Chapter 7 #2
Zorath goes rigid. I can see the fury washing through him—still and absolute, coiled somewhere beyond explosive, the kind that doesn’t spend itself quickly.
“The old king died begging, you know.” Kreth takes a step forward, casual, unhurried.
“Crying your name. Asking us to spare his boy.” Another step.
“We discussed it, after. Whether to kill you that night or let you rot. Juk wanted you dead—cleaner that way, no loose ends. I convinced him otherwise.”
“Why?” The word tears out of Zorath, rough and raw.
“Because this is more fun. Watching you suffer. Watching you wait. Knowing you’d come for me eventually, and knowing I’d get to do you the same way I did your father.” He cracks his knuckles. “But you’re wounded now. Bleeding from half a dozen cuts. And I’m fresh.”
He draws his blade.
The weapon is massive—more cleaver than sword, the kind of thing meant for butchering rather than dueling. The edge catches the crystal light, notched and scarred from years of use. I know without being told that this is the blade that killed King Morvak.
Zorath raises his hammer.
ZORATH
Blood drips from wounds I’ve stopped counting.
The spear thrust through my shoulder is the worst—every movement grinds metal against muscle, sends white fire racing down my arm.
The cut across my ribs pulses with each breath.
Smaller wounds sting and seep, a constellation of damage mapped across my body.
None of it matters.
Kreth killed my father. Kreth held him down while he died. Kreth spent three years smiling at me across council tables, knowing what he’d done, savoring my helplessness.
Now it ends.
“I’ve imagined this moment.” My voice sounds wrong to my own ears—too calm, too controlled, when everything inside me is screaming for violence. “Every day for three years. Every night in dreams that wouldn’t let me rest.”
“Then let’s not disappoint you.” Kreth circles left, testing my reactions, that cleaver held low and ready. “I’ll try to make it last. Your father only took an hour. I think I can do better with you.”
We clash.
His first swing comes in fast—faster than a man his size should be able to move, the cleaver whistling through air that was occupied by my head a split second before. I duck, hammer sweeping low, aiming for his knee. He pivots, takes the blow on his thigh instead, grunts but doesn’t fall.
He’s good. Better than his guards.
We separate. Circle. Clash again in a flurry of strikes that echoes off stone walls and frozen lava shelves. His cleaver catches my hammer haft, tries to bind my weapon, and I let it—using the grip to pull him off balance, driving my forehead into his face.
Tusks meet tusks. The impact rocks us both backward. Blood streams from a cut above his eye—first blood, small satisfaction.
“You fight dirty.” He wipes blood from his brow, examines it, grins. “Good. Clean fighters die fast.”
He comes at me again. The cleaver blurs through patterns I recognize from street brawls and pit fights—nothing elegant, nothing trained, just efficient brutality honed through years of killing people who couldn’t fight back.
But I can fight back. I’ve been training for this since the night his blade opened my face.
Hammer meets cleaver. Sparks fly. My wounded shoulder screams as I force the bind upward, creating space, snapping a kick into his knee that buckles him for just a moment.
Not long enough. He recovers, sweeps the cleaver in a horizontal arc that would open me from hip to shoulder if it connects. I throw myself backward, feel the blade whisper past my chest, land hard on stone slick with blood.
Pain flares everywhere. For one terrible second, I can’t move—body refusing commands, damage finally demanding attention.
Kreth looms over me. Cleaver raised. Grinning wide enough to split his face.
“Just like your father.” He savors the words. “On your back. Helpless. Watching death come and unable to stop it.”
Behind him, I see Fable. Frozen, terrified, still clutching that bloody bookend. Her eyes meet mine across the carnage, and something passes between us—not words, something deeper. Something that says ‘get up’ and ‘I believe in you’ and ‘don’t leave me alone in this nightmare.’
I get up.
The hammer catches Kreth in the ribs before he can adjust, my wounded body finding reserves I didn’t know existed. He staggers, grunts, cleaver dropping out of position. I press the attack—hammer, elbow, knee, every piece of me that can deal damage swinging for anything I can reach.
His nose breaks under my fist. His lip splits against my tusks. He catches my hammer on the third swing, wrenches it from grip numbed by blood loss, sends it clattering across the archive floor.
