Chapter 2 #2
Gravik’s voice cuts through the red haze.
I spin, hammer raised, and find the old guard captain standing at the yard’s edge.
Gray streaks his hair—gray that wasn’t there three years ago, before the night that changed everything.
His reflexes have slowed, his joints ache in the mornings, but his mind remains sharp as forge-steel.
He served my father for twenty years. Nearly died the night of the assassination—Kreth’s team let him go because they thought he wasn’t important enough to chase down.
Their mistake.
“What?” The word comes out harsh, raw, stripped of courtesy.
Gravik approaches slowly, hands visible, the way you approach something dangerous and barely contained. He’s the only one who can get away with it. The only one who knew me before I became this—this thing made of fury and grief and careful calculation.
“News from the upper halls, my prince.” His voice carries only to my ears. “The Triumvirate has issued invitations.”
“Invitations.”
“A celebration. Honoring the third anniversary of the regency.” His jaw tightens—the same tell I inherited, though I didn’t know it until he pointed it out. “They’ve invited nobles from across the kingdom. Lords with sons of marriageable age. Sons with…claims to the Flamebound bloodline.”
The words hit me like a physical blow. I lower my hammer, feeling the burn in my shoulders, the blood seeping from cracked knuckles. “They’re not waiting for my birthday.”
“It appears not.”
A celebration. An anniversary. And nobles with marriageable sons—distant cousins, minor branches of the family tree, anyone with enough Flamebound blood to legitimize a claim. The Triumvirate is going to crown one of them. Going to steal the succession before I can reach the age of legitimate rule.
My fingers tighten on the knife hilt. Something settles beneath the rage—not cold patience but absolute clarity, sharp enough to cut.
“When?”
“The celebration begins in two weeks, my prince. The coronation…”
“The coronation?”
Gravik’s face is stone. “One week before your birthday.”
Of course. One week. Close enough to seem coincidental, far enough to make legal challenges meaningless. By the time I turn twenty-four, there will already be a king on my father’s throne. A puppet king, strings held by serpents, wearing a crown stolen from my dead father’s corpse.
I had expected it—the general shape, if not the specific timing.
The Triumvirate has been working toward this moment.
Every tax increase funding their preparations.
Every border skirmish thinning the ranks of warriors who might support me.
Every whisper about the mad prince undermining whatever loyalty remained.
And I’ve been waiting. Planning. Building my own network of loyalists, positioning my own pieces on the board. But I’m not ready. Not yet. Not for this.
“Who?” The word grinds between my teeth. “Which cousin?”
“Borak. Son of your father’s second cousin.”
Borak. I know the name. Weak, malleable, kept compliant through a careful combination of promises and threats and substances that cloud the mind. He wants to be king without wanting anything that comes with kingship. The perfect puppet. The perfect tool.
“How certain are you?”
“Certain enough.” Gravik moves closer, lowering his voice further. “Juk’s household has been stockpiling ceremonial regalia. Dura’s warriors have received new postings—concentrated around the Throne Hall. Kreth has been…quiet. Too quiet.”
Kreth quiet is never good. Kreth quiet means he’s preparing for something that requires all his attention.
My knuckles throb. I look down, realize I’ve been clenching my fists hard enough to drive cracked skin into raw muscle. Blood drips onto the courtyard stones—my blood, joining the scattered remnants of training dummies and broken warriors.
“Options.”
Gravik hesitates. That hesitation says more than any words could.
“There are no good options, my prince.” The admission costs him. I can hear it in his voice, see it in the set of his shoulders. “Strike first, and you’re a usurper. Wait, and they crown Borak before you can claim what’s yours. Either way…”
Either way, they win. Either way, my father’s throne passes to his murderers or their puppet. Either way, three years of waiting, planning, surviving—all of it meaningless.
No.
The thought rises from somewhere deeper than rage. Deeper than grief. The part of me that refused to die the night they killed my father. The part that broke an assassin’s neck with my bare hands while blood poured down my face.
“There has to be something.” I hear the desperation in my own voice and hate it. “Something I’m not seeing.”
“Perhaps.” Gravik doesn’t look convinced. “Perhaps—”
“My prince.”
A servant appears at the courtyard entrance—one of the lower hall staff, young enough to still show fear when approaching me. She carries a folded paper in trembling hands.
“A message, my prince.” She extends it like an offering. “Left at your chambers. No one saw who delivered it.”
