Page 50 of Orc's Veil

Light explodes behind me.

Not the sickly opalescence of the dying Veil. This is brighter. Fiercer. Twilight magic wielded not for healing or sealing but for destruction—a weapon made of blood and will and eight years of desperate survival.

Eirene.

She’s not hiding. Not bleeding passively while I fight. She’s standing in the center of the stone circle, both arms raised, blood streaming from wounds I didn’t see her open. Her eyes have gone completely black—no white, no gray, just endless dark that somehow blazes with inner fire.

The light pouring from her hands strikes the breach-born creature like a physical blow. Shadow-flesh sizzles, burns, sloughs away in sheets. The thing screams—a sound that makes my bones vibrate—and staggers back from the onslaught.

I don’t hesitate. I attack.

My blade finds the gaps her magic has opened. I hack at burned flesh, sever limbs weakened by light, drive my sword deep into the creature’s core where the darkness is densest. It claws at me—catches my shoulder, tears through armor and flesh—but I don’t stop.

I feel Eirene’s power flowing through the mark, feel her will joining mine, feel us become a single weapon with two edges.

The breach-born falls.

It dissolves into wisps of shadow that scatter on the windless air, leaving only the stench of its death and the ichor coating my blade.

But there are more. There are still more.

TWENTY-NINE

VARKHUL

We fight back-to-back.

I don’t remember deciding to position this way—don’t remember choosing to trust her at my back, to guard hers in turn. But it happens naturally, instinctively, the claiming guiding us into a formation we’ve never practiced but somehow know by heart.

She moves, and I know where she’ll be. She strikes, and I’m already covering the gap she leaves. When a shadow-wolf lunges for her exposed flank, my blade intercepts it before the thought fully forms in my mind.

“Left!” she calls, and I’m already turning, already swinging, my sword cleaving through a memory-eater that was trying to flank us.

“Three coming high!” I shout, and her magic is blazing before I finish, a wall of light that sears the attacking creatures into wisps of screaming shadow.

It’s like we’ve been doing this for years. Like we were made for this—the chaos of battle stripping away everything that isn’t essential and leaving only what fits together, blade and anchor, each one the completion of what the other lacks.

Eirene’s twilight magic blazes in arcs of searing light, sealing breaches with force instead of passive sacrifice. Every gesture costs her—I can feel the strain pulsing through the mark—but she doesn’t falter. Doesn’t slow. She fights with a fury I’ve never seen from her, a primal viciousness that matches the darkness we’re facing.

My blade is a blur. Muscle memory takes over—twenty years of killing distilled into pure motion. Thrust. Parry. Slash. Spin. Each movement flows into the next without thought, without hesitation. I am the executioner. The blade that never wavers.

But now I have someone worth protecting.

The Veilspawn die in waves. Shadow-wolves. Memory-eaters. Breach-born monstrosities. They crash against us and shatter like waves against stone. The ground is black with ichor. The air is thick with the screams of dying darkness.

And slowly, impossibly, the tide begins to turn.

The breaches are closing. Eirene’s magic is sealing them faster than the Sovereign can tear new ones, the Veil responding to her blood with a strength I’ve never felt before. The claiming has changed her—made her more than a boundary witch. Made her part of the barrier itself.

The creatures stop coming.

I stand in the center of carnage, chest heaving, blood and ichor dripping from wounds I don’t remember receiving. My arms shake with exhaustion. My vision blurs at the edges.

I turn to Eirene. She’s on her knees, barely upright, her black eyes slowly fading back to gray shot through with gold. Blood covers her arms, her dress, the stones beneath her. She’s given so much—too much—and I can feel her exhaustion pulling at me across the mark.

“It’s over.” Her voice is ragged, wrecked. “They’ve stopped.”

I want to believe her. Want to drop my blade, gather her in my arms, tend to her wounds and my own. The silence isintoxicating after the chaos of battle, the absence of screaming and dying and endless dark shapes lunging at us from every direction.