The Sky-Veil: Chapter 1
The Grey-Beneath
The Sky-Veil series is a mythopoetic journey through a forgotten realm where the divine brushes the mortal. A nameless man awakens beneath a veil of sorrow and memory, guided by three silent goddesses across a path of signs, silence, and sacred trials. His quest is not to rise in power, but to remember his name—and the order of Being itself. This is a story of longing, wisdom, and the quiet majesty that crowns the soul.
The Sky-Veil series was written and developed by Walter Emerson Adams with creative assistance from ChatGPT (OpenAI) as a language-shaping tool. All content and narrative remain original to the author.
He awoke with no memory of how he had come to the Grey-Beneath.
The ground under him was soft, not with soil, but with a carpet of brittle moss the color of old smoke. It crumbled like a memory too long forgotten as he turned over in quiet desperation. The sky overhead was a motionless dome of dull pewter, barely changing between day and night, a twilight stretched thin across the Sky-Veil above. Nothing moved—not leaf, not wind, not time.
All around him, the world hummed with a low ache, like the sound of distant weeping you could never quite hear, but always feel.
He sat up slowly.
He was clothed in a simple tunic, dark and threadbare, dirty in places he didn’t remember dirtying. A satchel lay beside him—worn, leather-bound, marked with symbols he could not read. It had not been there when he went to sleep. Inside it, he found only a book with blank pages, and the feeling that they were not to remain blank. He glanced left and right but saw no one.
He stood.
The land was a quiet desolation. Trees dotted the distance, thin and skeletal, their bark ashen-white, peeling like old skin. Stone columns stood at odd angles, half-buried in the moss, like the ribs of some dead civilization. Birds did not sing here. No rivers ran. Only a pale mist drifted low across the ground, coiling through hollows and folding in on itself as if shy.
He walked.
Not because he knew where he was going, but because to stand still here felt like surrendering to the slow decay of the world.
Others moved through the Grey—shadows in the fog, draped in long robes and silver masks. They walked aimlessly, never acknowledging him. He once tried to speak to one, but no voice came from his throat, and no recognition came from theirs. The masks were expressionless, mirror-like. When he passed too near, he caught glimpses of himself in them—not as he was, but as he feared to be: empty, hollow, forever wandering.
He kept his distance after that.
As he walked, he began to notice things—small things, subtle and strange.
A cluster of violet flowers blooming between two stones—impossibly vibrant in a land so drained of life. A broken harp on the steps of a ruined arch, one string still singing softly in the windless air. A stone with a spiral etched in its center, warm to the touch when everything else was cold.
These were signs. He did not know how he knew that. He simply did.
The Grey-Beneath was not a prison.
It was a forgetting.
A place of forgetting the remembrance. A womb of silence.
And amidst its quiet sorrow, something stirred.
Then, one evening—or something like evening, when the sky deepened to a dull violet and the air turned heavy with empty meaning—he found a pool.
It was small, with a creek running down to it, one he had never seen before. In fact, he had never seen any of this before on his walks through the Beneath. The water was still, like glass. It reflected no sky, only shadow and light.
He knelt beside it.
The air changed.
The mist cleared.
And behind him, she appeared.
A presence first—warmth, scent, the salty breeze from a shore just out of sight.
Then form.
She stepped through the fog like the ocean moves through night—She of the Sea-Foam and Smile, though he did not yet know her name.
Her hair shone with the sunlight of rosy-fingered dawn, sweet light not known in the Grey-Beneath. Her eyes held galaxies—sorrow and laughter, joy and mourning entwined. He looked at her as if he had known her before.
He could not speak.
“You have felt it,” she said, her voice was angelic, wafting through trees and across meadows, bringing temporary life to the landscape. “The ache beneath the Sky-Veil.”
He nodded.
She knelt beside him. The light of her presence shimmered on the water.
From its depths, she drew forth a single rose.
Its petals were veined with light, and the scent it gave off was not floral, but familiar—the scent of home, though he had never known it.
“This is remembrance,” she said. “Not of things once known, but of the nature of Being itself.”
She placed the rose in his hand.
It did not wither.
“Keep it,” she whispered. “When the night grows heavy, and the Beneath presses against your soul—remember this moment. You are not lost. You are beginning.”
Then she was gone.
Only the rose remained.
And in the stillness of the Grey-Beneath, the man took his first step—not into knowledge, but into the longing that would lead him home.
Enjoy “She of the Sea Foam and Smile (Aphrodite’s Gift)” from my album The Sky-Veil, available on my music site.
Purchase the album, The Sky-Veil here.
Lyrics ©Walter Emerson Adams. Music and vocals by Suno ©Walter Emerson Adams.
She stepped through fog like sea through silent night She of the Sea-Foam and Smile Her name unknown, her hair was gleaming bright By dawn’s first light, the world in blush beguiled Her piercing eyes - like galaxies and stars Where sorrow, joy, and laughter lay entwined She looked at him as though she knew his scars Did Aphrodite gift him grace, remind? “You felt the ache beneath all things” she spoke Her voice, an angel’s, wrapped around the trees She knelt, her presence shimmered on a brook She drew from depths her roses, blooms in three Their petals veined with light, their scent divine She whispered, “Keep them,” pressed them in his hand Then Aphrodite vanished into song She of the Sea-Foam and Smile
The Grey Beneath lyrics are so beautiful. You are on a very special journey. I will check out the music.