Are You Real, Warden?

Korax first noticed the man because Apollo refused to step forward.

The horse did not rear or shy. He simply stopped on the mountain pass, one forehoof lifted, ears angled toward the Shattered Marches forward and below, where life grew thin and the Orc Realm never quite settled.

Korax followed Apollo’s gaze.

The man stood between two mountain spruces, hands visible, posture calm in the way of someone who had never been surprised by danger. He wore a coat too light for the cold. No breath showed when he exhaled.

Korax did not draw his sword.

“Move along,” Korax said.

The man blinked, as if the words had taken a moment to reach him. Then he smiled, faint and careful.

“Are you real?”

Korax felt the question more than he heard it, like a change in pressure. He ignored it.

“This pass is closed,” Korax said. “Turn back.”

The man looked past him, down the trail Korax had come from. “You came through.”

“I’m keeping it from remaining open.”

The man’s smile deepened. “That’s why I waited.”

Korax slid from the saddle. Apollo did not relax. The obsidian black stallion watched the man as if he were watching a burning barn with judgment.

“Who are you?” Korax asked.

The man considered. Snow drifted through him without clinging, though Korax did not look directly at that for long.

“You can call me what you already do,” the man said.

Korax’s jaw tightened. “I don’t know you.”

“No,” the man agreed. “Suppose you wouldn’t.”

The man stepped closer. The distance between them felt wrong, like a measurement that kept changing when Korax tried to count it. The trees behind him seemed to lean, and the air between the trunks thickened into a grey fog.

“You are the Warden,” the man said.

Korax’s hand moved to the hilt of his sword.

“No one here uses that word.”

The man tilted his head and shrugged. “Not outloud.”

Korax studied him. The face was ordinary. The kind of face that would be forgotten five minutes after leaving a room. If Korax looked away and then looked back, the shape of the nose seemed a little different, the brow a little flatter, as if the man was wearing the idea of a person rather than being one.

“You came out of the spruces back there? Alpine dweller?” Korax questioned.

“I came to the spruces,” the man replied. “You decide what comes out.”

Korax felt a familiar irritation rise. “That’s not how it works.”

The man’s expression changed, and in a sick voice, he retorted. “That’s exactly how it works.”

Korax took a slow breath. “I am a Knight of Meadowvale. You know the rules. State your purpose. Now.”

The man hesitated. For the first time, he looked uncertain.

“I was just told to ask you something,” he said.

Korax waited.

The man met his eyes. “Are you real?”

Korax answered quickly. “Yes.”

The word felt wrong the moment it left his mouth.

It was not the sound. It was the way the man accepted it.

The trees behind them even shifted in agreement.

The man seemed to slip, as if losing his balance on the ice, despite not quite touching it. The edges of his coat, his very frame, blurred, then sharpened again. He looked relieved, and in that relief there was something like a hunger.

Korax noticed.

“So, that’s how,” Korax said quietly.

The man steadied, relief plain on his face. “You hold fast.”

Korax’s eyes narrowed. “You’re anchored by my response.”

“By your certainty,” the man corrected.

Korax took a step back. The man did not follow. He didn’t need to. The grey between the trees was already swelling up, already thickening like a bruise.

“What happens if I don’t answer?” Korax asked.

The man glanced toward the fog behind him. The grey there seemed to be listening.

“I return,” the man said.

“And if I do?”

The man swallowed. “I remain.”

Korax felt the shape of the trap then. Clean. Elegant. No bargain offered. No threat spoken. Just a question built like a hinge.

“You’re not here to cross,” Korax said. “You’re here to stay.”

The man nodded. “I’m here to see if you still keep things apart.”

Korax stared. “For whom.”

The man did not answer at first. When he did, his voice was barely above the wind.

“For the Veil.”

Apollo stamped once, hard. The sound rang loud in the snow. Korax heard it twice, like an echo that didn’t belong in the open air.

Korax’s gaze snapped sideways.

