Page 45 of Orc's Veil

A boy, maybe twelve years old. His hands are bound behind his back. His face is streaked with dirt and tears. He’s accused of being touched by shadow—of carrying the Veil’s taint inside him, spreading it to everyone he meets. The evidence is thin. A village’s hysteria. A scapegoat for a plague that had nothing to do with magic.

But the order has spoken. The sentence has been passed.

Through Varkhul’s eyes, I watch the blade rise. Through his ears, I hear the boy’s final words—not a plea, not a curse, but a question. “Did I do bad?” His voice is small, confused. He doesn’t understand why he’s here. Doesn’t understand why the tall orc in dark armor is looking at him with such careful blankness.

The blade falls.

I feel Varkhul’s horror—buried deep, suppressed immediately, locked away behind walls of duty and discipline. He didn’t let himself feel it then. The order doesn’t allow doubt. The blade doesn’t allow mercy.

But I feel it now. Eight years later, carried on the claiming mark between us, I feel the scream he never let himself release.The grief he never acknowledged. The question he never asked: Was I wrong?

There are more children. Two girls accused of witchcraft—not boundary witches, just village girls who happened to know which herbs cured fevers. A boy who threw a rock at a Veil-warden and was sentenced to death for treason. An infant—gods, an infant—born to a woman who’d crossed the boundary while pregnant, condemned before it could even open its eyes.

The order doesn’t discriminate. The law doesn’t care about age or innocence or circumstance.

And Varkhul has been their blade for twenty years.

I’m crying. I realize it distantly, feel the tears sliding down my cheeks, taste salt on my lips. I’m crying for people I never knew, people who died before I ever came to the Veilborder, people whose faces are now burned into my memory as surely as if I’d watched them die myself.

I claimed a murderer. I gave myself to a man who has killed children.

The mark on my chest pulses with warmth, trying to comfort me, trying to remind me of the man who held me against the stones while the world fell apart. But I can’t feel that man right now. All I can feel are his victims, screaming in my skull.

“Eirene.”

His voice cuts through the flood of memories. I didn’t hear him wake—didn’t feel him move—but suddenly he’s there, crouched in front of me, his massive form blocking the thin light filtering through the window.

I flinch away from him.

The hurt that crosses his face is devastating. Raw and immediate and completely unguarded. He felt my revulsion—of course he did, the claiming doesn’t allow secrets—and it hit him harder than any blade.

Good. Let it hurt.

“You’re feeling them.” It’s not a question. He knows. He can feel exactly what I’m experiencing, even if the memories themselves are his. “The executions.”

“How could you?” The words tear out of me, rough and broken. I can’t look at him. Can’t stand to see the face that watched so many others take their final breath. “Children, Varkhul. You killed children.”

He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t try to explain or justify or minimize. He just nods, a single jerking motion, and I see his jaw clench tight enough to crack teeth.

“I followed orders.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I was wrong.” The words come out quiet. Broken. “I was wrong, Eirene. About all of it.”

“Wrong doesn’t bring them back.” I’m on my feet now, pacing the tiny space between us, unable to stay still. The cottage walls feel like they’re closing in. The memories keep coming—a steady stream of death and doubt and carefully suppressed conscience. “Wrong doesn’t undo twenty years of murder. Wrong doesn’t give those children their lives back.”

“I know.” He doesn’t try to touch me. Doesn’t try to close the distance I’ve put between us. He just watches me with eyes that hold no defense, no excuse, no attempt to make himself appear better than he is. “I know it doesn’t.”

“Then what? You expect me to forgive you because the mark says I have to? Because we’re bound and I can’t escape what you’ve done?”

“No.” He shakes his head, slow and deliberate. “I don’t expect forgiveness. I don’t deserve it.”

“Then what do you want from me?”

The question hangs between us. Outside, the sky is lightening toward a dawn that never quite arrives. The Veil hums with the new stability we created last night—bought with blood and claiming and desperate surrender. But inside this cottage, stability feels like a distant dream.

“I want you to see all of it.” His voice steadies. “Not just the deaths. See why I did it. What I believed. What I was before the order made me a weapon.”