Page 14 of Orc’s Hex

It’s not even a sustained cast—something set in motion centuries ago and never interrupted. Someone has been down here. Repeatedly. Keeping the sigil from degrading, keeping it current, keeping it calibrated to the living version of the bloodline it was built to end. Whoever is doing this knows what they’re doing.

And they’re not finished.

I should leave.

I have what I came for—the scope of the sigil, the mechanism, the inscription, the maintenance evidence.

I stay.

Not because there is more to read. Because this is what I do—I stay past the point where leaving would be rational, past the point where the professional has gotten what she needs, and I work. The work asks nothing of me except competence. Right now that is the only currency I can afford to spend.

I’m trying to read the sub-inscription’s dating more accurately—I need a better sense of how frequently someone comes down here—when the carving beneath my hand warms past the temperature it’s been holding.

Not gradual. Immediate.

I pull my hand back.

The channels nearest me pulse once—a single, slow movement of warmth through the carved stone, traveling outward from the center and returning. Not threatening. Measuring. It’s extending toward me the way it extends toward Drazhul, reading every presence it decides might be relevant to its function.

I stay very still.

The channels warm again. The inscription at the center—your blood shall destroy what it chooses—glows faintly through the carved stone in a color I don’t have a name for. Not quite crimson. Not quite old oath magic going active. Somewhere between those two things, with no precedent in anything I’ve personally encountered.

And then the carving reaches.

Not physically. The stone doesn’t move. But the attention I felt when I entered the chamber—the patient, confident attention of something in its own territory—focuses. Narrows. Points itself directly at me with an intensity that is entirely different from the ambient awareness of a few minutes ago, and I feel it the way you feel a door open in a room you thought was sealed.

My body says: run.

I don’t run. I stand up slowly, keeping my movements deliberate, the way you move around something territorial that hasn’t decided what you are yet. I back toward the corridor entrance without turning my back to the center of the carving. My torch, when I pick it up from where I’d set it on the floor, reveals in its guttering light what I missed when I arrived.

I wasn’t looking at the floor. I was looking at the carving.

Now I’m looking at both.

The channels aren’t empty.

I’d assumed the warmth in the stone was residual—the heat held in rock after prolonged exposure to a sustained working. I was wrong about this the same way I was wrong about the maintenance schedule, and I take a moment to be annoyed at myself for the error before I look at what’s actually in the channels.

Blood.

Fresh blood, still wet enough to catch my torchlight in a sheen rather than a matte, filling the inscription channels at the sigil’s outer ring in a thin, even distribution that does not look old, does not look like seepage or residue or anything else I could talk myself into.

I look at it for three seconds.

The blood is still moving. A slow, capillary progression through the outermost channel—not pooled, not dried, not old. It is following the carving’s direction the way water follows a cut in stone, and the direction it’s following has been set by whoever put it there.

I look at the corridor entrance behind me.

I look back at the blood.

Not mine. Not Drazhul’s. Not anyone who came down with me tonight, because no one came down with me tonight.

This is fresh. Someone has been in this chamber—someone who knows exactly what this carving is and how to feed it—and the volume of it is not incidental. They came down here with intent. They prepared. They knew what they were doing.

Or they were here while I was reading it.

That’s the thought I walk out of the Foundation Crypt with, moving fast enough that I’m near-running by the time I hit the upper catacombs, fast enough that I don’t stop to think about whether anything is following me—because that thought would slow me down, and slowing down is what you do when you’ve established you’re alone in a place, and I have not established that.