WARDEN OF THE ASHEN VEIL Written as Part One of The Ashen Veil Chronicles FADE IN: EXT. ANCHOR POINT SEVEN, OUTER DISTRICT, ALDENMERE, PRE-DAWN A city that works before it wakes. Street vendors arranging their stalls. A lamplighter making his last rounds. The sky the specific grey of three hours before sunrise. And overlaid on all of it, the Ashworld. Not above or below. Occupying the same space. A city identical to this one, the same stone, the same geometry, but the color has been taken out of it. The dead go about their routines in the same streets the living walk, doing the things they were doing when they died, not knowing the streets have changed around them. A dead woman hangs laundry from a doorway that is now an exterior wall. The building that surrounded that doorway burned thirty years ago. The dead woman is unaware of this. A dead child runs past chasing something. Cuts through a produce cart and out the other side. The cart vendor does not notice. The child does not notice. SERAVAEL DUNE (38) moves through both worlds at once. She is lean, economical in her movements, dressed in practical traveling clothes that have been repaired more than once. She carries a leather survey bag over one shoulder and a small notebook in her left hand. Her face has the quality of someone who has long since decided that the point of an expression is to convey information and that anything else1