Chapter 11
ELEVEN
BLORJORN
The flagstones crack and heave.
I’m on my feet before the first hand claws its way through the gap—skeletal fingers wrapped in rotting cloth, bone gleaming pale in the dim light. A second hand follows. A third. The floor splits open in a dozen places at once, and what rises from beneath is the stuff of old nightmares.
Skeletons. Human skeletons, still wrapped in fragments of rusted armor, still clutching corroded weapons in their fleshless hands. Green fire burns in their empty eye sockets—bright and hungry and unmistakably magical.
Necromancy. An old trap, buried beneath the flagstones, waiting for orc blood to trigger it.
We walked right into it.
My axes find my hands without conscious thought. Grief and Reckoning, their edges catching the sickly green light, their weight familiar and reassuring in my grip.
“Behind me!” I shove Kielyne toward the wall, putting myself between her and the rising dead. “Stay close!”
The first skeleton lunges. I split it from skull to spine, bone shattering beneath my blade, ancient dust spraying through the air. It collapses—and then the pieces begin to twitch. To drag themselves back together.
They reassemble.
Of course, they do. Necromantic constructs don’t die until the sigil powering them is destroyed. I should have remembered that. Would have, if I wasn’t still half-recovered from blight poisoning and distracted by the woman at my back.
The room erupts into chaos.
My war band meets the dead with roars and steel.
Grothak’s sword cleaves through ribcages.
Vekra’s blade shatters skulls. Fenrik fights with more courage than skill, his young face set with terrified determination.
But for every skeleton we destroy, another claws its way up from the floor. Dozens of them. More.
Human soldiers, buried here after some long-forgotten battle. And someone—some long-dead war-mage—left a trap for any orc who sought shelter in their grave.
“The sigil!” Kielyne’s voice cuts through the chaos. “There has to be a sigil controlling them—find it and destroy it!”
Smart woman. Too smart to huddle helplessly while others fight for her.
I clear a path, axes singing through bone and rusted steel.
The skeletons are fast—faster than they should be—and they don’t feel pain, don’t hesitate, don’t tire.
For every one I destroy, another is there to take its place.
My wounds scream in protest. My muscles burn.
The blight may be gone, but my body hasn’t forgotten what it cost.
A skeleton lunges at Kielyne from the side. I spin, axes sweeping, and catch it across the throat. The skull goes flying. The body keeps coming—and she ducks beneath its grasping arms, rolling clear, coming up with one of my dropped knives in her hand.
“The light!” She’s pointing to a piece of metal dangling from a piece of roof and already moving, scrambling while I hold back the tide of bones. “It has to be carved somewhere under it!”
“Go!” I take position between her and the horde. “I’ll hold them!”
They come at me in waves. Rusted swords scrape against my armor. Skeletal fingers claw at my face, my arms, any exposed flesh. I fight with everything I have—axes sweeping in brutal arcs, bones shattering, ancient dust filling the air until I can barely see.
“Left!” Her voice again. Warning.
I pivot. Catch the skeleton that was about to bury its sword in my side. Split it in half before it can strike.
We’re fighting together now. No words needed, no coordination planned—just instinct and trust, her watching my blind spots while I clear paths for her to move.
She’s not a fighter, but she’s smart and quick, and she doesn’t panic.
When a skeleton grabs for her arm, she doesn’t scream—just drives the knife up through its jaw and keeps moving.
The light looms ahead. She drops to her knees under it, feeling along the stone with her hands, searching for the sigil that must be carved somewhere on the surface.
“I can’t find it!” Frustration in her voice. Fear beneath it.
“Underneath a stone!” I kick a skeleton away from her, buying seconds. “War-mages hide their work. Check the underside!”
Her fingers dig into the crevices between stone, her trimmed nails snapping off. She flips stones that weigh half her body.
The skeletons press harder. They sense the threat to their master’s work. A sword catches my shoulder—old wound, barely healed—and blood sprays hot across my arm. I snarl and keep fighting. Pain is familiar. Pain I can work through.
“Found it!” Her voice, muffled behind me. “It’s carved into the stone—I need to break it!”
“Blood!” Morra’s voice cuts through the chaos—the old bone-singer, fighting her way toward us with a ferocity that belies her age. “Human blood to break human magic! Cut yourself, child—bleed on the sigil!”
A moment of terrible silence from behind me.
Then: “Done.”
The magic shatters.
