Orc’s Veil (The Veil Lands #11)

1. Eirene

ONE

EIRENE

The Veil is hungry tonight.

I feel it the moment I step outside my cottage—that familiar pull in my chest, the boundary reaching for me with invisible fingers.

The bruised-purple sky stretches overhead, twin moons hanging fat and luminous through the perpetual haze.

Eight years of twilight. Eight years of bleeding.

Eight years of watching those moons rise and fall while I kneel at the stones and offer myself, piece by piece, to a hunger that will never be satisfied.

Tonight feels different.

The air hums with pressure, thick and electric against my skin.

Sound distorts at the Veilborder—my footsteps return to me wrong, delayed and multiplied, bouncing off surfaces that don’t exist. My shadow stretches behind me, longer than it should be, moving a half-second after I do.

This place never lets you forget what it is.

An open wound. A place where reality bleeds.

The smell hits me first—old blood and ash and the ozone-sharp scent of magic gone wrong. It never fades. Never dissipates. The Veilborder holds onto everything, including the stench of its own slow death.

I tighten my grip on the ritual knife and walk toward the stones.

They rise from the black soil in a jagged circle—ancient monoliths twice my height, carved with symbols that hurt to look at directly.

The runes seem to shift when I’m not watching, rearranging themselves into patterns that make my temples throb.

I’ve never been able to read them. Neither could the witch who trained me, or the one who trained her.

The knowledge died with the High Witches, three centuries gone.

Some things aren’t meant to be understood. Only fed.

The central stone pulses warm beneath my palm as I approach.

Recognition. The Veil knows me, knows the taste of my blood better than anything else in this forsaken place.

The channels carved into the stone’s surface are stained dark from centuries of offerings—rust-brown rivers leading down into the earth, into the barrier itself.

Hello, old friend.

I don’t say it aloud. Don’t need to. The boundary feels my greeting in the way my heartbeat quickens, in the faint tremor of my hand as I press it flat against the stone.

The Veil shudders in response. Not settling. Not steadying.

Screaming.

The sound rips through me—high and keening, audible only to witches and orcs, or so I’ve been told. I’ve never met an orc. Never wanted to. They carry the stain of the original betrayal, the shattering that created this mess in the first place. The Veil fears them. Hates them.

Right now, it fears another presence entirely.

I kneel at the base of the central stone, pressing my knees into the cold, damp earth.

The smell of old blood rises around me—countless offerings soaked into the soil over generations.

My grandmother bled here. My mother bled here.

I’ve bled here every night since I was eighteen, and still the barrier grows thinner.

Still the darkness presses in.

I draw the blade across my palm. Clean. Practiced.

The black iron knife is older than the stones themselves, passed down through a line of boundary witches stretching back to the original compact.

The edge never dulls. The handle never slips.

It cuts true every time, opening my skin in a neat line that wells crimson immediately.

Blood drips into the channels.

The Veil feeds.

I feel it happening—the slow drain, the pull of a vastness drawing from my veins.

My vision blurs at the edges. The moons swim overhead, their light fracturing into halos.

This is the part I used to dread, back when I still had enough energy for dread.

Now it’s just routine. Kneel. Cut. Bleed.

Wait for the darkness at the edge of my sight to recede.

Tonight, it doesn’t recede.

The Veil shudders again, harder this time. The stones groan—actual sound, audible to anyone, the scrape of ancient rock shifting in its foundations. I press my bleeding palm harder against the central monolith, willing the boundary to settle, to accept my offering and calm the hell down.

Take it. Take what you need.

But the Veil isn’t interested in what I’m giving. It’s reacting to a force on the other side—a pressure pushing through.

I cut deeper.

The blade bites into the meat of my palm, past the shallow offering into the places where real blood flows.

Pain flares bright and immediate, but I’ve learned to use pain.

Learned to turn it into fuel. The Veil responds to sacrifice, to suffering, to the willingness to give everything for the boundary’s sake.

Blood pours down the channels now, flooding them, running in rivers toward the base of the stone.

Still not enough.

The air between two of the eastern stones begins to shimmer. Pearlescent light bleeds into the darkness—wrong light, sick light, the color of something dead and luminous. The Twilight Gate. It’s forming without warning, without the usual gradual flickering that gives me time to prepare.

A will is forcing it open.

I push myself to my feet, swaying with blood loss, knife still clutched in my dripping hand.

The Gate tears wider—a vertical gash in reality, edges ragged and weeping that sickly luminescence.

Through the gap, I catch glimpses of what lies beyond.

Shadows that move with intention. Shapes pressing against the barrier.

Close. Close, damn you.

I slash my other palm open. Both hands bleeding now, I press them against the nearest stones, one on each side of the forming Gate. The boundary magic surges through me, raw and burning, trying to knit the tear closed. The Veil fights back against the intrusion, using my blood as ammunition.

The Gate wavers. Begins to shrink.

And then a child tumbles through.