Page 49 of Orc's Veil

The first wave of Veilspawn crashes against us.

Shadow-wolves lead the charge—a dozen of them, moving like smoke across the black soil, their empty eyes fixed on the light blazing from Eirene’s blood. They hit the edge of the stone circle and scatter, circling, probing for weakness.

I don’t give them time to find any.

And I go to work.

Twenty yearsof executions have taught me how to kill efficiently. Cleanly. Without wasted motion or unnecessary suffering.

This isn’t clean. This is butchery.

My blade sings through shadow-flesh, spraying ichor that burns where it touches skin. One creature falls. Two. A shadow-wolf lunges for my throat and I catch it on my forearm, feel claws scrape against armor, drive my sword through its open mouth until the point emerges from the back of its skull.

The mark on my chest blazes with heat. Power flows through me—not just my own strength, but Eirene’s magic tangled with mine, amplifying every strike, every movement. I can feel her behind me, feel the blood pouring from her wounds as she feeds the Veil, feel the boundary responding to her sacrifice.

A memory-eater comes at me low, its eyeless face turned toward the fresh grief I carry from seeing Korvax’s death. I split it from skull to groin with a single overhead strike. Another creature takes its place. Then another. Then another.

They keep coming.

The ground around me is slick with ichor. My armor is coated in the stuff, dark and viscous, smelling of rot and ancient malice. My arms burn with exertion. My breath comes in ragged gasps.

And still they come.

From the direction of the encampment, I hear a scream. Not the shriek of a Veilspawn—a voice I recognize. Orc. Male. Dying.

Then another scream. And another.

The warden encampment is falling. My brothers—orcs I trained with, fought beside, watched take their oaths—are dying. And I can’t help them. Can’t even try to help them, because the moment I leave the stones, the moment I abandon Eirene?—

Everything falls.

I feel Draveth go first.

It comes through the Veil—a pulse of severed life. Draveth wasn’t a stranger. He was everything I used to be: the order’s cleanest instrument, ruthless and certain and incapable of doubt. I had feared what he’d do when he arrived. Feared the efficiency of him, the lack of hesitation that had always made him more dangerous than me.

The Sovereign devours him between one heartbeat and the next. His certainty—all that iron certainty I once admired—consumed whole, added to the entity’s mass. The order’s sharpest blade, broken before it ever reached us.

I don’t grieve the executioner he was. But I grieve what he might have become if someone had made us question sooner.

And then Kravos.

His death follows moments later—a pulse of severed life, a soul torn apart and fed to the hungry dark. He’d come with Draveth’s force, I realize. Too impatient to wait at the Citadel for word of my compliance. High Warden Kravos. The man who signed Eirene’s death warrant. The commander I served for fifteen years.

He dies screaming.

I feel the Sovereign consume him—feel the entity grow stronger as it devours years of memories, decades of service, a lifetime of cold certainty. Kravos believed in the order. Believed in the law. Believed that sacrificing one boundary witch was worth the stability of the realm.

Now he’s just fuel for the very darkness he thought he was fighting.

“Varkhul!” Eirene’s voice cuts through my spiral of horror. “Behind you!”

I spin. A breach-born creature—massive, humanoid, made of compressed darkness—has broken through while I was distracted. It towers over me, limbs too long, joints bending wrong, a nightmare given form by centuries of stolen fear.

I barely get my blade up in time.

The impact drives me back, boots scraping trenches in the black soil. The creature’s arm comes down again—a blow that would shatter stone—and I deflect it at an angle, feel the force shudder through my skeleton, roll clear as its foot crashes down where my head was.

It’s too fast. Too strong. I can’t?—