The trail behind him looked the same.

But the sounds did not.

It returned to him from the wrong distance.

Korax turned back to the man.

The man’s smile was careful, almost apologetic.

“You want me to doubt,” Korax said.

“I want you to choose,” the man replied. “Even doubt is a choice.”

The grey behind him thickened until it stopped being background and started being space. The spruces looked suddenly farther apart, as if the world had taken a breath and failed to let it out.

Korax’s grip tightened.

He had felt thin places, the slippages, before. A ripple along a seam. A misstep where the ground didn’t quite decide to be ground. He had sealed Veil tears with old tools, magic, and older marks, and he had walked away praying he’d never have to do it without them.

He had no aid, mages, or gifts from entities here.

He had his steel.

He had his breath.

He had Apollo.

Korax said, “You’re already fading.”

The man looked down at his hands. They were thinner now, light bleeding through the fingers like mist.

“Then ask me now,” the man said, urgency creeping in.

Korax did not move.

“Are you real,” the man pressed.

Korax shook his head once. “I won’t.”

The man’s voice broke. “Warden—”

Korax cut him off. “These questions loosen you. You came here knowing that.”

The man took a step back.

The snow did not sink under his feet.

Something in the grey behind him moved. A posture. A standing shape that remembered how to be human, the way a scarecrow remembers how to be a man.

Korax heard a soft scrape, like thick frozen cloth dragged over hard stone.

Apollo snorted. He was angry. It was the sound he made right before he kicked.

“You’ve met me before,” the man said suddenly. “Haven’t you.”

Korax froze.

“Say it,” the man urged. “Say we have.”

Korax searched his memory. Nothing surfaced. And yet the man’s posture, the way he leaned slightly forward as if bracing for refusal, felt familiar in a way Korax did not like.

Korax said, “No.”

The man closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, acceptance had replaced hope.

“I understand,” he said. “That’s why they sent for you.”

Korax frowned. “Sent for me to where?”

The man smiled, thin and tired. “Here. Always here.”

The grey surged outward and around the knight, then inward. Korax felt the world tilt. The snow beneath his boots did not move, but his stomach did. His vision narrowed as if someone had put a hand around his skull and squeezed.

Apollo whinnied repeatedly.

Korax heard it from very close.

Then very far away.

Then not at all.

The sound vanished, and that absence hit Korax like a punch. The absence of Apollo was wrong enough to make his heart stutter.

Korax reached for his reins by instinct.

His hand closed on air.

The trees around him blurred. The spruces lost their needles in his sight and became black strokes. The snow became ash. The sky became a lid.

Korax tried to inhale.

The air tasted like old wool and extinguished candles, and cold.

He blinked.

The world had changed.

He stood on the same trail.

But it was not the same.

The spruces were still there, but they were perfectly straight, as if someone had drawn them with a ruler and forgotten that trees have arthritis. The snow did not sparkle. It did not crunch. It lay flat and dead, like dust deciding to imitate winter.

The man stood ten steps ahead.

Alone with Korax.

Korax turned sharply, searching for the edge, searching for the place where a seam could be found and worried open.

Nothing.

Just more grey.

The road behind him stretched in a direction that didn’t feel like any direction he’d ever walked.

Korax’s breath became shallow.

The man watched him like a priest watches a confession.

“You answered me,” the man said softly.

Korax’s hand found his sword. The blade came free with a clean hiss that sounded too loud in the dead air.

The man did not flinch.

“You don’t need steel here,” he said. “Steel is for disagreements.”

“I have one.” Korax took a slow step forward, then another. “Where. Is. My horse?”

The man smiled. “Where you left him.”

Korax forced his voice steady. “This is the Veil.”

The man’s eyes brightened at the word.

“Say it again,” he murmured.

Korax did not.

Somewhere in the distance, very far, there was a sound like wind passing through a hollow church. Only it was not the wind.

It was breathing.

Korax’s eyes tracked the grey between the trunks.

