28. Varkhul
TWENTY-EIGHT
VARKHUL
The Sovereign sends everything it has.
The attack comes at dusk—the liminal hour, when the boundary between worlds is thinnest. I feel it in the mark before I see it: a surge of wrongness that makes my chest burn and my teeth ache. Beside me, Eirene gasps, her hand flying to the matching brand over her heart.
Then the Veil tears open.
Not one breach. Not dozens. Hundreds. The entire boundary splits apart like rotting fabric, darkness hemorrhaging through every crack.
The sky turns black with shadow-forms—a tide of Veilspawn that blots out the silver moons, that fills the air with the stench of decay and the screaming of stolen voices.
They’re not just attacking the stone circle. They’re attacking everywhere.
The warden encampment had moved closer—Draveth had arrived at dusk, exactly when his two days were up, and his first order had been to advance the camp within a mile of the stones.
He’d had perhaps three hours on the ground before the Sovereign struck.
The entity had been watching his approach too, it seemed.
It had been waiting for reinforcements to arrive before it committed everything it had.
In the distance, toward the encampment, I hear the clash of steel and the roar of orcs in battle. Iron and bone and warded banners—the defenses I helped build over years of service—were crumbling under the onslaught of shadow.
The Sovereign isn’t probing. It isn’t testing. It’s trying to end this. Now. Tonight.
“The encampment.” Eirene’s voice is tight with strain. “The guards—”
“Can’t help them.” I draw my execution blade, feel the familiar grip settle into my palm. “We hold here. The stones are what matter.”
“If the encampment falls—”
“If we fall, nothing else matters.” I meet her eyes—pale gray and gold-threaded now, the claiming woven into every part of her. “You’re the anchor. I’m the blade. We hold.”
She nods. Pulls her ritual knife. And cuts.
Blood wells from her palm—not the hesitant offerings she’s been making for eight years, but a deep slash that sends crimson pouring down her wrist. The Veil responds immediately, shuddering with power, the stones around us flaring bright with ancient light.
The first wave of Veilspawn crashes against us.
Shadow-wolves lead the charge—a dozen of them, moving like smoke across the black soil, their empty eyes fixed on the light blazing from Eirene’s blood. They hit the edge of the stone circle and scatter, circling, probing for weakness.
I don’t give them time to find any.
And I go to work.
Twenty years of executions have taught me how to kill efficiently. Cleanly. Without wasted motion or unnecessary suffering.
This isn’t clean. This is butchery.
My blade sings through shadow-flesh, spraying ichor that burns where it touches skin. One creature falls. Two. A shadow-wolf lunges for my throat and I catch it on my forearm, feel claws scrape against armor, drive my sword through its open mouth until the point emerges from the back of its skull.
The mark on my chest blazes with heat. Power flows through me—not just my own strength, but Eirene’s magic tangled with mine, amplifying every strike, every movement.
I can feel her behind me, feel the blood pouring from her wounds as she feeds the Veil, feel the boundary responding to her sacrifice.
A memory-eater comes at me low, its eyeless face turned toward the fresh grief I carry from seeing Korvax’s death. I split it from skull to groin with a single overhead strike. Another creature takes its place. Then another. Then another.
They keep coming.
The ground around me is slick with ichor. My armor is coated in the stuff, dark and viscous, smelling of rot and ancient malice. My arms burn with exertion. My breath comes in ragged gasps.
And still they come.
From the direction of the encampment, I hear a scream. Not the shriek of a Veilspawn—a voice I recognize. Orc. Male. Dying.
Then another scream. And another.
The warden encampment is falling. My brothers—orcs I trained with, fought beside, watched take their oaths—are dying. And I can’t help them. Can’t even try to help them, because the moment I leave the stones, the moment I abandon Eirene—
Everything falls.
I feel Draveth go first.
It comes through the Veil—a pulse of severed life.
Draveth wasn’t a stranger. He was everything I used to be: the order’s cleanest instrument, ruthless and certain and incapable of doubt.
I had feared what he’d do when he arrived.
Feared the efficiency of him, the lack of hesitation that had always made him more dangerous than me.
The Sovereign devours him between one heartbeat and the next. His certainty—all that iron certainty I once admired—consumed whole, added to the entity’s mass. The order’s sharpest blade, broken before it ever reached us.
I don’t grieve the executioner he was. But I grieve what he might have become if someone had made us question sooner.
And then Kravos.
His death follows moments later—a pulse of severed life, a soul torn apart and fed to the hungry dark.
He’d come with Draveth’s force, I realize.
Too impatient to wait at the Citadel for word of my compliance.
High Warden Kravos. The man who signed Eirene’s death warrant.
The commander I served for fifteen years.
He dies screaming.
I feel the Sovereign consume him—feel the entity grow stronger as it devours years of memories, decades of service, a lifetime of cold certainty. Kravos believed in the order. Believed in the law. Believed that sacrificing one boundary witch was worth the stability of the realm.
Now he’s just fuel for the very darkness he thought he was fighting.
“Varkhul!” Eirene’s voice cuts through my spiral of horror. “Behind you!”
I spin. A breach-born creature—massive, humanoid, made of compressed darkness—has broken through while I was distracted. It towers over me, limbs too long, joints bending wrong, a nightmare given form by centuries of stolen fear.
I barely get my blade up in time.
The impact drives me back, boots scraping trenches in the black soil. The creature’s arm comes down again—a blow that would shatter stone—and I deflect it at an angle, feel the force shudder through my skeleton, roll clear as its foot crashes down where my head was.
It’s too fast. Too strong. I can’t—
Light explodes behind me.
Not the sickly opalescence of the dying Veil. This is brighter. Fiercer. Twilight magic wielded not for healing or sealing but for destruction—a weapon made of blood and will and eight years of desperate survival.
Eirene.
She’s not hiding. Not bleeding passively while I fight. She’s standing in the center of the stone circle, both arms raised, blood streaming from wounds I didn’t see her open. Her eyes have gone completely black—no white, no gray, just endless dark that somehow blazes with inner fire.
The light pouring from her hands strikes the breach-born creature like a physical blow. Shadow-flesh sizzles, burns, sloughs away in sheets. The thing screams—a sound that makes my bones vibrate—and staggers back from the onslaught.
I don’t hesitate. I attack.
My blade finds the gaps her magic has opened. I hack at burned flesh, sever limbs weakened by light, drive my sword deep into the creature’s core where the darkness is densest. It claws at me—catches my shoulder, tears through armor and flesh—but I don’t stop.
I feel Eirene’s power flowing through the mark, feel her will joining mine, feel us become a single weapon with two edges.
The breach-born falls.
It dissolves into wisps of shadow that scatter on the windless air, leaving only the stench of its death and the ichor coating my blade.
But there are more. There are still more.