Chapter 8 Kielyne
EIGHT
KIELYNE
The horn’s wail shatters what’s left of the night.
I’m on my feet before the echo fades, my hand closing on the knife I keep under my bedroll. Around me, the camp explodes into motion—orcs scrambling for weapons, horses screaming, Blorjorn’s voice cutting through the chaos with orders I barely register.
“Hadrin’s advance force! Less than an hour out! Move!”
Not marauders this time. Soldiers. Professional hunters with blood magic and military precision.
We run.
The war band moves with terrifying efficiency—tents collapsing, supplies loaded, horses mounted in minutes. Someone shoves me onto a horse, and then we’re riding hard into the gray pre-dawn, the Bloodscar Plains swallowing us in their endless expanse.
Blorjorn stays close. I catch glimpses of him at the edge of my vision—massive and grim, axes at his belt, scanning every horizon for threats. Protecting me. Even now. Even after I woke screaming and let him see me at my worst.
I don’t know what to do with that.
The sun rises over a landscape that makes my stomach clench.
The Bonefields.
I’ve heard stories. Everyone in the Eastern Provinces has heard stories—the stretch of the Bloodscar Plains where ancient battles killed so many that the earth itself seems sick with it.
Where bones surface through the soil like crops, where nothing grows right, where the dead don’t quite stay dead.
The stories don’t do it justice.
The grass here grows thin and pale, struggling through soil more calcium than earth. What little vegetation survives is twisted, sickly green, wrong in ways I can’t quite articulate. The light itself seems muted, colors leached away, even with the sun climbing higher.
And the silence. Gods, the silence.
No birds. No insects. Nothing but the creak of leather, the thud of hooves, and the whisper of wind through the bone-studded grass.
I’m a healer. I’ve spent fifteen years surrounded by death—treating the dying, easing the dead into whatever comes after, learning to accept that some battles can’t be won. I thought I’d made peace with mortality.
But this place...
There’s a pressure on my temples. A weight against my senses.
Not supernatural—or at least, I don’t think so—but the accumulated grief of thousands of deaths, soaked into the very earth.
This is what happens when violence becomes geography.
When so many people die in one place that the land itself can’t forget.
My horse stumbles. I grab the saddle horn to keep from falling, my heart hammering against my ribs.
A hand catches my arm. Steadies me.
Blorjorn has moved his horse alongside mine, his grip warm through my sleeve. His dark gaze searches my face—concern there, carefully controlled.
“You feel it.” Not a question. “The weight of this place.” His jaw tightens. “The largest mass grave on the Bloodscar Plains. Three great battles were fought here over two centuries. Hundreds of thousands died.” A pause. “Human and orc alike. The earth remembers.”
“It feels... heavy. Wrong.” I swallow. “Like the land itself is grieving.”
“It is. In a way.” His grip on my arm loosens but doesn’t release entirely. “Some places remember violence. Hold onto it. This is one of them.”
I look out at the field of bones. “Your people fought here.” The words come out before I can stop them. “Didn’t they?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than usual.
“The Battle of the Three Dawns. I was barely an adult by orc standards.” His gaze moves across the field, seeing things I can’t. “My father led a charge on the second morning. He didn’t come back.”
The admission hits me harder than I expected. This massive, deadly warrior—this orc captain who’s killed more people than I can count—was once a boy watching his father ride to his death.
“I’m sorry.” The words feel inadequate. Everything does.
“Don’t be.” His voice hardens. “I’m not telling you this to earn sympathy. I’m telling you because you keep looking at me like I’m the only monster in this war.” He gestures at the endless bones. “There are older ones. Worse ones. My people were cursed long before we became warriors.”
“Cursed?”
He nods. “During the ritual collapse, the Veil tore, shadow poured through. That shadow was not mindless. It was blight — raw, hungry, destabilizing shadow-magic. The High Witches were trying to seal it. The orcs disrupted the ritual. When the Veil ruptured fully, something had to contain the overflow. And it chose the nearest vessels strong enough to survive it. The orcs.”
“Wow. That sounds like a pain in the ass.”
His gaze snaps to mine. Something flickers in those dark depths—surprise, maybe. Recognition.
For one moment, I don’t see the killer. I see the weariness beneath the brutality. The weight of generations pressing down on his shoulders. The man who bound himself to a stranger because he couldn’t stand to let another innocent person die.
“We need to keep moving.” He pulls away, breaking the moment. “Hadrin’s trackers won’t be far behind.”
I nod. Don’t trust my voice.
We ride on through the Bonefields, through the endless dead, and something between us has shifted. The fury I’ve been carrying since the oath still simmers beneath my skin, but it’s not the only thing there anymore.
There’s curiosity. Reluctant sympathy. The beginning of something I refuse to call understanding.
Then the trap springs from buried bones.
One moment, we’re riding. The next, the world explodes in green-black light.
It happens too fast to process. A sigil carved into ancient bone, buried just beneath the surface. A blight ward left by long-dead human sorcerers, designed to trigger when orc blood passes over it.
The magic detonates upward in a column of putrid fire.
Blorjorn takes it full in the chest.
The force throws him from his horse, his massive body slamming into the bone-studded earth with a sound I’ll never forget. He doesn’t scream—doesn’t have time.
But I feel it.
The oath-mark on my arm flares with sudden, searing pain—not the dull ache of before, but something sharp. Urgent. A warning carved into my flesh that something is very, very wrong.
I’m off my horse before I realize I’ve moved. Running toward him across the bone-strewn ground, my feet slipping on skulls and scattered debris.
When I reach him, I understand why the mark screamed.
Blorjorn lies crumpled on the ground, his massive frame suddenly fragile. The blight spreads across his chest in a web of blackening veins, eating into his flesh, rotting him alive from the inside out.
His skin darkens. Cracks. Weeps something that isn’t quite blood.
I scream his name.
The sound tears out of me without permission—raw and primal, horror and denial all at once. I’m on my knees beside him, my hands hovering over the spreading black, afraid to touch, afraid not to.
His eyes find mine. Dark with agony, but aware. Still fighting.
“Run.” The word comes out mangled, barely recognizable. “Kielyne—run—”
“I’m not leaving you.” My hands press against his chest, against the spreading corruption. The blight burns cold against my palms, hungry, trying to spread to me.
I don’t care.
“I’m not leaving you,” I repeat, savage and certain. “You hear me? I’m not—”
The mark on my arm pulses again. Warning. Fear. His pain bleeding through the oath in sharp, jagged bursts.
If he dies, I might follow. The oath binds us. His death could be mine.
That’s not why I stay.
Around us, the war band shouts—orders, questions, panic. Someone is screaming for a healer. Someone else is checking for more traps. Fenrik’s voice, high with fear. Grothak’s, rough with command.
None of it matters.
I look down at the orc captain—at Blorjorn, who bound himself to me to save my life, who came to me in the darkness when I woke from nightmares, who carries his father’s death and his people’s curse and still somehow found room to protect a human woman he barely knows.
His breathing weakens. The mark on my arm burns with the echo of his fading life.
No.