth noises.”
Technically true. Useless.
At its heart, Veilcraft is the manipulation of thresholds.
The boundary between seen and unseen. Between now and almost-now. Between the self you show the world and the reflection that knows better. Practitioners of Veilcraft learn to put their fingers in those seams and tug—subtly, carefully—until the world gives way.
You live your life on one side of those thresholds, in what we call the Waking World. It feels solid. Bright. Obvious. But every time light strikes you and fails to pass through, it leaves a mark: a region of could-be where light is not.
Umbrael lives there.
Umbrael is not emptiness. It is not the absence of Solareth’s radiance, some leftover scrap of before. Umbrael is The First Shadow, the primordial presence that existed when there was nothing to shine and nothing to be shone upon. When Solareth—The Break of Light—tore the first line through that ancient dark, Umbrael did not vanish.
It rippled.
What you call “a shadow” is one of those ripples. A thin echo of Umbrael reaching into the Waking World wherever light meets resistance. Every silhouette on a wall, every pool of darkness under a table, every long smear of yourself at sunset is a shallow place where that primordial presence presses close—ink-blue and patient.
Between Umbrael and Solareth lies the Veil.
Think of it as a membrane stretched taut between shadow and light, between what might be and what is revealed. All magic must pass through the Veil in one way or another, but Veilcraft concerns itself with the Veil directly. A Veilcrafter learns to find the places where this membrane thins—at doorways, at dusk, at the edge of a lie—and pull.
A Working of Veilcraft is nothing more, and nothing less, than a deliberate disturbance of that membrane. A whispered request to the shadow side. A careful misdirection of the light. You will see the formal structures later: ingredients, gestures, words.
For now, it is enough to know this: every Working begins with attention to a Threshold.
Light and shadow are not enemies, but they do not agree.
Solareth, in its aspect as The Break of Light, is revelation. It insists that everything be seen, named, pinned in place. Pyrotheurgy—the art that calls Solareth’s fire—is devoted to that insistence: burning away lies, cauterizing ambiguity, forcing truth into the open whether it is ready or not.
Umbrael is different. Where light says, “This is,” shadow says, “This might be.”
In Veilcraft we treat shadow as potential: the space where hidden doors could exist, where a face could be mistaken, where a secret could remain safely in the dark… or be drawn out at the right moment. The tension between these forces—revelation and possibility, flame and shade—runs through every Veilcraft Working, even when no literal fire is present.
Shadows, after all, are not passive.
Watch yours again. Move your hand quickly, then stop. See how the shadow overshoots, then corrects. See how it stretches when you do not. Shadows remember. They “keep” what has passed through them: gestures repeated until they wear grooves in your habits, the way your shoulders hunch when you lie, the tilt of your head when you want something and pretend you don’t.
They store these things in a language of shape and delay.
A lover’s hand withdrawn too slowly. A knife raised a fraction higher than necessary. A child’s flinch that never quite goes away. The light forgets as soon as it moves on. The shadow does not. It keeps the outline of every hesitation, every secret, every almost-confession, and it learns.
Veilcrafters—those we call Practitioners of this art—train themselves to read that language.
They learn to stand where shadows pool and feel which way they lean. To notice when a reflection lags by a blink. To listen when the dark under a door seems thicker than it should be, like spilled ink that never dries. From these small attentions grow Workings: the specific operations by which a Practitioner thickens a shadow until it can bear weight, thins it to slip through, or stretches it to bridge two distant places.
You may not think of yourself as a Practitioner. Not yet.
But if your fingers have ever traced the edge of a doorway before crossing, if you have ever paused at the threshold of a difficult conversation and felt the air go thin and cold in your lungs, you have already brushed the Veil. If you have ever stared at your own silhouette until it seemed almost like someone else, you have already met Umbrael’s echo.
This chapter will show you what it means to do such things on purpose.
We will speak of thresholds and membranes, of the Veil and the Waking World, of Workings that let you step from one shadow to another or wear a forgettable face. We will also speak of the Price—of what happens when the echo in your wake grows tired of merely following.
For now, stay in your dim room a little longer.
Stand where the light can find you. Let your eyes adjust until the gray around you deepens, until your shadow sharpens at the edges like ink drying on bone-white paper. Breathe. Move your hand again, slowly, and watch the silhouette on the wall.
If you are very patient, if you are very still, you may notice that sometimes your shadow moves first.
When you learn to listen to that—to the tiny betrayals and delays—you are already practicing Veilcraft. And once you have truly learned to listen to your shadow, you may find it has been waiting a long time for the chance to answer back.