But I don’t need a hammer to kill.
I tackle him. We go down in a tangle of limbs and blood, wrestling across stone slippery with the deaths of eleven guards. His hands find my throat—massive, scarred, squeezing with strength that dims my vision at the edges. I drive my thumbs into his eyes.
He howls. Releases my throat. Tries to throw me off.
I don’t let him.
My tusks find his shoulder. I bite deep, tear, feel muscle part beneath enamel. His blood fills my mouth—different from the guard I bit earlier, somehow fouler, the taste of corruption given physical form. He screams. Thrashes. Can’t dislodge me.
My hands find his throat. Squeeze. Watch his face go purple, his struggles weaken, his eyes bulge with the understanding that he’s about to die—
A horn sounds.
The noise cuts through the red haze, sharp and unmistakable. The emergency signal. The one that means the Keep itself is under attack, that something has gone so catastrophically wrong that every warrior is needed to respond.
Kreth’s eyes widen. Not with fear of me—with fear of something else. Something beyond this archive, beyond our private war.
I hesitate. Just for a second.
It’s enough.
He throws me off with strength born of desperation. Scrambles to his feet, bleeding from a dozen wounds, one eye swollen shut from my thumb, throat already bruising. But alive. Still alive.
“This isn’t over.” His voice is a ruined rasp, vocal cords damaged by my grip. “I killed your father slowly, princeling. I’ll take even longer with you.”
He backs toward the door. Every instinct screams at me to follow, to finish what we started, to end the man who destroyed my family. But the horn sounds again, and I hear something else beneath it—shouting, the clash of weapons, the sounds of battle spreading through the Keep.
Something has changed. The game has shifted while we were killing each other in this archive.
Kreth vanishes into the corridor. I let him go.
Not because I want to. Because I’m swaying on my feet, because the blood loss is finally demanding attention, because Fable is standing in the middle of a charnel house with terror in her eyes and I can’t protect her if I collapse.
I turn. Find her. Close the distance between us on legs that feel made of water.
“Are you hurt?”
Stupid question. She’s covered in blood—mine, the guards’, probably some from the man she hit with that bookend. Her hands are shaking. Her breath comes in short, sharp gasps that border on hyperventilation. But she meets my eyes steadily.
“I think I killed someone.” Her voice is small. Lost.
“You did.” No point in lying. “He would have killed you if you hadn’t.”
“That doesn’t make it feel better.”
“No.” I reach for her—not grabbing, not pulling, just offering. My hand hovers between us, bloody and broken and completely unworthy of anything she might give me. “It never does.”
She takes my hand anyway.
Her fingers are cold against my heat, slick with blood that’s drying tacky between our palms. She’s shaking—her whole body trembling with aftermath and adrenaline and the particular horror of having crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed.
She saved my life.
The understanding falls into place, quiet but immovable. That guard she hit—he was flanking me, would have had a clear shot at my unprotected back. She saw the threat before I did. Acted while I was occupied. Protected me the way I was trying to protect her.
We protected each other.
“We need to move.” The words feel inadequate, but they’re all I have. The horn sounds again, more urgent now. Whatever’s happening outside, it’s getting worse. “The crypts. We can hide there, tend wounds, figure out what’s changed.”
“Kreth will come back.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re injured. Badly injured. I can see—” Her voice catches. “There’s so much blood, Zorath.”
“Most of it isn’t mine.” A lie. Maybe. I’ve honestly lost track.
She doesn’t believe me. I can see that in her eyes—reading the damage, coming to conclusions that don’t favor my survival. But she doesn’t argue. Just tightens her grip on my hand and nods.
“Then let’s go.”
We step over bodies and through blood, leaving the ruined archive behind. The horn screams again as we duck into the hidden passage, its cry chasing us into the darkness.
Behind us, eleven guards cool in pools of their own blood. Ahead, whatever fresh catastrophe waits in a Keep that’s suddenly under attack.
And somewhere between us—in the grip of bloody fingers, in the trust implicit in following each other into darkness—something has shifted. Deepened. Become something neither of us planned for.
I’ll spend whatever remains of mine making sure she doesn’t regret it.