I feel it—a pulse of energy that rolls through the structure, making my vision blur. The green fire in the skeletons’ eye sockets flickers. Dies. And then they collapse, all of them at once, falling into piles of harmless bone that clatter against the flagstones and go still.
Silence.
For a long moment, no one moves. The war band stands among the fallen bones, chests heaving, weapons raised, waiting for another attack that doesn’t come.
Then Kielyne climbs to her feet. She’s covered in dust and cobwebs, her clothes torn, my knife still clutched in her bloody hand. A fresh cut on her palm drips crimson onto the stone floor. She’s shaking—adrenaline and exhaustion and probably pain—but she’s alive.
She’s alive.
I’m across the space before I realize I’ve moved. My hands find her arms, hauling her to me, and I don’t think—don’t plan—don’t do anything except act on instinct older than thought.
I kiss her.
The kiss is not gentle.
It’s fierce, desperate, fueled by adrenaline still screaming through my veins. My mouth crashes against hers—bruising, demanding—and for one terrible moment, I think she’ll shove me away, will finally see me for the monster I am.
She doesn’t.
Her hands fist in my shirt, dragging me closer.
She kisses back with equal fury—teeth and tongue and something raw that tastes like rage and relief and want.
My hands find her hips, gripping hard enough to bruise, and she arches into me, her body pressed against mine, her heart pounding against my chest.
She’s warm. Alive. Real. And kissing me like she’s been wanting to for days, like the argument and the fear and the blood we’ve shared have stripped away every reason not to.
It lasts seconds. Maybe longer. An eternity compressed into one desperate moment.
Then we wrench apart.
Both breathing hard. Both shaken. Her lips are swollen, her eyes wide, her chest heaving with ragged breaths. I can still taste her—copper and warmth and something uniquely her.
Neither of us speak.
What is there to say? I just kissed her. In front of my entire war band. After she bled herself to destroy a necromantic trap, and I fought through a horde of undead soldiers to reach her.
Her fingers release my shirt. My hands fall from her hips. The distance between us widens—inches that feel like miles.
Grothak clears his throat. “Captain.” His voice is carefully neutral, but I can hear the question beneath it. “We should secure the perimeter. The fight may have drawn attention.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. The sounds of battle would have carried across the plain—steel on bone, orc war cries, the magical pulse when the sigil broke. If Hadrin’s scouts are anywhere within earshot.
“Do it.” My voice comes out rough. Wrong. “Double the watch. I want to know the moment anyone approaches.”
Grothak nods and moves away, barking orders. The war band stirs into motion around us—securing the building, checking for more traps, tending to the wounded. Normal activity. Routine.
None of it feels normal.
Kielyne hasn’t moved. She stands among the scattered bones, still holding my knife, still bleeding from the cut on her palm. Her gaze is fixed on me—searching for something, though I don’t know what.
“That shouldn’t have happened.” Her voice is quiet. Unsteady.
“No.” I can’t disagree. “It shouldn’t have.”
“We were—the adrenaline—”
“Yes.”
She nods. Once. Twice. Like she’s convincing herself of something. “Right. That’s all it was. Adrenaline.”
We both know she’s lying. We both let the lie stand.
“Your hand.” I gesture at the cut still dripping blood. “Let me—”
“I can handle it.” She pulls back before I can reach her. Puts distance between us. “I’m a healer, remember?”
She turns away. Finds her pack among the scattered debris. Starts binding her wound with the efficient, detached movements of someone who’s done it a thousand times.
I watch her. Can’t look away.
The taste of her is still on my lips. The feel of her body against mine is still burned into my memory. And I want—gods help me, I want—in ways I haven’t let myself want anything in decades.
War horns shatter the moment.
They echo across the Bloodscar Plains—distant but unmistakable, coming from multiple directions at once. Hadrin’s forces. They heard the fight. They’re converging on our position.
Fenrik crashes through the door, pale-green and wild-eyed. “Scouts report riders approaching! Three groups, coming fast! We have maybe twenty minutes before they reach us!”
Kielyne looks at me. The kiss hangs unacknowledged between us, but there’s no time—no time for any of it.
“Move out!” I shove everything else aside. Become the war captain again, the weapon, the monster they need me to be. “Leave everything we can’t carry. We ride toward the Veilspire!”
The war band scrambles to obey. Horses are mounted. Weapons are drawn.
And through it all, her taste lingers on my lips—a reminder of the moment we stole from the chaos.
A promise of something neither of us is ready to name.