Chapter 7
SEVEN
ZORATH
Twelve guards. Kreth. One exit blocked, one we came through now crawling with enemies. Fable behind me, clutching evidence worth dying for.
The math is simple: fight through or die here.
I don’t hesitate.
The hammer is in my hand before the decision is made. The weapon’s vitrified head catches the crystal light as it swings, black as midnight, veined with solidified fire.
The first guard’s chest caves before he can raise his weapon.
The impact shudders up my arm, familiar and satisfying. Ribs splinter beneath the blow. Lungs rupture. Blood sprays across my face—hot, copper-scented, the first taste of violence in a night that will be drenched in it. The guard’s eyes go wide with surprise, then empty with death. He crumples.
I’m already moving.
The second guard’s skull splits as I continue the swing’s momentum, not wasting energy on a reset when follow-through will serve.
Volcanic glass meets bone with a crack that echoes through the archives, bouncing off stone shelves and frozen lava formations.
Brain matter spatters across a row of ancient tax records.
The body drops like a puppet with severed strings.
Two down. Ten and Kreth to go.
The remaining guards close ranks—professional enough to recognize what they’re facing, trained enough to respond with coordination rather than panic. Spears jab toward me in practiced thrusts, the kind of formation designed to pin an opponent in place while others flank.
I don’t let them pin me.
Their spears are useless at this range. Long weapons need space to work.
My hammer doesn’t.
The downswing shatters a knee. The guard screams—high, animal, the sound of someone who has never faced real violence and is now drowning in it. He falls, tries to crawl away, fingers scrabbling against stone worn smooth by centuries of scholars’ feet.
I step on his back. Use him as a platform to vault into the next cluster of enemies.
My hammer catches one under the chin—the blow travelling upward, jaw dislocating with an audible pop, teeth scattering across the archive floor like scattered pearls.
His face transforms into something unrecognizable, all angles wrong, humanity erased in a single strike. He’s dead before his body realizes it.
Another swing takes an arm off at the elbow. Clean separation, the volcanic glass sharper than any forged steel. The guard stares at the stump—one perfect second of disbelief, his mind unable to process what his eyes are showing him. My follow-through crushes his temple before the scream can form.
Blood slicks the stone beneath my boots. The smell fills the archive—copper and shit and opened bowels, the particular stench of violent death that never quite matches what songs and stories promise. This is what battle actually is. Not glory. Not honor. Just meat being unmade.
I grab a dying guard by the collar. He’s still twitching, not quite dead, brain catching up to body’s damage.
I throw him into two others—bodies colliding, weapons tangling, the living stumbling over the dead.
One falls. I’m on him before he can rise, hammer descending, ending what the collision started.
A blade catches my ribs. Not deep—the guard who landed it is too panicked for precision—but blood flows anyway, hot against my skin, joining the shoulder wound in a catalogue of damage that will matter later. If there is a later.
I repay the cut by ripping the sword from his hands.
His grip breaks like a child’s. I ram the blade through his throat, angling upward, feeling the resistance of spine and the sudden give when steel finds the gap between vertebrae.
He gurgles. Blood bubbles from his lips.
I leave the sword where it is and move on.
Seven down.
Kreth watches from the doorway.
The bastard hasn’t moved. Hasn’t helped his men.
He’s just standing there, massive arms crossed, satisfaction plain across his scarred face.
Enjoying the show. Letting his soldiers die while he studies my technique, catalogues my weaknesses, plans how he’ll take me apart when I’m exhausted and bleeding.
Fine. Let him look.
A guard lunges at me from the left—brave or stupid, probably both. I catch his sword arm in my free hand, squeeze until bones grind, then bite.
My tusks puncture leather and flesh beneath. Blood fills my mouth, iron and salt and the particular warmth of a living body’s fluids. The guard screams. I tear out a chunk of muscle and spit it in his face.
He’s still screaming when my hammer finds his skull.
The remaining guards falter. I can see it in their eyes—resolve shifting, self-preservation overriding loyalty.
They signed up to capture a prince and a human scholar.
A quick arrest, minimal resistance, maybe a bonus from the Regents for clean work.
They didn’t sign up to die in an archive surrounded by the pulped remains of their comrades.
One breaks. Turns. Runs for the door.
