There's Nowhere to Hide in the Veil

The moment I step into the Veil, Aurora Hallow disappears. One breath, I can still feel my mother behind me. Ivy, standing at the edge of the trees, trying not to tremble. Rosemary somewhere among the ferns, probably too young to understand. Prose watching from the glimmer stone, silent in the way he becomes when words would only make something heavier.

Then the pale light folds around me, and there is no meadow. No moss beneath my hooves. No fireflies. No sound. Only white. And for a moment, I think I have died.

But then the Veil breathes into me. Moving through every fiber of my being, searching for the places I have hidden from myself. I try to take a step forward, but there is no forward. There is no path. No before or after. There is only now, and now stretches so wide I cannot find its edges.

I close my eyes and whisper the first truth I can reach, “I’m afraid.”

The white around me flickers. For a moment, I expect a monster, claws, teeth, two glinting red eyes. Instead, the Veil gives me a doorway. It stands alone in the whiteness, small and crooked, carved from pale bark. I know it at once because I made many miniature ones like it when I was little. Tiny doors hidden beneath roots, behind stones, inside hollow logs. I made them while imagining the sprites might one day want to rejoin us in our part of the Hallow. That maybe if they did, they could use their ancient magic to fix everything that felt broken.

This one has no handle. I step closer and when I touch it, the white around me trembles.

A voice speaks from nowhere, “What are you waiting for?”

It sounds like me.

“I do not know,” I say.

The door remains closed. So I answer again, “I am waiting for someone to come back.”

The door cracks open. Behind it, there is no room. No forest. No face waiting for me. Only another stretch of white. I step through it anyway… there’s nowhere else to go.

The world changes. Mirrors surround me, rising from the ground like sheets of frozen pond water each reflecting a different version of me. In one, I am small and laughing, racing Rosemary through fern beds while she tries to keep up. In another, I am older, standing beside my mother, pretending I do not notice how often she looks toward the trees. In another, I am with Prose, nodding as he tells me I am ready, though my heart is pounding so hard I can barely hear him. In another, I am at the edge of the trees overlooking the Veil… smiling… brave... terrified.

I look away, but the mirrors turn with me. The Veil won’t let me leave myself. I know this.

One reflection steps closer from inside its glass. It is me on the morning I entered the Veil… was that just this morning? I have calm eyes and a steady face… the version I let everyone else see.

She looks at me and asks, “Why did you smile?”

My throat tightens, “So they would not be afraid.”

The reflection does not blink, “so they would not be afraid, or so they would not know you were?”

The question lands sharply. A pain in my chest. The mirrors hum around me. I want to say there is no difference. But the Veil has no patience for almost-truths.

“I did not want them to know,” I whisper.

The mirror-me softens.

“Why?”

The word fills the space, echoing from every reflection relentlessly. The same way Prose sounds when he knows I am walking around the truth instead of through it.

I close my eyes. “Because if they knew how afraid I was, maybe they would think I was not the right fawn.”

The mirrors stop humming. The reflection in front of me reaches her forehead to the glass. For a moment, I think she might step through. Instead, the mirror fades into light. A small gold flicker rises from where it stood. A Glimmer. It drifts toward my chest and rests there, warm as breath.

The Veil loosens around me. I understand then, or begin to. The Veil is not asking me to be unafraid. It is asking me to stop pretending fear means I am unworthy.

The white returns, but this time, it carries sound. A thousand tiny hooves in moss. Ferns brushing against fur. Rosemary laughing too loudly because she wants to be noticed. My mother humming under her breath when she thinks no one is listening. Prose turning pages in the archive fields. Fireflies blinking in answer to questions no one has said aloud.

The sounds swirl around me until they become a path. I follow it. The path leads to a pool of water suspended in the air. It hangs before me like a floating pond, round and still, reflecting nothing. When I step close, the surface ripples.

A memory appears: Rosemary, younger, crying beside the den because another fawn told her she was too small to help with the firefly lanterns. I remember this, sitting beside her saying, “You are not too small. You are just not ready yet.”

In the memory, Rosemary looks at me with wet eyes. “Then when will I be ready?”

I know what I said. I said, “Soon.”

But the Veil changes the memory. The little Rosemary in the water looks up at me now, not the me beside her then, but the me standing here.

“When will you be ready?” she asks.

The pool ripples again. Now I see Mother. She is sleeping in the den, though even in sleep her body is curled around where my Father used to sleep. Like she is hugging his ghost. I am young, standing at the entrance, watching her breathe. Rosemary is tucked beside her, small and warm and safe.

In the memory, I make a decision. I remember this too. No one asked me to make it. No one even knew. But I made it. I decided I would be easy. I would be steady. I would not need too much. I would not make Mother worry more.

The reflection of the memory darkens.

The Veil asks: “Who told you love had to make you smaller?”

I step back. “I do not know.”

The Veil knows that is not enough and is silent, rejecting my lie.

“No one,” I say, my voice shaking. “No one told me. I thought it would help.”

The memory shifts. I see every time I swallowed a question. Every time I said I was fine before anyone asked. Every time Rosemary reached for me and I held her together while some part of me quietly came apart.

The pool reflects my face. It is showing me how I disappeared.

I lower my head, “I thought if I needed less, they could survive more.”

The water brightens. Another Glimmer rises. This one hurts as it enters me. It carries grief, but beneath the grief is relief. A truth named is still painful. But it is no longer alone.

The Veil is shifting around me again. This time, the white is blossoming into a forest. Not Aurora Hallow. The roots hang from the sky instead of growing into the ground. Leaves drift upward. The trees are made of half-remembered thoughts, and when I pass them, I hear my own mind speaking in fragments:

“Be brave.”

“Do not make it worse.”

“Rosemary needs you.”

“Mother is tired.”

“Prose believes in you.”

“I can’t fail.”

The words endlessly echo around me from every direction.

“I can’t fail.”

My chest tightens around the Glimmers I have gathered, giving me strength.

“I am trying,” I say.

The roots above me shift.

The Veil answers, “trying is not the same as telling the truth.”

I look up. The roots are braided with little bark doors. Hundreds of them. Every door I ever carved as a young fawn. They echoed every small wish I hid in the forest because I could not bear to say it aloud:

“I want him to come back.”

“I want Mother to stop waiting.”

“I want Rosemary to stop asking if I will leave.”

“I want someone to tell me I can be scared and still be loved.”

A door drops from the roots and lands before me. This one is larger than the others. I know what is behind it before it opens. My body knows before my mind lets me. The Veil has circled the wound long enough. It’s shown me the masks I wore around it. The promises I made because of it. The ways I tried to become useful enough that no one else would leave.

Now it is taking me to the place where the wound began.