“Veil’s been part of this world long before we ever figured out how to give it a name. We just dressed it up in words and laws to feel like we had a grip on it. We don’t. We never did.”
You hear a lotta fancy words tossed around about the Veil — energy, resonance, infected bloodlines, the weave of reality. That’s all college-boy talk. Down here where it matters, it’s simpler: the Veil is what goes bump in the night, or it’s what folks turn to when they’re desperate enough, greedy enough, or stupid enough to think they can beat the house.
It’s the arcane, the occult.
It’s the ghosts and dark things swimming out in Lake Michigan.
It’s the woman down the street who can tell you if your kid will live past twenty by feeling three of his baby teeth.
It’s the fancy suit-wearing engineer who sigils up the furnaces at the steelworks to stand higher heat.
And it’s the weird, flame-shaped demon thing that comes out of that furnace when they get the sigil wrong.
It’s one word we use to talk about a lot of things — but all of them come from the same place: the Veil.
But what is it, really?
Hell, what is love? What is fate? Gravity and light?
You can describe them — sure — but do you really know what they
are?
If you think you do, you’re already too cocky to be messing with the Veil.
The Veil is what we call everything that isn’t natural.
It started as a way to explain the blurry line between "our world" and "not our world," and somewhere along the way, the word stuck.
Now it covers anything we can’t neatly box up: monsters, miracles, curses, disasters — all of it.
Sometimes the Veil moves like a force — pure and cold, like gravity or magnetism.
Sometimes it acts biological — think things that live only on blood, or storms that breathe.
And sometimes, it’s emotional — rage, grief, despair, so thick it takes on a shape and a hunger of its own.
Confused yet? Good. That means you’re starting to understand.
Our best guess is this: the Veil is raw,
other currents bleeding into our world — sometimes through chance, sometimes because some fool kicked open a door that should’ve stayed bolted.
What we know for sure is simple:
it's real.
It’s been studied, measured, regulated.
Coca-Cola even tried lacing their formula with it out in California once. Nobody talks about what went wrong — not legally allowed to — but whatever it was, it ended in lawsuits and sealed courtrooms and hush money tall enough to touch the clouds.
There are schools that teach ways to
manipulate it.
There are government agencies that regulate it — and worse, agencies that
wield it.
You think the CIA is dangerous? You ain’t seen anything yet.
The Veil ain’t some ghost story to scare kids straight.
It’s tangled up in every dirty deal, every whispered prayer, every freak storm that knocks a neighborhood sideways.
Governments study it. Gangsters sell it. Churches pray it away.
But nobody —
nobody — really controls it.
The best you can hope for is to ride the beast ’til it bucks you — and pray you land somewhere you can still crawl away from.
Yeah, there’s rules to the Veil — but they ain’t
our rules.
And the Veil’s got a long memory and a mean sense of humor.
One day, it cashes the check you didn’t even know you wrote, and by then?
You’re just another sorry soul wondering where it all went sideways.
In the end, what the Veil
actually is — that’s still up for debate.
Maybe it always will be.
But here’s what we do know:
It’s powerful.
It’s volatile.
It’s corruptive.
It’s unpredictable.
And if you think you can beat it...
well, the Veil's already got your number.
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