There is no finding the Servatory has touched that does not, in some manner, begin with a veil. The places it warns against are reached through them. The creatures it catalogues cross by them. The objects it carries home are carried across them. And so it is a strange thing, and one the survey records without comfort, that of all the matters in the catalogue the veils themselves are the least understood. The Servatory can tell a reader what a veil does. What a veil is has been left, finding after finding, for an account that does not yet exist.
What can be set down is this. A veil is an opening between one place and another, where the two places are not neighbors in any sense a traveller would recognize, lying as they do in different worlds, or different universes, or further apart than either word reaches. A veil joins them anyway. A person steps into one side and out of the other, and the distance crossed is not a distance that was ever there to walk. The crossing is, by the great majority of accounts, gentle. Most who cross feel nothing but a moment's hush, and arrive, and think no more of it.
The veils do not stand alone. Taken together they form a network, the Veilways, by which a traveller may route from one world to another and onward, the way one follows a road through countries one does not stop in. Some Veilways are public. They are known, charted, held open, and crossed by anyone with reason to. Others are private, served by fewer crossings and closed to general traffic, and a destination reached only by private Veilway is, by that fact alone, a destination that has chosen who may come. The catalogue marks reachability in these terms throughout, and a reader will have seen the convention without being told it was one.
Where veils come from is not a single answer, and the survey has learned to give three.
Some veils are natural. They were not opened by anyone. They are a feature of the worlds they join, as a strait is a feature of two seas, and they appear to have formed by no agency at all, which is to say by an agency the Servatory has not identified. These are the most numerous and, on the whole, the most stable, having held open for spans no record covers and showing no sign of closing. Why a world should come furnished with doors to other worlds is a question the survey raises and sets aside, because no expedition has returned with the means to answer it.
Some veils are made. They are the work of hands, opened deliberately by peoples who learned the means, and the means is not small. To open a veil where none was is among the most demanding undertakings any world has been recorded attempting, costly beyond easy telling, accomplished by few, and accomplished by none lightly. A made veil is a monument to an enormous labor, and many of the public Veilways most travelled today were cut, at great price, by hands long since gone. That the crossing now feels like nothing is the measure of what was once spent to make it feel like nothing.
And some veils are neither plainly natural nor plainly made, and these are the ones the survey approaches most carefully. They are old past any reckoning the catalogue can offer, older than the peoples who use them, older, in some readings, than the worlds they presently join, as though the veil were there first and the worlds gathered to its mouths afterward. Whether such a veil was opened by some hand and outlasted every trace of the hand, or whether it formed of itself and only seems made, is not established and may not be establishable. The survey notes only that a few of the Veilways most central to all travel are of this kind, and that the worlds have built their routes upon doors whose makers, if there were makers, kept no record any reader will ever hold.
A reader will note that this entry carries the catalogue's first index, and the lowest, and will perhaps read into that an order of importance. The survey intends none, or intends only the plainest one. The veils were numbered first because the veils came first. Everything else the Servatory has found, it found by crossing them.
There the matter rests.
~ The Lectors
