Page 50 of Orc’s Hex

Mother Veyra watches me go.

“This is what was taken from them. Every Xorn heir the sigil prevented. Every life that should have existed and didn’t. You wanted to understand the grievance, curse-eater. Understand this.”

I hit the door with my back and pull it open and shout Drazhul’s name into the corridor with a volume I don’t stop to modulate.

The shapes in the floor keep rising.

TWELVE

DRAZHUL

He hears her shout his name from two corridors away.

He’s already moving—has been moving since the floor shuddered through the Hall of Oaths three minutes ago, since Varek looked at the door and Setha’s head snapped up and Drazhul made his decision before either of them finished reacting. He came up the east passage at a run, which he does not usually do, and now he’s through the Great Hall entrance and he can see Ziva pulling herself away from the advisor chamber door and he can see, through the open archway ahead of her, what the floor is doing.

He understood the Heir-Killer Sigil prevented heirs.

He did not understand that the curse had been collecting them.

The Great Hall floor has split across three lines radiating from the center. The cracks that have been widening for days have finally opened past the point where darkness shows below—and out of that darkness, out of the old oath stone and the Foundation Crypt three floors below it, the Bone-Shadow constructs are rising.

They are wrong in the way targeted grotesque is not wrong. Not random. Intentional. The proportions are off in the way denied growth is off—too narrow at the shoulders, the limbs slightly short, the heads bowed at an angle that has never resolved into upright because nothing ever reached completion. He looks at them and he knows what they are made of.

Every heir the curse prevented. Every Xorn bloodline continuation the sigil consumed before it could exist. Three centuries of denied potential given form.

There are seven of them.

There will be more.

He takes the room in the half-second he has to take it. Three exits: the main entrance behind him, still clear; the side corridor to the advisor chambers, where Ziva stands; the archway to the east wing, currently unguarded. Twenty-eight warriors ran drills in this hall a lifetime ago this morning. None of them are here now. Just stone, cracking floor, and seven shapes built from everything his bloodline was never allowed to become.

Get her clear of the open ground. Get your back to something that can’t be flanked.

He crosses to Ziva in three strides, puts himself beside her, and says without looking at her: “Tell me what you need.”

“Don’t let them reach me while I’m threading.”

“Done.”

“And Drazhul⁠—“

“What.”

“They’re made of Blood Law. Iron won’t hold them. You need impact and disruption, not cutting.”

He already knew this. He nods once and goes.

The first construct reaches him before he reaches it.

It moves faster than it should—shadow and bone-echo, not flesh, unbound by mass and leverage the way a body would be. He takes the impact on his forearm, drives back with his elbow, and the thing staggers but doesn’t fall. He reads it in that exchange: disperses force instead of taking it. He adjusts.

Heel of the palm to the chest. Full force through one point.

The construct shatters and the pieces scatter dark against the floor.

Then begin to reassemble.

Not sustainable.