Page 68 of Orc’s Hex

He stays there.

Not because he needs to. Because this is the first moment in a hundred and sixty-five years in which the weight below him has simply been weight. Stone. No mechanism pressing up through the basalt’s grain. No awareness of his presence, no ambient reaching, nothing that has learned his name and been using it since before he was born. Just the cold mineral fact of the mountain.

He presses his palms flat and breathes.

He stays on his knees long enough to be certain of it.

Then something else releases—traveling upward through the stone in the same direction the reversal did, quieter and final. The body-hopper’s anchor. Whatever had kept Sorvaine Mervyn’s consciousness tethered to the living world was the sigil’s foundation—its active maintenance, the continuous Blood Law working that gave her a reason to persist. Without the sigil, that anchor is gone. Sorvaine’s consciousness had not survived it. He didn’t know yet what that meant for the body she’d occupied. He would find out. Brynna would know.

The crypt wall cracks.

ZIVA

I channel the reversal into his blood the moment it touches the stone.

The channels take it.

The crypt is collapsing.

I can hear it—the foundation stone developing fractures above and below and around us, the walls cracking along lines that have been under pressure since the consolidation began, the ancient chamber coming apart as the structural magic that has held it intact starts to fail. Dust and splinters of old stone fall from the ceiling in sheets. The eastern wall is coming apart at the seam. The arch above the entrance is cracking.

I do not stop working.

I push the reversal through every channel I can reach, keeping the mechanism running backward as fast as the channels can carry it. The construct is still fighting Drazhul—I can hear that too, the shrieking and the impacts—and every second the reversal runs is another second the sigil loses integrity.

He drives it down.

The impact of the construct’s skull hitting the foundation stone travels through the floor and into my feet and into my hands and into the reversal work, and the channels pulse—a single, massive pulse, the sigil’s remaining energy running through the channels one final time⁠—

He drives it down again.

The sigil shatters.

It goes through me.

The shattering hits me—not sound, not force, but three centuries of Blood Law intent dissolving through every absorption channel I have open—and I am on my knees before I have decided to be, hands on the stone, and the reversal work finishes itself without me because there is nothing left for it to reverse.

The crypt goes dark.

Then the wall behind me cracks floor to ceiling.

“Up.”

Drazhul.

His hand is around my arm—not gentle, absolute—and he pulls me to my feet and he is bleeding from the chest and his arms and his wrists and he is already moving toward the entrance arch, pulling me with him.

“The reversal⁠—“

“Done.”

One word. I don’t argue.

The crypt entrance is cracking.

We run.

The catacombs are coming apart.