Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
ZORATH
Blood paints the corridors of my ancestors.
We punch through the upper levels faster than anyone expected—Thalzar’s forge workers know passages that don’t exist on any map, routes carved by long-dead kings who understood that survival sometimes means knowing how to run.
The defections have left gaps in Juk’s defenses, guards who should be manning checkpoints conspicuously absent, doors that should be barred standing open in silent invitation.
But the Throne Hall is different.
I know the moment we reach the final approach.
The corridor widens, torchlight flickering across polished basalt, and the air changes—thicker, warmer, carrying the deep thrum of the volcano that cradles this chamber like a heart in a chest of stone.
Pillars line the passage ahead, each one carved with the faces of dead kings.
Seventeen generations of Flamebound rulers, watching their descendant fight to reclaim what was stolen.
The first arrow takes one of my warriors in the throat.
He goes down without a sound, hands clawing at the shaft, blood spraying across the faces of my ancestors. More arrows follow—a rain of death from galleries I can barely see, archers positioned in shadows that swallow the torchlight.
“Back!” Gravik’s voice cuts through the chaos. His hand closes on my arm, yanking me behind a pillar as arrows shatter against stone where I stood a heartbeat before. “They’ve fortified the approach. Dura’s turned the Hall into a killing ground.”
I press my back against cool obsidian, listen to my warriors dying around me. Three more fall in the first volley. Another two try to retreat and take arrows in the spine. The basalt floor runs red, pooling in the grooves where generations of feet have worn paths into the stone.
“How many archers?”
“Thirty. Maybe more.” Gravik’s face is grim, blood from a cut on his brow running into his eye. “They’ve got the high ground, clear sightlines. Anyone who steps into the open dies.”
I risk a glance around the pillar. The Throne Hall opens ahead—vast, shadowed, the throne itself barely visible at the far end. The obsidian seat glows faintly, veins of solidified fire pulsing in the darkness. My father’s throne. My throne.
Standing between me and it: two hundred of Dura’s warriors, arranged in defensive formations that would make any siege commander weep with envy. And above them, in the galleries that ring the Hall’s upper levels, archers who can pick off attackers before they clear the entrance.
Dura stands at the center of the formation, massive even by orc standards, her war-axe gleaming in the torchlight. She sees me looking. Raises her weapon in salute—a warrior’s acknowledgment, one fighter to another.
She’s going to make me earn this.
“There’s no other way in.” I say it flatly, without emotion. The truth doesn’t require feeling. “Every passage leads here eventually. The throne is meant to be defended—a final refuge for kings under siege.”
“Then we wait. Starve them out. They can’t hold the Hall forever.”
“Juk is still out there. Still has warriors. Every hour we wait gives him time to rally reinforcements, bring in troops from the outer territories.” I grip my hammer, feel the familiar heft of volcanic glass. “We end this now.”
“My prince—”
“Shields up.” My voice carries, loud enough to reach the warriors pressed against pillars and crouched behind fallen bodies. “We go through. We take our losses. And we end this.”
Silence. Then, one by one, shields rise. Warriors who know they might die in the next few minutes straighten their spines, check their weapons, prepare to follow their prince into hell.
Gravik meets my gaze. Something passes between us—not words, something older. The look of a man who watched me grow from a boy to a prince to whatever I’m becoming now.
“For your father,” he says quietly.
“For the kingdom.”
I charge.
The arrows find me immediately.
One glances off my shoulder plate, spinning away into darkness. Another buries itself in my shield with a thunk that vibrates up my arm. A third—I twist aside, feel the wind of its passage across my cheek, hear it clatter against stone behind me.
Warriors fall around me. Good orcs, loyal orcs, orcs who believed in me enough to follow me into a death trap.
Their blood joins the rivers already flowing across the basalt floor.
Their screams join the chaos that fills the Hall—the thunder of boots, the clash of steel, the war cries of warriors who know they’re fighting for more than just a throne.
I reach the first line of Dura’s defenders and my hammer sings.
The opening blow catches a warrior in the chest, obsidian crunching through armor, ribs shattering beneath the impact.
He flies backward, crashes into his fellows, creates a gap that I exploit with brutal efficiency.
