Page 13 of Orc’s Hex

I sit back on my heels and stare at the floor.

The carving extends all the way to the wall in every direction. I’m sitting in the middle of it. I realized this approximately three seconds ago and I’m not panicking about it because panic is the enemy of good curse work, and I need good curse work right now more than I need to feel appropriately alarmed.

I can feel it.

That’s the part I hadn’t expected. In the upper levels the curse’s pressure was an ambient weight—old and active, pressing outward through the stone. Down here, at the source, it’s not pressure. It’s attention. The carving beneath me is aware of me the way predators are aware of things that enter their territory—not urgently, not with alarm. Patiently.

It extends toward me like a plant toward light.

The channels nearest my knees warm fractionally. Not burning. Welcoming.

That’s worse than burning.

The core inscription.

I crawl to the inscription ring—actually crawl, because standing feels wrong in here—and I read the full text of the Betrayal Sigil’s active purpose.

It takes me approximately six minutes to read it.

I spend approximately four of those minutes hoping I’m misreading the regional variations in the script.

I’m not.

The sigil doesn’t prevent heirs the way I assumed when I took this contract. I assumed suppression—direct interference with fertility or pregnancy, a classic Blood Law punishment mechanism. Simple. Removable. The kind of thing I’ve done seventeen times in a decade.

This is not suppression.

The Heir-Killer Betrayal Sigil—and the core inscription names it exactly that, in first-generation script with no interest in euphemism—doesn’t prevent heirs by preventing conception. It prevents heirs by converting the clanlord’s protective instincts into lethal impulse in direct proportion to the depth of emotional bonding. The stronger the attachment formed, the more aggressively the sigil responds—amplifying the hallucinations, escalating the compulsion toward violence, ensuring that the closest relationship becomes the most dangerous one. It doesn’t target the heir. It targets the mechanism that produces the heir.

It makes love a weapon.

Not elegant. Meticulous. Designed by someone who understood Blood Law deeply enough to aim this precisely and hated this bloodline enough to do it.

I sit in the middle of this thing—in the middle of three centuries of withheld grief made into architecture—and I think about Drazhul Xorn.

What I’ve named lands differently in the Foundation Crypt than it did in the war chamber. Four betrothals. Two trusted men gone. A hundred and sixty-five years of every protective instinct turned back against the people he was trying to protect—and the entire time the thing doing it was right here under his feet, renewed by the same oath that gave him the right to lead.

That’s not a curse.

That’s a trap.

I go back to reading.

There’s a third layer I missed on first pass—a sub-inscription running beneath the main carving in a different hand. Smaller. The Old Blood Law characters are first-generation but the formation is different—not the same practitioner who made the original sigil.

Someone added to it.

I press my palm flat to the floor and close my eyes and read through my hand instead of my eyes—less precise, but gets deeper, gets past the surface inscription into the layered history of what’s been done to the stone. Blood Law carving holds memory the way scars hold history. You can read the original, and then everything that was done to it afterward.

Layers.

Not two. Not five. Dozens of passes, each one fresher than the last, each one in the same secondary hand—not the original architect’s work, but someone who studied that architecture and learned to replicate it. Refinements. Updates. Adjustments to the targeting as the Xorn bloodline changed across generations. The most recent layer is fresh enough that if I pressed ink to it the channels would bleed.

This isn’t old. This was done last month.

I take my hand off the stone.

This isn’t a remnant.