Page 64 of Orc’s Hex

It drives across the crypt floor faster than its proportions suggest—shadow and compressed denial, not bound by the physics of mass—and I have two seconds before it reaches me and I use both of them.

Blood threads, both hands, every drop of strength left in my absorption channels after forty minutes of ritual draw.

I catch it mid-lunge.

The threads slam into the construct’s ribcage-equivalent and hold—not stopping it, the mass and momentum of that compressed potential doesn’t stop cleanly—but bending its trajectory. The not-face swings past my left shoulder close enough that I feel the cold of it, and the impact drives me back two steps and I keep the threads taut through both steps.

My heels hit the crypt wall.

The threads hold.

Barely. I feel the strain of it travel up both arms and into my shoulders, an ache in channels that have already moved a consolidated curse once tonight and are not built to also anchor several hundred pounds of shadow-construct on the first attempt. My hands are shaking. I don’t let the shake reach the threads.

Good. Stay there.

The construct tests the bind—a slow, exploratory push against the threads, the way something tests a locked door before deciding whether to break it—and I push back with everything the last forty minutes have left me. It’s not much. It’s enough for now.

I hear Drazhul behind me—the chain pulling taut, his weight shifting against the wall. Still chained. Watching the Bone-Shadow Heir with everything he has in his hands and the chains the only thing between that and what he would do with them.

Not yet. I have this. Give me one minute.

I hold the construct in the blood threads and I look at it.

Not clinically.

I speak into it.

“You don’t define my body.”

And you don’t define his.

And you don’t define what this bloodline becomes.

I don’t say the rest aloud. I put it into the threads instead. Every piece of it—the antechamber, his hands on the carving, the way he kissed me like someone who intended to make it back from this and was not betting everything on that. The sigil has been telling this bloodline for three hundred years what it is and what it will never have and I am done with that and I put all of it into the threads.

The Bone-Shadow Heir screams.

The sound is in the stone and in the air and in the Bondmark on my wrist simultaneously—a frequency below what ears register, above what skin ignores—and the crypt shakes with it.

I keep my footing.

I work from the ribcage outward.

The densest compression of denied heirs sits at its center. That is where the curse’s purpose lives. I start there.

It doesn’t want to be worked.

Every construct I’ve threaded tonight has resisted in the ordinary way—shadow architecture pushing back against disruption the way any curse structure pushes back, mechanically, without intent behind it. This is different. This resists like something aware of what I’m trying to do to it, adjusting each time I find purchase, and I understand somewhere under the working focus that this is the part of the sigil that has always been the most awake. The rest of the mechanism executes. This is the part that wants.

It wants to exist. Every fragment of it does. That’s the cruelty of what was built here—three centuries of potential given enough shape to want its own continuation, and no path to become anything except this.

I don’t let the understanding slow my hands.

I push reversal work through the blood threads.

The construct fights back.

Every disruption I push into its center radiates out through the form and the form flexes against the threads—and I cannot hold the bind at full strength and push the disruption at full strength with what I have left.