Page 4 of Orc’s Hex

“I work better without people breathing on me.” Pleasant. Final. “Nothing I do tonight will compromise the job or get anyone killed. You have my word on it.”

He looks at me the way you look at a problem you haven’t finished reading. “Upper floors,” he says finally. “Stay out of the war chamber.” He goes.

I wait four minutes. Long enough for his footsteps to die in the stone. Then I put on my coat, check my kit, and go.

The upper floors of Blackscar Hold tell a story, if you know how to read stone.

Not with eyes—eyes are useful for some things and misleading for others. I read space through my palms, through the pressure that builds when I move through rooms where Blood Law has been performed. Through the way stone warms or cools against my fingertips independent of temperature. Every wall I touch in Blackscar carries decades of oath magic pressed into the basalt’s grain.

No lineage tapestries beyond a single generation. I find the empty hooks as I work through the upper corridor—three of them, properly spaced for standard clan tapestries, all bare. Every other fortress I’ve worked in, the bloodline is mapped in silk and thread the moment you cross the threshold. The visual argument for why this family deserves what it has.

Blackscar Hold has one generation displayed. Drazhul’s. Because there is only one generation to display.

The Hall of Ancestors is off the main corridor. I walk it end to end—statues arranged newest to oldest—and the deeper I go, the more the faces wear down into suggestion rather than detail. Some of the oldest bear deliberate damage. Not age. Damage.

Near the far end I stop.

One statue’s face has been worked off. Not carefully—rough, forceful strokes, the kind that prioritize getting it done over how it looks. The upper half is gone, jagged at the break. The base inscription chiseled off entirely, the removal scar as visible as any original carving.

I crouch. Read the fragment of the name that survived.

Korvak Xorn.

Every Blood Law scholar knows the name. The Shadow War, the broken Covenant of Nine, the oath-breaking that left thousands of allied witches exposed and reshaped the Veillands’ political landscape. Korvak Xorn was the architect of that choice.

The weathering on the inscription scar is decades old. Someone removed these honors long after the official histories had moved on and called it settled.

He doesn’t repair it. Doesn’t display it, doesn’t hide it. He walks past it and leaves it accurate.

I stand and keep moving.

The Hall of Oaths is below the main level, first chamber down the old stone steps, and it’s not on Varek’s list of restricted spaces—either he forgot it or he didn’t think I’d know to look for it. He’s wrong on the second count.

The floor is covered in carved oath circles—overlapping geometric patterns pressed deep into the black rock, a visual language that encodes treaty terms in geometry rather than words. I press my palm to the nearest pattern.

It glows. Faint and immediate. Old enough that any blood warms it. Witch blood works the same as orc blood when the inscription is this deep.

The Covenant of Nine. Nine binding lines converging on a central inscription. Nine orc clans and their allied witch covens, sworn together at the worst point of the Shadow War, bone-deep and witnessed. This wasn’t ceremony. This was survival.

And it was broken here.

The floor knows it. The oath circles carry an absence—the wrong kind of absence, the kind that comes after something was present and then stopped being. A scar in the stone’s memory.

I stand and breathe and let the full shape of it settle.

I don’t leave.

The torches in the Hall of Oaths burn lower than anywhere else in the hold—deliberately, I think, though I can’t yet say why a room built for treaty-swearing would want its own dimness. I walk the perimeter of the Covenant of Nine circle without stepping inside it, the way you walk the edge of water you haven’t decided is safe.

Eight of the nine binding lines still carry a faint residual glow when I brush them. Old magic settling into memory the way old magic does—present, but quiet, the way a scar is present on skin that has otherwise healed.

The ninth line is dark.

Not faded. Dark—the specific absence of something that was deliberately extinguished rather than something that wore away on its own. I crouch at the edge of it and hold my palm an inch above the stone without touching, the way you’d hold a hand over a wound you aren’t sure has finished being a wound.

Korvak Xorn’s line. It has to be. The ninth clan. The one that broke first.

I trace the dead line with my eyes from the outer wall to the center, where all nine were meant to converge into a single unbroken inscription—the promise made physical, the treaty carved so deep into black basalt that breaking it should have been structurally impossible. Someone broke it anyway. Whatever Korvak Xorn did, three hundred years ago, it didn’t just fail politically. It failed the stone.