Three Truths Every Shadow Knows
Veilcraft does not bother with sterile laws.
Laws belong to courts and classrooms—to people who believe the world will behave if they name it sternly enough. Shadows have never cared for that kind of authority.
Instead, Veilcrafters speak of three truths.
You won’t find them printed in any sanctioned syllabus. They travel in other ways: breathed over guttering candles, scratched into the margins of forbidden books, passed from one Practitioner to another when the night feels a little too deep.
They sound like proverbs. They feel like warnings.
They are all you have between you and what waits on the far side of the Veil.
How Shadows Obey: Essential Workings
We will not give you full rituals.
This is not coyness. The Veil has opinions about who learns what, and it enforces them with a thoroughness no editor could match. Pages go missing. Ink runs. Margins darken until the words beneath are only texture.
But you deserve to know what is possible—and what it costs.
Think of what follows as silhouettes of workings rather than their full bodies. You will see the outline, feel the weight, understand where The Price lies. If the shadows mean for you to learn the rest, they will show you in their own time.
Veilcraft workings tend to follow the same quiet pattern. Name. Threshold. Ingredients. Method. Price. Warning.
The name is how you call the working. The threshold is the boundary you lean on—doorway, window, the line between two pools of light. The ingredients are what you offer the shadows to convince them to move. The method is the shape of your will and words. The Price is what the working takes from you in return. The warning is what experience has carved into the margins for those who come after.
Keep that template in mind. Watch how the shadows obey—and what they remember.
The Price Written in Silhouette: Shadow-Seep
Shadow-seep is the moment your shadow stops being a reflection and starts being a participant.
Not a separate creature. Not a possessing spirit. Your shadow remains you—only no longer content to be edited by your intentions. It becomes the part of you that refuses to lie on command.
Canon is clear: this is Veilcraft’s price.
Every Working, from the smallest Whispering Dark to the most reckless Umbral Step, tugs at the boundary between you and your echo in Umbrael. Do it once, nothing happens. Do it a dozen times, you feel only the thrill of competence. Do it for years, and the membrane thins. The ink of you bleeds across the page.
That bleed is shadow-seep.
There are no alternative tariffs for Veilcraft. No blood tithe. No convenient headaches. Only this one, deepening. Your shadow learning to tell the truth even when you would rather it didn’t.
We mark its progress in stages, not because the shadow cares for our categories, but so you might recognize when you are already too far gone.
The Umbral Reaches: Where Shadows Are Born
Imagine falling without moving.
The Umbral Reaches are like that: depth without distance, a descent that never quite arrives. The darkness there is not blank. It has grain, like velvet brushed against the nap, like ash sifted between your fingers. It folds and refolds around you in slow currents, cool as stone cellars and storm basements, warm as breath on the back of your neck. There is no horizon. Only layers of shadow, stacked and drifting, as if someone took every night the world has ever known and pressed them together until they became a place.
They are not another world in the way most people mean. The Umbral Reaches lie beneath the Waking World, and behind it, and within it, all at once. They are the underside of every object that has ever cast a shadow. Every dim corner, every patch of darkness under a bed or behind a doorframe, is a shallow pool of the Reaches seeping through.
When a Practitioner leans hard on Veilcraft—during deep workings, in the held-breath moment of an Umbral Step pushed further than it should go—they sometimes slip past the thin film of their own shadow and feel it give way. One heartbeat they are in a hallway or alley; the next, the Veil has inverted, and the world has been edited down to silhouettes.
Cities appear there, if “appear” is the right word. Not built of stone and glass, but of outlines—towers and bridges traced in ash-black ink, hollow inside, stretching upward into a sky that is only a slightly lighter shade of dark. Streets run between them like negative space. The buildings are impossibly tall, elongated by some angle of light that does not exist in the Waking World. Every edge is razor-sharp, but if you reach out, your hand passes through with the faintest resistance, as if through smoke that remembers being solid.
Sound behaves strangely. There are voices, but they do not come from mouths. They arrive the way thoughts do: fully formed, already in your own inner cadence. Sometimes they repeat things you have said. Sometimes they say what you almost said and swallowed. Sometimes they answer questions you were careful not to ask aloud.
It can take a long time to realize that not all of those thoughts are yours.
Time is worse.
In the Reaches, moments stretch until they are almost comfortable. You can walk for what feels like hours along a corridor formed by two parallel walls of shadow, your footsteps making no sound, your body weightless as if gravity forgot you. You can stop and stare at the way your own silhouette drags along the floor, a little darker than the rest, a little too interested in the doorways you pass. When you finally find a threshold back—a crack of bone-white light under a door, the suggestion of a window—you step through and stumble into your room to find that only a few seconds have passed.
