Page 56 of Orc’s Hex

His face is very close in the narrow passageway and the torchlight does what it always does to him in low light—makes the bronze of his eyes catch—and for a moment neither of us moves.

“I just need you to know that if the hallucination tells you I’m the threat⁠—“

“It always tells me you’re the threat.” Not grim. Not bitter. A man stating a thing he has lived with long enough to stop reacting to. “That’s the part I know how to manage.”

He reaches up and pushes a strand of hair back from my face.

It’s a small thing. His hand is enormous and careful and it moves the hair from my jaw and doesn’t stop there—his palm stays, curved against the side of my face, his thumb below my cheekbone, and he looks at me, nothing behind his eyes but this.

I stop breathing.

He leans down.

It’s not a question. It’s not soft. It’s the same way he does everything he means—direct, deliberate, no performance. His mouth covers mine and I have exactly enough time to register the heat of it before my hands find the front of his shirt and pull and the thing I have been not naming becomes the only thing in the room.

He kisses like he fights. Focused. No wasted movement. His hand at my jaw, his thumb at my cheekbone, the rest of him very still while his mouth does what it’s doing. I do not care even slightly.

Then he pulls back.

Not far. An inch. His forehead drops against mine and his eyes are closed and he is breathing.

I am going to finish this ritual.

And then.

I step back. Pull his sleeve down. Look at the arch.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

His voice has dropped half a register. Mine is steadier than it has any right to be.

The Foundation Crypt opens before us.

I’ve been in here once before—the night I went down alone and read the full inscription by candlelight and gave myself three seconds of horror before I went back to work. That was the sigil in a controlled state, ambient and active but not directed. I knew what it would feel like to step into the amplification field of an active Blood Law crypt.

I did not know what it would feel like to step into one with Drazhul Xorn beside me.

The Bondmark on my wrist ignites the moment we cross the threshold.

Not the slow warmth I’ve been living with since the mark formed—this is immediate, total, a heat that goes from wrist to shoulder in the same second, the Blood Law in my skin responding to the amplification field with the clarity of a signal through a cleared channel. I can feel him through it—not his thoughts, not his emotions, just his location and his aliveness and the quality of his breath two feet to my left, louder in my awareness than the actual sound in the room.

He feels it too. I see it in the way he steadies—a barely visible adjustment, a man recalibrating.

The Foundation Crypt is unchanged.

The sigil is not.

In candlelight ten days ago it read as carved channels in dark basalt, old and patient. In the light I’m carrying now, with the amplification field running through everything, the sigil is awake in a way that has nothing ambient about it. It knows what we came here to do.

The inscription at the center is one I have read in this room before. It hasn’t changed. Neither has what it means.

I walk to the outer ring of the sigil and indicate the place I need him—inside the ring, at the carving’s center, where the bloodline channel is deepest.

Drazhul looks at the floor.

He looks at it with the patience of someone done carrying it.