Page 68 of Orc's Veil

“Not going anywhere.” I press my back against his for a moment—just long enough to feel the heat of him, the solid reassurance of his presence—then spin away to call more memories free.

The Sovereign is shrinking.

With every memory I reclaim, every soul that escapes its grasp, the entity loses mass. Where it once towered three times Varkhul’s height, it’s now barely larger than a man. The stolen faces that covered its surface have gone still—not cycling anymore, not shifting, just frozen in expressions of release as they finally break free.

Stop.The Sovereign’s voice is barely a whisper now, thin and reedy.Stop, please. I’ll give you anything. I’ll release him. I’ll seal the breaches. I’ll?—

“You’ll die.” I step toward it, blood dripping from my outstretched hands. “That’s what you’ll do. You’ll die, and you’ll give back everything you’ve stolen, and the people you consumed will finally be free.”

You can’t—you don’t understand?—

“I understand perfectly.” Another wave of memories tears free—dozens this time, hundreds, a flood of stolen moments pouring out of the Sovereign’s collapsing form. “I understand that you’ve been feeding on grief for centuries. That you’ve turned other people’s pain into your own power. That you wouldhave done the same to me—bled me forever, used me as a door to destroy everything I’ve spent my life protecting.”

The entity reaches for me—one last desperate attempt to claim the breach it came for. Its remaining mass coalesces into a clawed hand, shadow-fingers stretching toward my throat.

Varkhul’s blade takes the hand off at the wrist.

The Sovereign shrieks—a sound of pure agony that shakes the walls of the throne room, that cracks the floor of severed ties, that makes the very air tremble with its death-throes.

I meet its pale luminescent eyes one final time. See the fear there. The desperation. The terrible knowledge of its own ending.

“This is for everyone you’ve consumed.” I raise both hands and pour every drop of power I have left into the call. “This is for the memories you stole. The lives you ruined. The world you tried to devour.”

I force every stolen memory back into its form.

Every face. Every voice. Every fragment of a thousand lives. The lullaby and the first kiss and the wedding vows and the birthday candles. The soldier’s mother and the grandmother’s husband and the father’s pride and the child’s joy. Centuries of consumed existence, flooding back into the entity that devoured them.

The Sovereign can’t contain it.

It swells—not with power, but with pressure. The stolen faces on its surface push outward, straining against the bounds of its form. The voices in its chorus rise to a deafening cacophony, overlapping, clashing, tearing each other apart.

And then it breaks.

THIRTY-NINE

VARKHUL

The Sovereign explodes.

Light—pure, blinding, impossibly bright—erupts from its collapsing form. I throw myself in front of Eirene, wrapping my arms around her, shielding her body with mine as the shockwave hits.

Her arms lock around my waist, her face pressed to my chest. I feel her breath against my skin, hot and fast, her body trembling with exhaustion but holding on to me like I’m the only solid thing in a dissolving world.

The force throws us backward. We hit the ground hard, tangled in each other, the breath driven from both our lungs. Around us, the throne room is coming apart—the walls of stolen memory dissolving, the floor of severed ties cracking and splitting, the crystallized throne shattering into a million glittering fragments.

But I don’t care about any of that. All I care about is the woman in my arms.

“Eirene.” I pull back just enough to see her face—pale, blood-streaked, her eyes half-closed with exhaustion. “Eirene, are you?—”

“We did it.” Her voice is barely a whisper, but there’s a smile on her lips. “We killed it.”

I kiss her. Can’t help it. Right here, in the ruins of the Sovereign’s throne room, with the Shadow Court falling apart around us, I cup her face in my hands and kiss her like it’s the last thing I’ll ever do.

She melts into me despite everything—despite the exhaustion, the wounds, the world crumbling around us. Her fingers curl into my ruined shirt, pulling me closer, and I feel her heart hammering against my chest in a rhythm that matches my own.

She tastes of copper and magic and exhaustion. Her lips are chapped and her breath is ragged and she’s covered in blood—her own, mostly, from the wounds she opened to fuel her assault. But she’s alive. She’s here. She’s mine.

“Varkhul.” She pulls back, her hands gripping my shoulders. “We need to move.”