10. Varkhul
TEN
VARKHUL
The Veilspawn is wrong in ways that make my skin crawl.
It moves like smoke given malice—solidifying only when it strikes, dissolving back into shadow when my blade passes through.
One moment it’s a wolf-shaped mass of darkness, the next it’s a smear of black mist reforming three feet to my left.
My execution blade catches it across the flank, and the thing screams in a language that predates words.
The sound burrows into my skull, scrapes against the inside of my bones.
I’ve killed shadow-touched beasts before. Veil-wardens train for it—learn to read the patterns of creatures that don’t follow natural laws. But this one is different. Older. Hungrier.
Its eyes are empty pits that somehow still see. Its mouth is full of teeth that shouldn’t fit—rows upon rows of them, jagged and translucent, growing back even as I shatter them with my blade. Every time I think I’ve found its core, it shifts, reforms, comes at me from a new angle.
I fight the way I’ve been trained. Efficient. Brutal. No wasted movement. My execution blade—forged specifically to sever magical ties—cuts deeper than normal steel. The creature recoils from it, hissing, dark ichor spraying from wounds that close too slowly.
It doesn’t like the blade. Good.
The Veilspawn circles, testing my guard. I let it—let it think I’m slower than I am, that the first exchange has tired me. Twenty years of executions have taught me patience. Have taught me to read the patterns of how things die.
This thing will die like everything else. It just doesn’t know it yet.
I press the attack, driving the Veilspawn back toward the stones. Each swing forces it to reform, to solidify enough for my blade to bite. The creature adapts—learns—starts flowing around my strikes instead of trying to absorb them. Clever. Too clever for a mindless beast.
It’s testing me. The realization hits as the creature feints left, then dissolves entirely, reappearing behind me. I spin, blade arcing, and catch it across the face. More teeth shatter. More ichor sprays. The Veilspawn screams again—rage now, not just pain.
At the edge of my vision, Eirene moves.
She hasn’t run. I expected her to flee—any sane person would put distance between themselves and a shadow-creature—but she stands near the central stone, ritual knife in hand, blood dripping from her palm.
The Veil shimmers around her, responding to her offering.
I can feel it trying to reclaim the creature that slipped through, trying to drag it back to the darkness beyond the boundary.
She’s using her blood to fight. Not with blade or magic, but with sacrifice. The Veil itself is her weapon.
The Veilspawn notices.
I see the moment it happens—the creature’s empty-pit gaze shifts from me to her. To the blood dripping between her fingers. Its whole posture changes, hunger replacing rage, and it stops fighting me entirely.
It lunges for her.
I move.
There’s no thought in it. No calculation. Just instinct—the same instinct that’s kept me alive through hundreds of executions, through fights with creatures worse than this one, through twenty years of violence in service to the order.
I intercept the Veilspawn mid-lunge, throwing myself between the creature and its prey. My body slams into its shadow-mass with enough force to stagger us both. Its claws rake across my forearm—the left one, the one not holding my blade—and fire blooms through my flesh.
Not fire. Acid.
I’ve been wounded before. Taken blades across my ribs, arrows through my shoulder, a mace to the skull that should have killed me.
This is worse. The shadow-creature’s touch burns through skin and muscle with a hunger all its own, eating toward bone, spreading outward from the four parallel gashes in a web of agony.
My blood wells hot and dark, spilling onto the black soil, and the Veil—
The Veil recoils.
I feel it—a violent shudder that runs through the boundary, through the stones, through the very air around us.
The tear that Eirene had nearly closed rips wider, bleeding that sickly light into the perpetual twilight.
The barrier thins, weakens, reacts to my blood with the same revulsion it shows to my presence.
But the Veilspawn is still coming. Still hungry. Still focused on the witch behind me with single-minded determination.
I grip my blade with both hands—ignore the agony screaming through my wounded arm—and drive it forward. The execution blade punches through the creature’s core, through the mass of shadow and malice that passes for its body. The Veilspawn writhes, screams, tries to dissolve around the steel.
I twist.
The blade is forged to sever magical ties. It’s what makes it effective against Veil-touched creatures—it doesn’t just cut flesh, it cuts the threads that bind shadow to form. I feel those threads snapping as I wrench the blade sideways, feel the creature’s essence unraveling around the steel.
The Veilspawn convulses. Darkness bleeds from its core in thick rivulets, pooling on the black soil, sinking into the earth. Its empty eyes dim. Its impossible teeth crumble. Its form loses cohesion, collapsing inward, becoming nothing more than a smear of shadow that fades as I watch.
Finally, mercifully, it stops moving.
I stand over the remains, breathing hard, blade still clutched in hands that have started to shake. Not from fear—from the acid still burning through my arm, from the blood still dripping onto the soil, from the Veil still recoiling with every drop.
The boundary is screaming. I can hear it—that bone-deep shriek that runs in the blood of orcs and witches alike, the sound I’ve come to dread since first setting foot at this boundary.
The tear has widened, grown, spread like a wound refusing to clot.
My blood is making it worse. My presence is making it worse.
And I can’t stop bleeding.