I take the paper. Dismiss the servant with a glance. Unfold the note with bloody fingers, smearing red across the pale surface.
The handwriting is unfamiliar. Precise, educated, the careful script of someone trained in formal documentation. Not orc script—human. The letters are too rounded, too flowing, lacking the angular efficiency of my people’s writing.
The Archives hold proof of your father’s murder. Come at midnight. Come alone. Come prepared to choose between vengeance and wisdom.
I read the words three times. Four. Each repetition brands them deeper into my brain.
Proof.
After three years of suspicion, of knowing without being able to prove, someone is offering proof.
“My prince?” Gravik has moved closer, reading the tension in my stance. “What does it say?”
I fold the note. Tuck it away. My heart slams against my ribs—not fear, not exactly, but something dangerous. Something I haven’t felt in three years.
Hope is a liability. Hope gets you killed.
“Tonight.” I meet Gravik’s gaze, hold it, let him see the calculation behind my fury. “I need your people to watch the archive corridors. Discreetly. I need to know who comes and goes.”
“The archives?” His brow furrows. “My prince, if this is a trap—”
“It might be.” The admission doesn’t bother me as much as it should. “But if it’s not…”
Proof. Evidence. Something real to hold against the bastards who killed my father.
The Triumvirate has been careful. Burning documents, silencing witnesses, rewriting history until even I sometimes doubt what I remember. They think they’ve eliminated every trace. They think the truth died with my father.
Someone disagrees.
I turn toward the Keep’s inner corridors, leaving Gravik standing among the wreckage of training dummies and groaning warriors. My mind races through possibilities. Who has access to the archives? Who would risk contacting me? Who would know about proof and be willing to share it?
The human archivist.
The thought surfaces unexpectedly. I’ve seen her, in passing—small, pale, quiet and careful and utterly ignorable. Exactly the kind of person who might spend years cataloguing documents no one cares about. Exactly the kind of person who might find something she wasn’t supposed to find.
Vengeance I understand. Vengeance is simple—blood for blood, death for death, the equations that govern orc succession since before the Keep was carved from volcanic stone. I’ve been preparing for vengeance since the night my father died.
Wisdom is something else. Wisdom is my father’s voice, urging mercy when I wanted blood. Wisdom is my mother’s hand on my shoulder, teaching me that strength without restraint destroys everything it touches. Wisdom is everything I’ve tried to become and everything I’ve failed to be.
The note demands I choose.
Maybe that’s the trap. Not assassins waiting in the shadows, but the choice itself—forcing me to commit to one path or the other, to reveal what kind of king I intend to become. The Triumvirate would love to know. Would use the knowledge against me, the way they use everything against me.
But the human archivist—if she’s the one who sent this—what does she want? What would a human scholar gain from helping an orc prince reclaim his throne?
Unless she actually believes in truth.
The thought is foreign. Uncomfortable. I’ve learned that everyone wants something. Every gesture has a motive. Every word carries calculation beneath its surface. The idea that someone might act from principle rather than self-interest feels naive.
But then again, I’ve been pretending so long I’ve forgotten that some people actually mean what they say.
The corridors grow quieter as I approach my chambers. My personal guards snap to attention—four of them, compromised to varying degrees, reporting my movements to one Regent or another. I’ve left them in place deliberately. Better to know which spies surround you than to wonder.
I dismiss them with a wave. Enter my chambers alone. Close the door and lean against it, letting the solid wood support my weight while my mind races.
Midnight.
The archives.
Proof.
For the first time in three years, something that might actually matter.
I pull the note from my belt, read it once more.
The handwriting blurs slightly—exhaustion or emotion, I’m not sure which.
My father’s face surfaces in my memory. Not the death mask the Triumvirate displayed during the abbreviated funeral rites, but the face I remember from childhood.
Laughing. Proud. Convinced that his son would be a good king.
I don’t know how to be good anymore, Father. I don’t know if I ever did.
But I know how to fight. I know how to survive. And if there’s proof—real proof, undeniable proof—then the balance shifts. Everything the Triumvirate has built on silence and buried parchment becomes weight they can no longer carry.
The sun is still high outside my window. Hours until midnight. Hours to prepare, to plan, to decide whether I’m walking into salvation or slaughter.
I start with the decision that’s easiest: I’m going.
Trap or gift, truth or treachery, whatever waits in those archives—I’m going to face it.
Because three weeks isn’t enough time to stop a coronation. But one night might be enough time to find a weapon.
And weapons, I understand.