Page 58 of Orc’s Hex

It comes in a wave.

The pain is secondary. The nausea is secondary. The burning that runs from my fingertips to my sternum—secondary. I have trained myself not to care about my own pain while working, and I exercise that training now with everything it’s worth.

I drive it through the ritual connection.

Through the bloodline channel. Through the Bondmark—which in this amplification field is not the warm background awareness I’ve been living with for two weeks but a direct line, clear as a shout, and I can feel exactly where he is and exactly what his body is doing when the first wave of the curse hits his bloodstream.

He convulses.

Once—sharp, involuntary, his entire body pulling against itself before his will reasserts and he locks himself back into stillness. His palms stay flat on the carving. His eyes stay on me.

He can hold this. I know that with the same certainty I know the sigil’s architecture. He can hold this.

I keep working.

The second phase is slower.

Drawing from the network itself—every thread the sigil has been running through the hold’s foundation, through the garrison warriors’ Blood Law oaths, through the oath stone channels that have been carrying this mechanism since before any man in the hold was born. Every tendril at once, or the consolidation fails.

The garrison warriors first.

Eleven active threads. I sever them cleanly—disruption, not violence, the oath itself intact—and feel each one release. Each thread follows the pull through the channel I’ve opened through Drazhul.

Each one is a weight added.

He absorbs them.

I watch his face between pulls. He is doing the thing he does when the curse is active—holding both versions of the room, the real one and what the curse shows him, insisting on the real one. His breathing controlled by effort, sweat at his temple. His hands still on the stone.

Not moving.

I kissed him twenty minutes ago. His hands were on my jaw.

Not the time.

My own hands have started shaking.

Not from fear. From cost—eleven threads is eleven times the channel between us has run hot with more force than my body was built to conduct, and I am the conduit as much as he is the destination. Every curse-eater training I’ve ever had said this ritual shouldn’t be attempted by one practitioner alone. I designed it anyway, because there wasn’t another curse-eater within three weeks’ ride who could read this sigil, and because waiting three weeks was never a version of survival either of us could afford.

I taste copper. I don’t stop to identify why.

I pull the next. And the one after.

By the third phase the crypt is changing.

The amplification field builds as the consolidation progresses—each thread pulled makes the next easier to find and harder to draw safely. The walls around us are warm now. Not the Foundation Crypt’s baseline cold. The sigil’s stored heat, centuries of it, radiating outward as the mechanism is called back to its source.

The chalk marks on the perimeter begin to smoke.

Not burn—smoke, thin gray threads lifting off the outer containment lines as the field’s heat climbs past what I calculated for. I note it and keep working, because renewing the marks now would cost time I don’t have, and the perimeter is holding structurally even as it protests. A margin, not a failure. I file it under things to watch and return my full attention to the network.

The carving under Drazhul’s palms has gone brighter and unsteady.

He is shaking.

Not the single convulsion of the first draw—a sustained tremor in his arms and shoulders. The kind that comes from holding enormous force very still for a very long time.

That is the thing about him I have been watching since day one. The cost shows—his hands shake, the sweat is real, every muscle in his face doing what it does under sustained load. But the breathing stays controlled. The eyes stay focused. His hands do not move.