Page 4 of Orc’s Bones

“My research was theoretical. What’s happening in your Crypts is applied. Someone took my framework and solved the problems I hadn’t.”

He looked at me. Nothing shifted in his face but I had the clear impression he was deciding, measuring, letting it settle before he moved.

“You have access to the Bone Archive and the upper Crypt levels. You report findings directly to me. No independent action without authorization.”

I ran the terms. A real perimeter — not theater — given that my research had apparently built the foundation for whatever was eating his city alive. Reasonable.

“Acceptable.” I let the beat land. “For now.”

Varek made a sharp sound. Thruk stepped back. The air between us changed.

“Start in the Archive. Report when you’ve finished.”

I turned and walked out.

The Cathedral steps were empty behind me. The ghostfire lanterns burned even along the Cathedral quarter archways — no flicker, no disruption. I stood on the broad black stone for a moment and let the hum come through the soles of my boots without cataloguing it.

The foundation held. The rest had burned. Both of those things were true and neither cancelled the other.

Then I started toward the Archive.

The lower districts were the oldest inhabited section of the city above ground — buildings accumulated rather than planned, each generation’s renovations absorbed into the one before until the original structure was only legible if you knew how to read resonance layering. I’d walked these streets a thousand times as a student, late nights and early mornings, the ghostfire thinner here so the shadows ran deep between pools of pale light.

Someone had solved what I hadn’t.

I moved.

The Dominion watched me go. It had been watching since the gateways — that accumulated consciousness of thousands of generations, held in stone and bone, not quite awareness and not quite not. It registered my return without interest. It had never cared about the four years I wasn’t here.

I had missed it. In the way you missed a thing that had cost you everything and become the shape of you anyway — the missing that doesn’t soften and doesn’t leave.

I was going to find out who had the bones.

The steps were in sight when the hum changed.

Not sound — a note dropping beneath my feet, like a string going slack, and then the hum lurching back in the wrong configuration. Structurally present. Not doing what it was built to do.

I turned.

Third column from the left at the base of the Cathedral steps — the one I’d pressed my hand to twenty minutes ago. A crack ran through the bone-reinforced wall along a seam that had nothing to do with weight distribution. Straight and clean, pointing south and down.

Toward the Crypts.

The ghostfire lantern above it flickered.

Steadied.

I stared at it for three counts. The bone memory around the fracture site had been disrupted not by impact but by the same directed interference I’d been tracking all evening. Someone hadn’t broken this. They’d unraveled it — pulled out the structural memory that had held it intact for decades, left the stone with nothing to hold itself by.

This was new. This had happened in the last hour.

That column was whole when I pressed my palm to it.

It wasn’t whole anymore.

Whatever timeline I’d been estimating was already behind.

I turned away from it and walked toward the Archive without looking back, because looking at it wouldn’t close it and I had work to do.