Page 67 of Orc’s Hex

It floods the channels.

This is what it has always been afraid of. Not a sword. Not a ritual. This: the bloodline offering itself freely.

The sigil destabilizes.

He can feel it—the carving under his feet going cold where his blood has touched it, cold the way old grief goes cold when it is finally acknowledged, and the channels he has been feeding with oath renewals his entire life begin to fail.

The Bone-Shadow Heir shrieks.

Not a scream—a shriek, higher and worse, the sound of a mechanism losing its primary source mid-operation. The construct’s form flickers. The terrible coherence of it wavers. The not-face turns toward the sigil on the floor where the blood is spreading through the channels, and Drazhul sees the moment it recalculates.

He doesn’t give it the time.

He grabs the construct’s skull with both hands.

Both hands. Everything his arms have. A century of warfare and every morning in the courtyard and every time he has stood between the curse and everyone he might have loved—all of it, now, in this.

He drives it down.

Into the foundation stone.

The construct does not go quietly. It fights him with everything the sigil’s desperate energy is still feeding into it, claws raking across his arms, the form convulsing, the sound it makes escalating past anything that belongs in a human space. He holds on. The stone beneath them cracks under the impact and the crack runs outward through the channels and the blood in the channels and Ziva’s reversal work in the blood⁠—

It gets a claw into the meat of his forearm and drags.

He feels the tear more than the pain—pain will come later, if there is a later, and right now there is only the fact of his own blood joining hers on the stone, one more offering the mechanism did not ask for and cannot refuse. He does not let go of the skull between his hands. He drives his weight down harder, using the wound instead of favoring it, because favoring it would cost him the half-second the construct needs to find a better angle.

It only needs one opening. Don’t give it one.

The construct’s remaining claw finds his side—the same ribs the seventh construct already ruined in the Great Hall—and something in his chest shifts wrong, a sound he feels rather than hears, and he does not stop.

He drives it down again.

Harder.

The sigil shatters.

Not cracks, not fractures—shatters. The carving in the foundation stone breaks apart from its center outward in a single expanding ring that he can feel through his boots and his hands and his blood and the chest sigil above his own cut, and it doesn’t sound like shattering stone. It sounds like three hundred years of Blood Law vengeance magic running out of foundation.

Everything goes white.

Not light—absence of everything else, every sense he has flooded past capacity in the same instant, sound and touch and pain from a body that has taken considerable damage, all arriving at once and canceling each other out into a single white nothing.

Then dark.

He doesn’t remember the transition between them. There is white, and then there is a gap he cannot account for, and then there is dark, and somewhere in the gap his body made decisions about staying alive that he wasn’t present to supervise.

Then he is on his knees in the Foundation Crypt with the construct dispersed into shadow around him and the stone beneath his hands cracked in every direction and the chest sigil cut still bleeding and the curse⁠—

The curse is gone.

He waits for it. The familiar pressure. The ambient presence of the mechanism running below every breath he has drawn since childhood. The weight he has been managing so long he cannot separate it from the baseline of existing.

Gone.

He has never in his adult life been without it.

The stone beneath his hands is cold. Just stone.