Page 76 of Orc's Veil

I gesture at the stones, the lightening sky, the changed world around us. At the home we’ve made from blood and sacrifice and impossible love.

“This is enough,” I say. “For now, this is everything.”

He doesn’t answer with words. He answers by pulling me close, by pressing his lips to my hair, by holding me in the circle of the stones while the new Veil hums around us. We stand there as the sky shifts from twilight to dawn—true dawn, for the first time in memory—and watch the light spread across a world we almost died to save.

We’re not heroes. We’re not saviors. We’re a boundary witch who fed a monster for eight years and an executioner who served the wrong masters for twenty, and we turned every broken thing about ourselves into the foundation of something that will stand.

FORTY-TWO

EIRENE

The Veilborder has changed.

I stand at the central stone as dawn breaks—true dawn, gold and rose bleeding across the horizon like a wound healing at last. The perpetual twilight that hung over this place for centuries has lifted. Not completely—the sky still carries that bruised-purple hue, the silver moons still visible even in daylight—but there’s warmth now. Hope.

The ancient stones rise around me, taller than they were before. They pulse with power that matches my heartbeat, responding to my presence the way they never did in eight years of bleeding. The channels carved into their surfaces glow faintly with residual light—the same pearlescent shimmer that marks my skin.

I don’t have to cut myself anymore. The Veil feeds on my existence now, not my blood. Simply being here, being part of the barrier we built, is enough to keep it strong.

Three months. Three months since we killed the Sovereign. Three months since we remade the boundary from our blood and sacrifice and love. Three months of learning what it means to be guardians instead of victims.

I hear Varkhul approaching before I see him—the heavy tread of his boots on the packed earth, the faint hum of power that surrounds him now. He moves differently than he used to. Still dangerous, still lethal, but there’s an ease to his stride that wasn’t there when he first arrived at the Veilborder with orders to execute me.

He comes up behind me, wraps his arms around my waist, and pulls me back against his chest. I lean into him without thinking—an automatic response now, as natural as breathing. His lips brush my temple.

Three months, and I still marvel at this. The casual intimacy we’ve built. The way his body curves around mine like we were made to fit. The heat of him against my back, steady and solid and real.

“You’re up early.”

“The Veil was restless.” I turn my head to catch his mouth with mine—a brief kiss, soft and familiar. “Nothing dangerous. Just… adjusting.”

“It’s been doing that a lot lately.”

“The barrier is still settling into its new form.” I turn in his arms, press my palms flat against his chest. The shifting runes that cover his skin pulse warm beneath my touch. “It’ll stabilize eventually. We just need to give it time.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime, we do what we’ve been doing. Guard. Protect. Send the occasional Veilspawn back to the darkness it crawled out of.” I smile up at him. “It’s not so different from before. Just… better.”

He snorts. “‘Better’ is one word for it.”

“What word would you use?”

His hands slide down to grip my hips, pulling me closer. “Mine.”

The word sends heat through me, even after three months of hearing it. Even after countless nights wrapped around each other, learning each other’s bodies, discovering new ways to bring each other pleasure. He says it like a vow. Like a promise. Like the only truth that matters.

“Possessive orc.”

“You love it.”

I do. Every damned day.

The tear in the Veil—thewound the Sovereign tore open in its death-throes—has become a scar.

I walk its length with Varkhul at my side, inspecting the barrier the way I do every morning. The scar runs from one stone to another, visible as a faint shimmer in the air, a permanent reminder of how close we came to losing everything. It’s healed now—stable, strong, no longer bleeding shadow into the world—but it will never disappear entirely.

Some wounds don’t heal. They just become part of you.