Shapes drifted, moving there. Like the ground could not decide whether it deserved their weight.

Two figures emerged, tall and narrow, their outlines defined by the absence of detail. Where their faces should have been was a smooth suggestion of skin pulled tight over nothing with a massive jaw of teeth. Their limbs were too long, their joints set wrong, and they moved like puppets remembering the strings.

Veil Sentinels.

Korax had seen them before. He remembered their stillness and power. The way they did not hunt. But waited with deliberation.

These ones, did not wait.

These leaned their blank heads toward him as if smelling for him.

Behind them, lower in the grey, shadows slid. Not quite animals…

Veil shadow-walkers.

They moved like spilled ink, crawling and jolting.

Korax’s grip tightened on his hilt until his knuckles burned.

The man stepped aside, giving the sentinels room.

“You don’t have a way out,” the man said, mouth twitching. “The Veil remembers every stitch that holds.”

Korax kept his blade pointed between them. “What are you?”

The man considered, as if deciding how much honesty Korax could survive.

“A question,” he said finally. “With a body.”

Then, the first sentinel moved in.

Korax struck.

The blade cut cleanly through grey, meeting no resistance.

Another strike that met only temperature. A cold so deep it was in his bones. Korax’s arm went numb to the elbow. Frost crawled up the steel, whitening the fuller in a heartbeat.

The sentinel did not bleed. It stepped back, and the cut in its shape did not close. It stayed open like a tear in cloth, showing nothing beneath.

The shadow-walkers surged.

Korax backed up fast, boots sliding on ash-snow that didn’t grip.

The shadows reached for his legs to erase his contact with the ground further.

When they touched his boot, the leather dulled instantly, like time had been poured over it. When they touched his pant leg, the cloth whitened like old linen pulled from a grave.

Korax kicked free and slashed down, sweeping.

Steel met the shadows.

The shadows did not stop.

They divided around the blade and flowed back together behind it.

“You can’t win by cutting,” the man watching said.

Korax snarled without meaning to. “Then why bring me here.”

The man’s eyes held a tired pity. “To see what you are when you don’t have your tools.”

The second sentinel lifted its arms and the shadow-walkers retreated to the man.

The grey thickened around Korax’s throat.

Korax first felt gentle hands, preparing to cradle.

Then the hands became a garrote of intention.

He couldn’t breathe. The Veil was deciding that he did not get to breathe on his own.

Korax staggered back, one hand clawing at his own neck, the other still holding the sword.

He couldn’t shout.

He couldn’t call Apollo.

He couldn’t pray.

The man stepped closer with the walkers.

“Are you real, Warden?” he asked again.

Korax realized, with a sick clarity, that the question was the weapon.

Answering had anchored the man.

Answering again would anchor Korax.

In the wrong place.

In the Veil.

Korax forced his mouth closed. He refused even the reflexive instinct to say “yes” that rose like bile.

Instead, he listened.

Listening did not give the Veil a word to anchor on.

Somewhere, distant, there was a sound.

A faint, furious, living sound.

A horse.

Apollo.

Not here.

But near.

Near enough that the Veil could not silence him.

Korax focused on it the way you focus on a lantern when the dark tries to make you believe it isn’t there. He let the sound pull him. He let it remind his bones what real air tastes like.

The sentinel tightened its grip.

Korax’s vision tunneled.

The man leaned in, almost tender.

“Say it,” he whispered. “Say you are real.”

Korax’s lips parted, but instead of answering, he drove his forehead forward and smashed it into the man’s face.

The impact felt wrong. Like hitting wet parchment stretched over a frame.

The man stumbled back into the sentinel. Surprise flickered on his face.

The Veil’s grip loosened just enough for Korax to inhale.

He drew one brutal breath.

And with that breath, he made the only sound he could make without giving the Veil what it wanted.

Not a word but a noise.

A sharp, guttural exhale that was pure animal, pure defiance.

Apollo answered.