Or you blink, take three steps between one patch of darkness and another, and emerge to find your candle burned to a puddle and dawn leaking funeral-purple around the curtains. Veilwalkers tell stories of going in for a breath and coming out missing hours, days, entire conversations they were certain they had not yet had.
The danger is obvious.
The temptation is worse.
In the Umbral Reaches, you are unobserved. There are no eyes, only the sense of being traced by something that does not judge you so much as inventory you. Your body feels light, freed from weight and consequence. The clamor of the Waking World—voices, expectations, the constant performance of being who people think you are—falls away. For those who live under secrets, or under the weight of others’ scrutiny, that silence can feel like mercy.
No one there demands you explain yourself. No one there calls you by a name you no longer want. You can walk faceless through those monochrome streets, and for a while, it feels like relief.
Historically, entire orders of Veilcrafters chose that relief a little too often. During the Hidden Era, in the long shadow after the Sundering, the Veil between Umbrael and Solareth was deliberately thickened. Officially, this was to protect the Waking World from unregulated magic. Unofficially, it was to keep the Umbral Reaches at a distance—to make slipping through your own shadow something that required intention, skill, and a willingness to pay the Price.
In the Modern Era, the Veil holds, but thins in places. The old bindings fray. Urban planners do not consult arcanists when they angle their streetlamps; architects do not think about how atriums and glass towers might catch and concentrate dusk. Office blocks become ink-blue wells by late afternoon. Train underpasses collect more than rainwater. Accidental crossings are more common now.
So is bleed-through.
You can learn to spot the thin spots, if you know what to look for.
Shadows that pool too dark beneath ordinary lights, as if they have depth you could fall into. Reflections in windows or mirrors that lag a fraction of a second behind your movements, then rush to catch up. Dreams of walking through cities drained of color, where everyone you pass is a silhouette and all of them, somehow, are you.
Spend too long in such places—waking or dreaming—and shadow-seep quickens. In the Reaches, your shadow is not tethered to your heels. It roams. It meets others: the dark traces of strangers, the long, thin silhouettes of things that never had bodies in the Waking World. It trades. It learns tricks you never taught it, gestures you never made. When you come back, it brings those with it.
You will notice, if you’re paying attention.
There are ways to push back.
Pyrotheurgy stands in opposition to Veilcraft for a reason. Revealing flame can burn back encroaching shadow, cauterize thin spots, force the Reaches to retreat. A properly warded Pyrotheurgic brazier can hold a doorway shut that would otherwise yawn open every dusk. But fire has its own prices, its own scars to leave on those who wield it, and the war between light and shadow has never been clean. Neither side is gentle. Neither side is on your side.
For now, it is enough to know that the boundary is not theoretical.
Picture a Practitioner paused in a mundane doorway—one hand on the chipped wooden frame of their apartment, one foot already stepped onto a floor that is no longer floor but ink-black depth. Behind them, the Waking World hums with traffic and conversation, the smell of exhaust and cheap coffee. Before them, the Umbral Reaches breathe, velvet-dark and waiting.
The threshold cuts through their body like a line.
In chapters to come, you will see how certain artifacts make that line thinner still, until doors, mirrors, and lanterns cannot quite decide which side they belong to—and neither, if you are careless, will you.
Tools of the Hidden: Lanterns, Mirrors, and Vanishing Ink
Some theories are too volatile to trust to ink alone. Veilcrafters learned early that the safest way to test an argument about shadows is to hammer it into metal and glass and see what breaks.
Artifacts are those arguments made solid—hypotheses about the Veil, trapped in objects anyone with hands can hold.
They are coveted. They are dangerous. They remember what you ask of them.
The Umbral Lantern
At first glance, an Umbral Lantern looks wrong.
Where a mundane lantern would cradle a steady flame, this one holds a knot of ink-blue darkness, caged behind ribs of tarnished gold. Its panes are not glass but something like smoked bone, faintly reflective, as if they remember light but refuse to admit it now. When lit, it does not shine.
It drinks.
The air around it cools. Colors leach toward ash black and bone white, with only that deep, funeral purple-blue shadow thickening at the edges of things. It throws not light but a pool of darkness so dense it feels like velvet under the fingertips.
Step into that shadow, and the world rearranges.
The Umbral Lantern does not reveal what is already obvious. It reveals what has been hiding. Secret doors bloom as darker rectangles against ordinary walls. Concealed sigils, invisible in daylight, flare in ink-blue lines like bruises surfacing beneath skin. People who believe themselves unseen—lurking in alcoves, behind curtains, under glamours—resolve as silhouettes more solid than the furniture around them.