My knife clears my belt. The throw is instinct, the motion burned into muscle by ten thousand repetitions. The blade takes him between the shoulder blades, severing spine, dropping him mid-stride. He slides across the bloody stone and doesn’t move again.
Nine down. Three and Kreth.
The last three guards look at each other. Look at the bodies. Look at me—covered in blood, mostly not my own, breathing hard but far from finished.
They charge.
FABLE
I watch a prince become a butcher.
Every kill is efficient, brutal, delivered with an expertise I can barely follow. I take in the angle of his swings, the way he uses momentum rather than brute force—and then look away, because some things shouldn’t be studied.
Blood sprays across shelves of ancient documents.
Parchment that survived centuries is spattered with the death of men who won’t survive the hour.
Bodies crumple between reading tables where I’ve spent countless quiet evenings.
The archive air is suddenly all blood—copper and viscera, and beneath them the chemical stink of fear-sweat from men who know they’re dying.
Part of me is horrified. The part that grew up in a scholars’ guild, surrounded by books instead of weapons, trained to value knowledge over violence. That part of me watches Zorath cave in a man’s chest and wants to vomit, wants to close my eyes, wants to be anywhere but here.
But there’s another part. A part I didn’t know existed until this moment.
That part watches Zorath fight and feels something that isn’t fear.
He’s protecting me. Every guard who falls is one less threat between me and a quiet death in an unmarked grave. The violence is monstrous, yes—but it’s also mine. Committed for me. Each brutal swing of that hammer is an answer to a question I didn’t know I’d asked: would anyone fight for me?
This man would. This prince covered in blood, taking wounds that would drop lesser warriors, killing with an efficiency that speaks of years of preparation—he would burn down this kingdom to keep me safe.
The realization takes root. Heavy. Permanent. Changing something fundamental in how I understand my place in this nightmare.
A guard goes down clutching the stump where his arm used to be. Zorath’s hammer finds his temple before the scream finishes. Another guard catches a spear thrust through Zorath’s already-wounded shoulder, and I watch him use the impact to spin inside the formation, turning injury into advantage.
He’s magnificent.
The thought arrives without permission. I shove it aside—there’s no room for that kind of thinking, not here, not now—but it refuses to leave.
He moves through violence the way I move through archives: fluid, confident, completely in his element.
This is what he was made for. Not council chambers and political games. This.
Blood runs from his shoulder. From his ribs. From cuts I can’t even identify, wounds accumulating faster than I can track. He’s slowing—not much, not noticeably to the guards, but I can see it. The cost of each swing increasing. The damage compounding.
How much more can he take?
The three remaining guards try to flank him. Smart—spreading out, forcing him to divide attention, creating angles he can’t cover simultaneously. But one of them misjudges. Steps too close to me, focused entirely on the prince, assuming the human woman pressed against the shelves is no threat.
I grab the bronze bookend before I consciously decide to reach for it.
Heavy. Solid. The kind of weight that could crack a skull if swung with enough force.
The guard doesn’t see me move. Doesn’t register the threat until the bookend is already descending, all my weight behind it, every ounce of strength I possess driving that bronze mass toward his temple.
The impact jars my arms to the shoulders. The sound—wet, hollow, wrong—will live in my nightmares. The guard drops without a sound, boneless, his skull dented where the bookend struck.
He doesn’t get up.
I stare at my hands. Blood on my fingers—his blood, from where the impact split skin. My grip on the bookend is white-knuckled, trembling. I may have just killed a man. A living person, gone because I swung a piece of bronze at his head.
My grandmother would be horrified.
My grandmother isn’t here.
Zorath finishes the last two guards while I stand frozen over the body at my feet. Quick work—one down with a hammer blow to the chest, the other trying to flee and catching a thrown knife in the spine. The archive falls silent except for the wet sounds of the dying and Zorath’s ragged breathing.
Eleven guards dead. Kreth remains.
The Regent hasn’t moved. He’s still in the doorway, hands that have never been quite clean hanging loose at his sides. His gaze sweeps across the carnage with something that might be appreciation.
Slow claps echo through the ruined archive.
“Impressive, little prince.” Kreth’s voice is gravel and satisfaction. “You’ve learned to fight since I killed your father.”