Page 59 of Orc’s Hex

His palms stay flat. His breath steadies.

I pull another thread. And another.

The curse in the network is not passive anymore. I can feel the resistance—each thread fighting the pull, the consolidation channel trying to reverse direction, old Blood Law magic refusing a reversal it was not built to accept. Running it backward is the hardest thing I have ever done and I have been doing it for twenty minutes and I am not stopping.

One thread fights harder than the rest.

I recognize it before I fully isolate it—the maintenance channel, the one Setha’s line has been feeding for three centuries, thicker and more deeply rooted than anything else in the network because it was built to be permanent. It does not want to come free. I set my grip on it through the ritual connection and it pulls back with something that feels less like mechanism and more like will, every Mervyn hand that ever fed this sigil deciding, collectively, across three hundred years, not to let go.

You don’t get to keep him.

I don’t know if I say it aloud or only in the working. I pull harder. The thread gives, all at once, the way old rope gives after refusing for too long, and the rebound through the channel staggers me half a step before I catch my footing again.

His eyes find mine across the ritual circle.

And hold.

He is inside the worst hallucination of his life—I can see it in the fixed intensity of his focus, a man holding the hallucination at arm’s length by sheer will—and he found my face and he is holding it.

Keep looking at me.

He hears it anyway—through the Bondmark, through the amplification field, through the proximity that makes words redundant.

He doesn’t look away.

There is a gap between pulls where my hands move to the next position and what I see stops being data.

This man. Shaking. Palms flat on the thing that has been destroying every person who mattered to him since before he was born. He kneeled when I indicated the spot and he has been holding every piece of the worst thing in his life in his body ever since and he has not moved and he has not looked away.

I name it.

Two seconds. Then I pull the next thread.

The last thread is the chest sigil.

The primary channel. The distribution hub the mechanism has run through since the first Xorn clanlord swore the bloodline oath after Korvak’s death. The one that will hurt him most.

I look at him across the circle.

“Last one. Brace.”

He closes his eyes for one second. Opens them.

“Do it.”

I pull.

The ancestral thread comes free with a sensation in the ritual connection like a rope under tension suddenly cut—and the rebound through the consolidation channel is violent, faster and harder than anything before, and Drazhul⁠—

Drags himself back.

He doesn’t go down. He doesn’t release the carving. He shakes through the impact with both palms still flat, and the sound he makes is not one I’m going to be able to forget, and his breathing blows apart for four seconds and then comes back together because that is who he is and four seconds is what it costs him and he pays it.

The curse is fully consolidated.

Every thread recalled. Every piece drawn back. A man who has spent his entire life learning to carry exactly this.

He is shaking so hard the chamber floor carries it.