4. Varkhul
FOUR
VARKHUL
The Veil hates me before I even reach the stones.
I feel it the moment we crest the final ridge—a visceral recoil, the boundary shuddering away from my presence with unmistakable revulsion. The sensation crawls across my skin, settles into my bones, reminds me of what I am. What my ancestors did.
The Veil-warden encampment lies a day’s ride behind us now—iron and bone and warded banners snapping in winds that shouldn’t exist. I left before the other executioners woke, took only my most trusted guards, moved fast and quiet toward the boundary. This execution is mine. I want no complications.
Traitor blood. Oathbreaker lineage. The Veil remembers the original sin even if I don’t.
Behind me, six iron-masked guards march in formation, their boots crunching against the black soil in perfect unison.
Each one carries the Veil-warden sigil on their chest—a torn curtain stitched with thorns.
Each one has sworn the same oaths I have.
Kill without hesitation. Judge without mercy. Execute without doubt.
I’ve upheld those oaths for twenty years. Three hundred and forty-seven times, I’ve brought my blade down on necks condemned by the order. Never questioned. Never wavered. Never felt anything but the cold certainty of duty fulfilled.
The iron rings on my tusks mark the count—etched with kill-runes, a tradition among executioners. Each ring represents ten lives ended in service to the Veil. I wear them with neither pride nor shame. They simply are. Numbers. Evidence. Proof of purpose.
My hands have never trembled. Not during the first execution—a witch who’d been selling boundary secrets to shadow-cultists. Not during the fiftieth—a warden gone mad from Veil exposure, killing travelers instead of protecting them. Not during any of the ones between.
Tonight will make three hundred and forty-eight.
The orders sit heavy in my belt pouch—sealed in blood, signed by High Warden Kravos himself. Eirene Marrow, boundary witch. The charges: theft of memories, forbidden blood rites, willful weakening of the Veil. The sentence: death.
Simple. Clean. Just another traitor to add to the count.
Except the boundary is screaming.
The Veilborder stretches before us—a wasteland of black soil and cracked stone. Two moons hang swollen overhead, their light struggling through a haze that has no business existing. The air tastes of ozone and wrongness, pressing against my skin with palpable force.
The ground crunches beneath my boots. The Veilborder consumes everything eventually.
Reality warps here. Sound arrives late, distorted, multiplied. Shadows slip sideways when nothing moves to cast them. My instincts scream wrongness with every step, but I’ve trained myself to ignore instincts. Instincts are for prey.
“Sir.” One of my guards—Korvax, young and eager—gestures toward the stones. “The boundary markers.”
I see them. Hard to miss—ancient monoliths rising from the earth, twice my height, carved with symbols that make my temples throb when I look at them directly. They form a rough circle ahead, marking the point where our world ends and the shadow-realm begins.
And between two of the eastern stones, light glows.
Sickly light bleeds into the darkness—pallid, luminescent, the shade of decay made luminous. A tear in the Veil itself, visible to naked eyes. That shouldn’t be possible. The barrier is meant to be invisible, intangible, perceptible only through the wards and senses of trained witches.
If I can see it, the damage is worse than the order realized.
This is her fault. The thought rises with familiar conviction. Years of forbidden practices. Years of cheating the boundary’s due. She’s torn the Veil apart with her mercy.
The evidence is clear. The sentence is just.
I stride forward. The Veil recoils harder—I feel it in my chest, a tightening, a rejection.
My boots cross onto sacred ground—the black soil that’s drunk a thousand years of sacrificial blood. The pressure in the air intensifies. My skin prickles with it, every instinct screaming that I don’t belong here, that my presence is poison.
Then fire hits me.
Not external—internal. A burning sensation across my chest, searing through muscle and bone, blazing to life in a place that’s been cold and dormant my entire existence. I stagger. Catch myself on the hilt of my blade. Force my expression to stay neutral as agony rips through me in waves.
What the hell—
The fire doesn’t stop. It pulses, throbs, spreads outward from a point just above my heart. The claiming mark. The place where the rune would form if I ever took a mate.
I’ve never taken a mate. Never wanted one. Executioners don’t claim mates—the work corrodes the essential parts of us, makes lasting attachment impossible. I accepted that isolation decades ago.
The other executioners joke about it—gallows humor, the only kind we have.
We’re not built for love. We’re built for endings.
The mate-claim requires vulnerability, requires giving pieces of yourself to another, and we’ve got nothing left to give.
We’ve carved ourselves hollow in service to the blade.
But the mark is burning. Awakening. Responding to a presence nearby, a call that echoes across the blood-soaked soil and screaming barrier.
“Sir?” Korvax hovers at my elbow. “Are you—”
“Fine.” I straighten. Push the pain down, the way I’ve pushed down everything that might interfere with duty. “Spread out. Secure the perimeter. The witch is here somewhere.”
My guards obey. Iron masks gleaming in the moonlight, they fan out across the stone circle, checking shadows, scanning for threats. The Veil shudders at their passage—not as violently as it shudders at mine, but enough to notice.
Korvax lingers a moment longer than the others. I see the question in his posture, the concern. He’s young enough to still care about his commanding officers. He’ll learn.
“Go,” I tell him. My voice comes out harder than intended.
He goes.
I move toward the central stone. Toward the glow.