The Veil
The Veil sits on Velhuneth, the Nox homeworld, inside an enclosed, heated, secured temple-like structure on the surface that the previous civilisation built approximately 200,000 years ago. When the lava fields swept across Velhuneth and scoured the rest of the surface clean, the structure held. The colonists found it early, during Nox's first survey of the world.
What it is
The Veil itself is invisible, a planar threshold with no perceptible doorway, no shimmer, no signage. The only thing that marks where it lies is the doorframe-shaped structure the previous civilisation raised around it.
When a person passes through the plane, white light envelops whatever part of the body is crossing. Seen from the side, the crosser appears to vanish, as though stepping into another dimension.
What the Veil holds, what it shows, what entering it actually does. ## The first crossing
The first colonist to cross was a Nox scientist, Lillith Umberlin. She returned lucid, physically and mentally intact, and lived a normal lifespan after.
Everything she experienced inside the Veil came back to her as a single impression she could never put into words. She had been somewhere. She had seen something vast, and she knew it mattered. The specifics did not return with her.
What did return, intact, were seven words.
THEY WERE US. WE ARE THEM. AGAIN.
She said them, and she could not explain them. She remembered speaking them inside the Veil, but not where they came from or what they answered. She spent the rest of her life trying to recover the rest of the experience and never did. The seven words were all that survived.
The trigger event
Generations later, Vera Umberlin crossed and returned with the encoding revealed. What the seven words had pointed to all along was a system distributed across every territory planet, ancient and waiting. The are real, and her return triggered the era-of-stratagem. The prose canon of that return is locked in scn-001-the-return-of-vera-umberlin.
Heroes and Veil heroes
Hero is a broad cultural category in Solace, and people are raised to it by many paths: leadership, battle, political acts, the ending of wars, the Veil. A Veil hero is a specific subset. They entered the Veil, came back intact, and what they carried out of it, whether knowledge, perception, or the willingness to share, lifted them to hero status. Most who return become Veil heroes, but not all. A returner who refuses to share what they brought back, or hoards it for their house's advantage, remains a returner without ever becoming a hero. The elevation is earned, not automatic.
Governance: the three sub-factions
The Veil is governed by three cross-house, non-hierarchical sub-factions, each charged with one part of the crossing:
- guides prepare candidates and certify when they are ready.
- gatekeepers control physical access at the threshold and hold absolute kill authority there.
- witnesses observe each entry and exit and produce the reports the houses receive.
See each sub-faction page for detail.
Related
- velhuneth (location)
- Lillith Umberlin, Vera Umberlin, Vincent Umberlin