The Verdant Veil ● Where Memory Is Allowed to Stay

A Place Where Memory Is Not a Problem

The Verdant Veil was the first place I knew had to exist.

Not because it was beautiful, though it is, but rather because, in contrast, I needed a place where memory was not treated as a problem to solve.

The Veil is lush, ancient, and layered with magic that does not rush. Sun Elves and Moon Elves live side by side here, alongside dryads and whispering glades, beneath spellwood trees that remember the First War. These trees don’t record history the way books do. They hold it in their grain. Over time, they grow around it. They do not forget.

Because of that, it mattered to me.

At the same time, when I was writing Book Two, I was learning that some memories don’t soften with time. They don’t soften with time. Instead, they don’t resolve neatly. As a result, they remain, quietly influencing everything that grows afterward.

The Hall of Echoes

Hidden within the forest lies the Hall of Echoes, a chamber bound to memory and truth. It doesn’t exist to accuse or absolve. It exists to reflect. You don’t enter it to be judged, you enter it to hear what still speaks when you stop trying to outrun it.

This was once Aistriana’s realm.

She ruled here not through force, but through listening. And when she stepped down, it wasn’t a failure of leadership. It was an acknowledgment of something I was learning myself: that caretaking memory is different from carrying it alone.

What the Verdant Veil Represents

In my own process, then, the Verdant Veil represents the part of healing where you stop asking memory to justify itself. Where you no longer demand that pain explain why it stayed. You allow it a place. You give it language, ritual, and boundary.

Diplomacy here is not political – it’s internal.
Healing arts do not erase – they bind.
Magic doesn’t dominate – it remembers.

The Verdant Veil exists because memory needed a home that wouldn’t try to fix it.

And because I did too.