Another swing takes a head clean off—the body stays standing for a heartbeat, blood fountaining from the stump, before it crumples.
A spear thrusts toward my face. I sidestep, grab the haft, yank the warrior off balance. My hammer catches him in the ribs as he stumbles past. Bones crack. He goes down screaming, and I’m already moving, already finding the next target, already painting the basalt floor with another shade of red.
The archers above can’t fire into the melee. Too many of their own people mixed with mine, too much chaos to pick targets. Their advantage evaporates the moment we close ranks, and then it’s just steel and fury and the ancient mathematics of violence.
I lose myself in it.
Not rage—not the white fury that consumed me when I killed Kreth. Something colder. More precise. Each swing measured to create maximum damage, each step positioning me for the next kill, each breath rationed against the expenditure combat demands.
A blade opens a gash across my thigh. I break the arm that holds it, then cave in the skull attached to the arm. A spear punches toward my gut—I deflect it with my hammer’s haft, step inside the reach, and crush the spearer’s windpipe with my elbow. Blood sprays across my face. Not mine. Not yet.
My warriors push forward around me, climbing over the dead, fighting through the dying. We’re taking losses—terrible losses, bodies piling up faster than I want to count—but we’re gaining ground. Inch by bloody inch, we force Dura’s formation back toward the throne.
And then I see her.
She wades through the battle like a force of nature, her war-axe claiming lives with every swing.
Three of my warriors fall to her in as many seconds—one split from shoulder to hip, one decapitated, one simply crushed beneath a blow that sends him flying into a pillar hard enough to shatter bone.
The scars on her face twist with something that might be joy.
Dura fights the way she rules: with overwhelming force, no hesitation, absolute certainty that strength is the only truth that matters.
Our eyes meet across the carnage.
She smiles. I don’t.
I cut a path toward her, hammer singing, bodies falling in my wake.
She does the same, axe rising and falling with mechanical precision, clearing a space where we can finish this.
The battle seems to sense what’s coming—warriors on both sides pulling back, creating a ring of blood-soaked stone where two commanders can decide the fate of a kingdom.
“Surrender.” I give her the option, even now. Fable’s voice in my head, telling me to be the king my father wanted. “Your cause is lost. Your allies are dead or fled. End this.”
Dura’s laugh is gravel and broken glass. “I don’t surrender, little prince.” Her axe rises, catches the torchlight, throws shadows across her scarred face. “I don’t know how.”
She comes at me like an avalanche.
Dura is better than I expected.
Decades of combat experience against my youth.
Raw power refined by countless battles against strategic aggression honed in training yards.
Her axe moves in patterns I’ve only read about—ancient orc fighting styles that fell out of fashion centuries ago, resurrected by a warrior who learned from masters long dead.
She fights with the certainty of someone who’s never lost. Never doubted. Never questioned whether strength alone could carry her through.
The first exchange leaves me staggering.
Her axe sweeps low, forcing me to jump. I land off-balance, barely get my hammer up in time to block the follow-through that would have split my skull. The impact jars my arms to the shoulders, sends pain lancing through muscles already screaming from the battle to reach her.
She presses the advantage. A thrust toward my gut that I deflect, a spinning strike that catches me across the thigh—the blade slicing through leather, opening flesh, blood running hot down my leg. I stumble. She kicks my wounded leg, and I drop to one knee.
Her axe descends.
I roll. Stone chips fly where the blade bites into basalt instead of bone. I come up swinging, hammer aimed at her knee, but she twists away with a grace that seems impossible for someone her size.
“You fight well.” She circles, looking for another opening. “Better than your father.”
“Don’t speak his name.”
“He begged, you know. At the end. Not for himself—for you. Wanted Kreth to spare his son.” Her lips peel back from tusks gone dark with old blood. “Kreth enjoyed telling him no.”
The rage surges. I want it to—want to lose myself in the fury, let it carry me through whatever comes next. But Fable’s voice whispers beneath the roar.
Fable’s voice echoes.
I don’t let the anger control me. I use it.
My next attack is faster than anything I’ve thrown so far. Hammer high, feinting at her head, then dropping low at the last instant to catch her hip. Volcanic glass crunches against bone. She grunts—the first sound of pain she’s made—and her stance shifts, favoring the damaged side.