You are not seeing more. You are seeing what the shadows have been holding back.
The Price is slower, and crueller, than singed fingers.
Prolonged use of an Umbral Lantern teaches the world to overlook you. At first it is small: a friend forgetting you were in the room, a loved one skipping your name when recalling who attended a gathering. In photographs, you are present but slightly blurred, as if the camera’s shadow refused to focus.
Then conversations begin to flow around you. Jokes are told that assume you are not there. Plans are made without your input, even when you are standing at the same table. Your voice still works. Your body still occupies space. But emotionally, you are receding—becoming a gap in the narrative of the people who matter most to you.
Memories edit themselves. In their recollections, you arrived late, or left early, or perhaps did not come at all.
This is not a new Price, only another mask on shadow-seep. The lantern trains your own shadow in the art of omission. It learns how to slip you out of stories the way Veilwalkers slip through checkpoints. Many of them speak, if they speak at all, of the particular horror of sitting among family while their shadows lean together in intimacy and your own stands a little apart, listening, already practicing your absence.
Being present but unseen is a Veilwalker’s professional dream.
Lived long enough, it becomes their fate.
The Ash Mirror
Where the Umbral Lantern fattens shadow, the Ash Mirror is what happens when shadow consents—briefly—to share a table with flame.
Its frame is charred metal, twisted as if it once knew softer shapes and then survived a fire that taught it discipline. The surface is black—not the flat black of paint, but the layered, depthless black of cooled volcanic glass. No matter how bright the room, it does not show your face.
It shows the truth you most need to see.
You do not choose which truth. You only choose to look.
Each use of the Ash Mirror burns away a cherished self-deception. The lover who insists they are staying for kindness watches, instead, the quiet satisfaction they feel in being needed. The mentor who believes they sacrifice everything for their students sees the ledger of small cruelties they have justified as “for your own good.” The Veilwalker who claims they could stop any time witnesses the nights they reached for shadow before they reached for help.
Once the mirror has shown you, that illusion cannot fully return. You can ignore the knowledge, argue with it, drink to blur it—but some part of you has been set alight. The lie no longer fits as comfortably. It itches at the edges.
This is Veilcraft’s third principle made merciless: every illusion contains a seed of truth. The Ash Mirror germinates that seed, whether you are ready or not. Pyrotheurgy supplies the fire that forces revelation; Veilcraft supplies the understanding of which truths will hurt enough to matter.
The Price is not scars on skin. It is the erosion of softness.
You can run out of comforting lies. Practitioners who lean on the Ash Mirror too often become brittle. They lose the ability to inhabit ambiguity, to forgive themselves small hypocrisies, to believe that someone might love them despite the sharp edges. They see through everything, including their own excuses, until trust feels like a trick and kindness like a miscalculation.
Clarity without mercy is another kind of blindness.
Vanishing Words, Remembered Obedience
Not all Veilcraft tools are so grand. Some are merely lines of ink that refuse to behave.
Where Veilcraft meets Sigilcraft, you find shadow contracts and vanishing words: agreements written in ink that only appears when bathed in shadow, texts that erase themselves from the page the moment they are read, leaving only the memory of their terms.
Picture a council chamber at dusk. The treaty on the table is blank in the late afternoon light—bone-white parchment, respectable, harmless. Everyone present remembers signing something, weeks ago. No one can quite recall the clauses. They only remember that it was necessary.
As the sun sinks and the room darkens, ink-blue script seeps up from the fibers of the page, letters coalescing only where the lanternlight fails. For a heartbeat, the true contract is visible: obligations, oaths, a small, easily overlooked line about what must never be spoken of this agreement.
Then someone lights an ordinary lamp. The shadows retreat. The writing vanishes.
The signatures remain binding. The minds that signed them keep obeying.
Veilcraft loves such tools because they blur the line between hidden and forgotten. Sigilcraft ensures the structure of the pact holds, even when no one can point to the words.
And this is the quiet truth beneath all these instruments: Veilcraft’s greatest tools are not the ones that hide you from others, but the ones that strip away the illusions you built for yourself. The lantern that shows what you pretended not to see. The mirror that burns away your favorite story about who you are. The contract that proves you agreed to more than you remember.
Once those illusions are gone, you are left with a simpler question, and a sharper one.
When there is nothing left to hide behind, which face will you choose to wear?
End of Veilcraft — The Art of Shadows and Illusion