Page 51 of Orc’s Bones

The ancient figure’s tone didn’t shift. “That isn’t your decision to make.”

I stepped through the inner boundary.

The replication sigil hit me at full activation and for a moment I couldn’t read anything at all.

Not because there was nothing there. Because there was too much, and it was mine. My framework reflected back at me with perfect fidelity — every decision I’d made in the original architecture, every theoretical leap and dead end and corrected error, present and running simultaneously. I could feel the places where I’d given up on a problem and the places where the solution had come to me at three in the morning during my second year of research. I could feel the exact formulation I’d tried seventeen times before the eighteenth version held.

My own thought processes, running at scale, outside my body.

I had been in bone structures that read personal before. I had never been inside one that was me.

The disorientation lasted longer than I’d expected. I couldn’t locate the boundary between the sigil and my own cognition — couldn’t tell, for three full seconds, whether the thoughts I was thinking were mine or the framework’s response to my presence. There was a moment where I couldn’t tell if I was moving or if the system was moving me. My hands stayed at my sides and I held onto the one thing I was sure of: the sound of Thruk’s breathing on the other side of the ring. Present. Real. Outside this.

I waited for it to resolve.

Three seconds. Four.

The boundary re-established itself. Not fully — still my framework, uncomfortably intimate in a way that made my skin feel too close to everything — but I could read the room rather than being only inside it. The node, ahead. The dark point where all the architecture converged. I oriented toward it.

Thruk.

There. The glow cut through the ring’s distortion like fire through fog. He hadn’t moved. Holding with everything he had, his eyes on mine. His jaw was hard and his channels were burning.

Hold the anchor. Keep working.

I pressed both palms to the node.

The feel of it under my palms was familiar the way my own handwriting was familiar — every decision I’d made in the original framework present in it, the places I’d solved problems and the places I’d left problems unsolved both visible in what had been built on top of them. I could read every choice the architect had made. I could read every choice I’d made that he’d built on.

I started unraveling it.

You dismantled what you’d built from the outside in, back toward the beginning — newest layer first, foundation last, because the foundation was the last thing that could be pulled safely. I stripped the counter-frequency layer. The stabilization solution. The implementation beneath.

The inner ring stuttered.

“Stop—“

He was at the inner boundary now, pressing against it from outside, the pre-catalogue current he carried pushing against the architecture trying to re-lock what I was unraveling. But the inner ring was built on my framework and it recognized my hands. The two of us pulled in opposite directions on the same structure.

The inner ring held. For now.

I pulled harder. Another layer. The node diminished under my palms, the architecture losing coherence as I stripped the additions back toward the original⁠—

Movement. Outside the ring.

Thruk standing.

He’d been on his knees with both hands on the Vault floor and now he was upright, the channels blazing at the level that had been pushing him down, and he was walking toward the ring.

I told him to hold and he’s walking in.

They saw it. Shifted focus — turned from the inner boundary toward the outer ring, toward Thruk, redirecting. Going to strengthen the outer pull. Put more force on the Varyn bloodline before he crossed.

The bloodline pull reversed.

Not controlled. Not smooth. A partial reversal — the Varyn relic at the center registering the living heir’s approach and the heir’s refusal to be drawn, and doing what the oldest bones in any bloodline did when the heir called: they answered.

I saw it happen from inside the ring. The ink in his arms shifted — the white-blazing pull-resistance giving way to something older and warmer, a frequency running upward from the floor through his blood rather than pressing down on him from the array. The oldest Varyn bone in the Dominion, still running its root recognition, still adding his entry to the record — and in the second it felt the living heir walking toward it rather than away, it pulled back against everything the construct had built.