5. Varkhul
FIVE
VARKHUL
She kneels at the base of the tallest monolith, palms pressed to stone that pulses faintly at her touch.
Blood covers her. Not splattered—dried in rivers down her arms, caked in the fabric of her clothes, crusted beneath fingernails that look like they’ve been digging through rust. Her skin is pale beneath the crimson, almost translucent, and her dark hair hangs in braids threaded with silver.
Too much silver for someone her age. The Veil has been eating her alive.
A ritual knife lies beside her knee—black iron, ancient, the kind of blade I’ve only seen in Veil-warden archives. Passed down through generations of boundary witches. Worth more than most villages.
She’s exhausted. I can see it in the tremor of her hands, the slump of her shoulders, the way her head hangs forward as if lifting it requires effort she doesn’t have. She’s been bleeding all night. Maybe longer.
She should look pathetic. Broken. Just another criminal waiting for the blade.
Instead, my chest burns brighter.
The Veil responds to her presence—not with the revulsion it shows me, but with relief. I feel it settle as she bleeds, feel the screaming ease, feel the tear between the stones begin to shrink. Her blood is healing it. Feeding it. Holding reality intact through sheer force of sacrifice.
She’s not weakening the boundary.
She’s the only thing keeping it from collapsing.
I bury the doubt. Doubt gets people killed—usually the wrong people.
“Eirene Marrow.”
She lifts her head.
Gray. Her eyes are gray, soft and deep, framed by dark lashes that should make her look gentle. But there’s nothing gentle in the way she holds my gaze. Nothing fearful in the way she studies me, taking in the armor and the blade.
She looks at me the way you look at a storm on the horizon. Inevitable. Dangerous. But not surprising.
“The executioner.” Her voice is soft, almost gentle, at odds with the steel in her stare. “I wondered when you’d come.”
The sound of it hits me harder than any blow. Low and smooth, threaded with exhaustion but not defeat.
My gut tightens. A reaction that has nothing to do with duty.
Focus.
“You are sentenced to death for crimes against the boundary.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “Theft of memories. Forbidden blood rites. Willful weakening of the Veil.”
“I know.” She doesn’t move. Doesn’t try to run. Her bloodied hands stay pressed to the stone, her body positioned between me and the tear in reality. “But if you kill me now, the Veil falls before dawn.”
I open my mouth to tell her that’s exactly what a traitor would say. That criminals invent reasons to live. That her excuses don’t change the sentence.
But the Veil chooses that moment to scream.
The sound tears through me before I can brace for it—a shriek that lives inside the skull rather than outside it, a frequency I’ve heard named in briefings but never understood until now.
The channel shared only by witches and those of orc blood.
I’ve never heard it before. Never been this close to the boundary while it was in distress.
It drives through my skull, makes my vision blur, sends my claiming mark into a frenzy of heat and pain.
Eirene doesn’t flinch. She presses her palms harder against the stone, and blood wells fresh from cuts that haven’t had time to close. The scream fades. The Veil settles.
“You hear it.” She studies my face with those soft gray eyes. “You feel what happens when I bleed for the boundary. And you feel what happens when I stop.”
I don’t answer. Don’t trust myself to answer.
She rises.
It’s a slow process—unsteady, her legs threatening to buckle, her hands leaving crimson smears on the monolith as she braces herself. She’s smaller than I expected. The top of her head barely reaches my chest. Her frame is slight beneath blood-soaked clothes, fine-boned and fragile-looking.
The scars on her arms catch the moonlight. Dozens of them—thin white lines from wrist to elbow, each cut precisely placed, a map of every night she has bled for the boundary. Some are fresh, still pink and swollen. Others have faded to pale traces. Evidence of years. Evidence of dedication.
Evidence of crimes, according to the order. Every scar is a forbidden rite. Every mark is treason.
But she stands. Faces me without flinching. Tilts her chin up to meet my gaze with a defiance that makes the fire in my chest flare hot enough to hurt.
“So perhaps we should discuss the order of operations.”