Page 24 of Orc’s Moon

I come apart around him with his name still half-formed on my lips, and he doesn’t stop, doesn’t slow, just holds me through it with a low sound against my throat that sounds like relief and reverence both at once.

There’s a moment, deep into the night, where his control finally cracks — a low sound tearing loose from his chest that isn’t words, his grip going hard enough at my hip to bruise, and when he says my name against my throat it comes out less like tenderness and more like a claim he’s done pretending he doesn’t want to make. I have never once in my life been this safe, and this wanted at exactly the same time. Not in Asterhold. Not with anyone who came before him. He holds nothing back and asks for nothing I’m not already giving freely, and when it’s finally over, we stay exactly as tangled as we fell, nobody in any hurry to move first.

Afterward, tangled in a bed that’s held nobody in a thousand years, his heartbeat slowing under my ear and his hand tracing slow, absent circles against my spine, I understand something I’ve been too stubborn to admit for days: whatever’s still coming for this city, I’m not facing it alone anymore. I haven’t been in a while. A room this small and this warm just finally gave me nowhere else to look.

“Stay.” Quiet, like the word costs him something to ask for out loud. “Not just tonight. However long this takes. I don’t want to do the rest of it without you standing next to me.”

“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere, Captain.”

“Good.” His arm tightens around me, and I feel him smile against the top of my head, unguarded in a way I don’t think anyone else alive has ever been allowed to see. “I’d have come after you regardless. I’d rather not waste the effort.”

We don’t notice the moonstone veins in the walls wake softly around us as we fall asleep — pale silver light tracing slowly through stone that hasn’t recognized anyone in this room in longer than either of our families have existed, answering something in the choice we’ve just made instead of any blood we carry.

I wake to a sound that doesn’t belong in a sealed room.

Cold air, sudden and wrong, threading in around my ankles where no draft has any business reaching. Vorren’s already awake, already reaching for Nightfall, a watchful thread in him that never fully sleeps, even when the rest of him finally did, and across the room, slow and deliberate, the sanctuary door begins to open on its own.

Nobody’s on the other side. Not yet.

But something out there just found a way in that we didn’t open ourselves, and whatever it is, it already knows exactly where we’re sleeping.

THIRTEEN

VORREN

Nothing’s standing in the doorway.

I’m on my feet with Nightfall bare before I can even confirm it, Lyessa a half-second behind me, braced for a threat that never steps through the opening. What’s coming through instead is light — the same warning pulse we saw racing around the Hall’s dome earlier tonight, blazing now down the maintenance passage from the direction we came, brighter and faster than anything a mere door-mechanism should manage.

“That’s not for us.” Lyessa’s already reaching for her boots, voice gone flat and fast the way it goes when she’s stopped being afraid and started being useful instead. “That’s the city’s own alarm. Something’s hit it hard enough to need every ward in Blackspire awake at once.”

“The Hall.”

“The Hall.” She doesn’t ask how I know. I don’t have a clean answer beyond instinct — the same inherited certainty that’s been finding doors and answering blood since the moment I set my palm against the Black Gates. Whatever’s happening, it’s happening at the one place in this city that matters more than every other stone combined, and something in me has known that since the second I woke, before I’d even finished opening my eyes.

I’m buckling armor I barely remember shedding, hands moving faster than thought, and Lyessa’s doing the same across the room — daggers back at her hips, satchel abandoned in favor of speed, hair still loose from sleep and not one word of complaint about it. A week ago I’d have called this reckless. Tonight I call it exactly what we both need to be.

She catches my wrist before I reach the door, pulls me down, and kisses me once, hard and quick and unapologetic about the time it costs us, her hand fisting briefly in the collar of my armor like she needs one more second of certainty before letting us walk into whatever’s waiting.

“For luck.” She’s already moving past me toward the passage. “Now let’s go break something.”

We follow the passage back the way we came, and it forks somewhere past the point we marked on the way down — a second branch, older, climbing away from the Library and toward the Hall instead of doubling back the way we descended. Whatever the Moonkeepers built beneath this city, they built it to connect, not to dead-end. We come up through it now, and the Hall waiting at the top of it isn’t the Hall we left.

Black-cloaked soldiers move through the chamber in organized ranks, and they aren’t searching. They’re destroying — hammers taken to the pillars carved with six-pointed script, torches held to the walls where a thousand years of names sit engraved in patient, ordinary rows. One soldier drives a chisel into the stone beside a name I read myself only hours ago, gouging it out letter by letter like erasing a person after they’re already dead is somehow still worth the effort.

I stood in this exact chamber earlier tonight and watched Lyessa bring a dead government back to life one forgotten name at a time. Watching a man in a black cloak grind that same wall into powder is worse than watching him swing a blade at me. A blade I understand. This is closer to murder committed against people already a thousand years gone, and it lands harder than any threat aimed at me alone ever has.

Moonlight pours through a crack already splitting the great dome overhead, throwing long silver bars across marble dust and broken statuary. One of the towering figures ringing the chamber — the elf representative, I think, though half its face is already rubble — lies toppled across three shattered pillars. The Warden statue I set my palm against only hours ago still stands near the chamber’s center, untouched so far, and I mean to keep it that way.

My hands go past fury and into a stillness I haven’t felt since the first time I killed a man who deserved it.

“Vorren.” Lyessa’s beside me, already scanning the chamber with the same fast, systematic focus she brought when we first stood here. “The Guardians. If any of them survived the market district, they’ll still be bound to the pillars’ command runes. I can redirect them.”

“Redirect them how?”

“The same way I disabled them the first time. Except this time I’m not pulling the thread that stops them fighting.” Her eyes find mine, fierce and certain. “I’m pulling the one that tells them who the enemy actually is.”

“Do it.”