Page 21 of Orc’s Moon

When it finally stops, the stair we came down by is gone entirely, buried under enough rubble that no light from above reaches us at all.

For one suspended breath, nothing moves — my weight braced over her, her hands still fisted in the front of my armor from the moment the first shock of falling stone found us, our breath both ragged in the dark, suddenly, absurdly intimate despite everything currently trying to bury us in it. Her palm flattens against my chest instead of pushing me off, less checking for injury than simply keeping the contact a beat longer than strictly necessary.

I lift myself off her slowly, and let myself breathe properly only once I’ve confirmed she’s whole. Shaken, pale in the crystal’s fading glow, but whole, and that fact alone does more to steady my own breathing than anything else in the last hour has managed. My shoulder throbs where the falling stone caught it. I’ll deal with that later, the same way I deal with everything that isn’t the immediate problem in front of me.

Just the two of us, and the crystal’s fading glow, and a wall of fallen stone that doesn’t look like it intends to move again anytime soon.

She catches me looking at her mouth and doesn’t look away first. Whatever’s sealed into this room with us, it isn’t only rubble.

Wherever the way out is, we’ll have to find it ourselves, and we’ll have to find it soon — because the longer we sit here in the dark with nothing left standing between us, the less certain I am that I’ll want to look for it.

ELEVEN

VORREN

Every wall in the vault gets the same treatment before I let myself call the stair a dead end.

Palm flat, moving slow, feeling for the give that means hollow instead of solid. Lyessa works the opposite curve of the chamber doing the same, muttering under her breath in a language I don’t recognize and don’t ask about, and it’s her hands that find it first — a seam behind the pedestal, narrow enough to miss twice, wide enough for one body turned sideways.

“Maintenance passage.” She’s already crouching to test the air coming through it, two fingers held up like she’s reading a current only she can feel. “Cold. Moving. That means it goes somewhere, not just deeper.”

“Or it goes somewhere worse.”

“Everything in this city has gone somewhere worse tonight, Captain. I’ll take my chances with a draft that isn’t currently on fire.”

I go first. The passage is exactly wide enough for my shoulders and not an inch more, rough-cut stone instead of the finished work above, the kind of tunnel built by people who needed function and never once cared whether anyone admired it. We walk it in near silence for longer than I track, my hand catching hers once when the floor drops without warning, and I don’t comment on how long after the drop I keep holding it.

Halfway through, she stops walking without warning, and I nearly collide with her in the dark before I understand why — she’s turned to face me, close enough in the dark that I can hear her breathing over the drip of water somewhere ahead of us, and whatever she was about to say dies before it starts. I don’t wait for her to find it again. I kiss her instead, once, slow despite everything currently on fire two levels above us, and she kisses me back like she’s been waiting all night for someone to stop being careful about it. It doesn’t last long. It doesn’t need to. When we break apart she doesn’t apologize for it, and I don’t either, and we keep walking like something’s finally been settled that doesn’t need discussing out loud.

The passage ends at a door.

Not grand. Not carved with a single Blackfang crest or Covenant sigil anywhere on its face — plain wood, iron-banded, the kind of door that guards something private instead of something sacred. It opens without resistance, hinges silent in a way nothing else in this city has managed tonight, and what’s on the other side stops me in the doorway the same way the Hall of Oaths did, for different reasons.

Small. Warm, somehow, despite a thousand years with no fire lit in it. A round room with a hearth built into one curved wall, a low table, a shelf of journals with handwriting worn soft at the spine from being opened and closed a thousand times over. A study through one archway, papers still scattered across a desk like someone stepped away mid-thought. A balcony through another, looking out over black water I can’t see the bottom of, some underground lake catching what little light reaches it and throwing it back silver. A tea set, three cups, sits untouched on a low shelf near the hearth — waiting for guests who never came back to drink from it.

Nothing in this room was built to impress anyone. Everything in it was built to be lived in.

“Someone’s quarters.” Lyessa steps past me, reverent in a way she wasn’t even in the Hall, fingers trailing the spines of the journals without pulling one free. “A private one. Look at the size of this hearth — this wasn’t for entertaining. This was for one person, maybe two, who wanted somewhere to stop being important for a few hours a day.”

“The Moonkeeper’s, if the rest of this city holds true to form.”

“Probably.” She says it distracted, already crouched at the hearth, already finding the flint and the dry kindling stacked beside it like whoever left this room fully expected to come back and use them again. “Whoever she was, she kept a fire ready. Not survival instinct. Just someone who liked coming home to warmth.”

I find the crossbeam and bar the door behind us before I let myself think about anything else. Cave-in above sealed the enemy out as thoroughly as it sealed us in — small mercy, the kind I’ll take without asking too many questions about how long it lasts.

The fire catches faster than it has any right to after a thousand years of cold stone. Lyessa feeds it kindling with the same careful attention she gives everything worth doing properly, and within minutes the room’s gone gold instead of gray, warm enough that I finally let my shoulders drop from wherever they’ve been sitting since the plaza.

“You have rations.” Accusation more than observation, and she’s already digging through my pack before I’ve agreed to share it. “Actual food, Captain. Why didn’t you mention this four hours ago when I was ready to eat my own boots?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I shouldn’t have to ask a man if he’s hiding dinner.”

“I wasn’t hiding it. I was saving it for when we actually needed it.”

“We needed it several crises ago.” She’s already got the preserved meat and hardtack laid out near the hearth, working with the same brisk competence she brought to reading a wall of dead names, and there’s something almost domestic in watching her do it — a woman making a meal instead of solving a puzzle, for once, and doing it like she’s just as capable at this as everything else.

I find a battered pot in the study’s corner cupboard, dust thick enough to write in, and she takes it from me without asking, already filling it from a waterskin and setting it near the flame like this is a task she’s performed a thousand times in a hundred different ruins. Maybe she has. There’s a whole life she lived before Asterhold burned that I know almost nothing about, and watching her work a hearth like it’s the most natural thing in the world, I find myself wanting the rest of that life laid out in front of me the same patient way she’d lay out a damaged manuscript.