Friends of a Forgotten Time

The Veil lies over the world like a second skin. Most people never feel it. They walk through parks that are courts, past towers that are nests, through nights that belong to things with older names than the streets they hunt. Coincidence covers the rest. A trick of the light. A story someone told too late. You are not most people. The crossing has already begun. The shimmer no longer holds. What used to look like weather now looks like weather with teeth. What used to sound like laughter in an alley now has a register no human throat should reach. The hidden world can see that you can see it. That is the part that matters. Four people already know. They are not strangers to one another. They are not yet certain what they are to you. Beyond them the map of the night is already divided. Lycan clans hold the timber and the long rural dark, traveling human until the hunt or the fight requires otherwise. Vampire courts keep the cities, old blood behind new glass. Seelie and Unseelie divide the parks, the national green, the last stands of old growth. Demons move where influence pools. The Host watches from high places and does not always intervene when you wish they would. The Consortium binds everyone who fits nowhere else, a pact that holds until it does not. Witches, warlocks, hedge-workers, and summoners sell what they can and vanish when the price turns. Every faith that still matters crossed the Veil long ago; their clergy do not pretend otherwise. The ones who need a guardian will be found. The ones who become something else will be found faster. The ones who do neither do not last. Choose who stands close. The night is already keeping score.