A full, tearing whinny, far away and close at once.

The Veil flinched.

Korax felt it.

As if sound itself were a nail and Apollo had driven it into the tear.

The shadow-walkers hesitated.

The sentinels’ blank heads tilted.

The man’s eyes narrowed.

“Ah,” he said with a too-wide grin. “So, you have a tether.”

Korax did not waste the opening.

He slammed his sword point into the ground to mark it.

Steel bit into ash-snow and scraped whatever passed for earth beneath. The sound rang. Metal onto something real.

Korax leaned into that sound, held it in his mind like a rope.

He thought of Apollo’s stall. Apollo’s breath in cold mornings. Apollo’s teeth on the bit. His weight when they rode.

The Veil hated the stubborn facts of a living creature deciding, I am here, and you cannot edit that.

Korax yanked the blade free and ran. He ran through, straight into the thinnest-looking grey between two spruces, where the veil seemed least committed.

The shadow-walkers bolted, trying to swallow his feet.

Korax kicked through them and felt his boots go numb.

The sentinels moved to block him.

Korax did not fight them.

Instead, he slipped past by inches, shoulder clipping a sentinel’s blank arm, and the contact burned like frostbite.

The man called after him, voice suddenly sharp.

“Warden!”

The word hit Korax’s spine like a hook.

He stumbled, almost fell.

The Veil tightened around that name, trying to use it as a handle.

Korax clamped his jaw and refused to turn.

Apollo whinnied again, the sound closer now, furious, living.

Korax threw himself into the grey.

For a heartbeat, nothing existed. No snow. No trees. No monsters. No grey.

Only pressure. Only the sensation of being peeled apart.

As if the Veil was trying to separate Korax from the story that made him Korax.

Then Apollo’s sound hit him like a fist.

A neigh, close, vibrating through bone.

Korax burst out of the slippage and fell hard onto snow that finally crunched like snow.

Real, Cold air slammed into his lungs.

He rolled, sword up.

The trail was back.

The trees were spruces again, crooked and imperfect, blessedly ordinary.

Apollo stood several yards behind him, eyes wild, foam at the bit, forelegs braced like he’d been trying to tear the world open with his body, too.

And the man stood where he’d stood before, between the two spruces, hands visible, posture calm. Only now his face looked strained, as if holding it together required effort.

His frame flickered at the edges.

Korax kept his sword leveled. He could still feel numbness crawling along his boots. He could taste extinguished candlewax in the back of his throat.

The man spoke softly.

“Good,” he said. “Good, Warden.”

Korax’s voice came out hoarse. “What do you want?”

The man’s smile thinned.

“To see how long you can keep doing that,” he said.

Korax stared at him.

The man’s gaze slid past Korax to Apollo.

Apollo pinned his ears and bared his teeth like a dog.

The man looked almost… respectful.

“A fine tether,” he murmured.

Then the man’s eyes returned to Korax.

“Are you real, Warden?” he asked one last time, not pleading now. Just asking.

Korax stayed silent.

The man nodded, as if that were an answer enough.

He faded without drama. No scream. No pull. No sudden violence.

Just absence, like a word erased from a page.

Apollo stomped hard, breath steaming, restless.

Korax stood where he was and waited.

Nothing followed.

No howl. No light. No rush of cold. No Veil-tear.

Just the mountain pass, holding its line.

Korax mounted Apollo slowly, fingers stiff on the reins.

As he rode away, he felt a certainty begin to gather in his chest, the sense that a boundary had been successfully held.

There was only one thing left, the memory of the question, circling without settling.

That night, when Korax stopped to make camp, he caught himself watching his own hands longer than necessary.

Feeling for weight.

Listening for breath.

And in the dark, far beyond the mountain, perhaps in the Shattered Marches even, he swore he heard something that might have been thunderous applause, in pleasure, as if the Veil itself enjoyed a good struggle.

He did not ask the question again.

The Veil, patient as ever, did not either.