29. Varkhul
TWENTY-NINE
VARKHUL
We fight back-to-back.
I don’t remember deciding to position this way—don’t remember choosing to trust her at my back, to guard hers in turn. But it happens naturally, instinctively, the claiming guiding us into a formation we’ve never practiced but somehow know by heart.
She moves, and I know where she’ll be. She strikes, and I’m already covering the gap she leaves. When a shadow-wolf lunges for her exposed flank, my blade intercepts it before the thought fully forms in my mind.
“Left!” she calls, and I’m already turning, already swinging, my sword cleaving through a memory-eater that was trying to flank us.
“Three coming high!” I shout, and her magic is blazing before I finish, a wall of light that sears the attacking creatures into wisps of screaming shadow.
It’s like we’ve been doing this for years. Like we were made for this—the chaos of battle stripping away everything that isn’t essential and leaving only what fits together, blade and anchor, each one the completion of what the other lacks.
Eirene’s twilight magic blazes in arcs of searing light, sealing breaches with force instead of passive sacrifice.
Every gesture costs her—I can feel the strain pulsing through the mark—but she doesn’t falter.
Doesn’t slow. She fights with a fury I’ve never seen from her, a primal viciousness that matches the darkness we’re facing.
My blade is a blur. Muscle memory takes over—twenty years of killing distilled into pure motion. Thrust. Parry. Slash. Spin. Each movement flows into the next without thought, without hesitation. I am the executioner. The blade that never wavers.
But now I have someone worth protecting.
The Veilspawn die in waves. Shadow-wolves. Memory-eaters. Breach-born monstrosities. They crash against us and shatter like waves against stone. The ground is black with ichor. The air is thick with the screams of dying darkness.
And slowly, impossibly, the tide begins to turn.
The breaches are closing. Eirene’s magic is sealing them faster than the Sovereign can tear new ones, the Veil responding to her blood with a strength I’ve never felt before. The claiming has changed her—made her more than a boundary witch. Made her part of the barrier itself.
The creatures stop coming.
I stand in the center of carnage, chest heaving, blood and ichor dripping from wounds I don’t remember receiving. My arms shake with exhaustion. My vision blurs at the edges.
I turn to Eirene. She’s on her knees, barely upright, her black eyes slowly fading back to gray shot through with gold. Blood covers her arms, her dress, the stones beneath her. She’s given so much—too much—and I can feel her exhaustion pulling at me across the mark.
“It’s over.” Her voice is ragged, wrecked. “They’ve stopped.”
I want to believe her. Want to drop my blade, gather her in my arms, tend to her wounds and my own. The silence is intoxicating after the chaos of battle, the absence of screaming and dying and endless dark shapes lunging at us from every direction.
But the wrongness is still there. Still pressing against my skull like a thumb against an eye.
“No.” The word comes out before I can stop it. “It’s not over. The Sovereign—”
The Veil tears.
Not chaotically. Not violently. This tear is deliberate—slow and purposeful, like a wound being pulled open by careful fingers. The largest breach we’ve faced spreads across the boundary, bleeding opalescent light into the darkness beyond.
And through the gap, the Umbral Sovereign steps into our world.
It’s massive.
Humanoid in shape but wrong in every detail.
Three times my height, made of shadow so dense it seems to drink the light around it.
Its limbs are too long, joints bending in directions that make my eyes hurt to follow.
Its hands end in fingers like curved blades—five, six, seven digits that twitch and flex with hungry anticipation.
But its face is the worst part.
The Sovereign doesn’t have one face. It has hundreds—stolen features that shift and change with every passing second.
A mother’s kind smile gives way to a warrior’s scarred sneer, then a child’s innocent wonder, then an old man’s weary acceptance.
The faces press against the surface of its form like souls drowning in tar, each one a memory it’s consumed, a life it’s devoured.
Its eyes are the only constant. Two points of pale luminescence that glow like moons behind clouds, fixed on us with ancient, patient malice.
“Little witch.” The voice comes from everywhere—a chorus of stolen tones, dozens of people speaking in perfect unison. “Little executioner. You’ve fought so hard.”
I step in front of Eirene. It’s instinct—protective, primal, unavoidable. My blade is raised, though I know it won’t do any good. Whatever this thing is, it’s beyond anything a sword can kill.
“Stay back.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “Whatever you are, whatever you want—you go through me first.”
The Sovereign laughs. A hundred voices, all different, all amused.
“Through you?” It takes a step forward, and the ground trembles under its massive form. “Why would I go through you?”
“I know what we’ve done.” Eirene’s voice is raw but unflinching, rising beside me. “But that doesn’t make you right. That doesn’t make you inevitable.”
“Inevitable?” The faces on the Sovereign’s form ripple with what might be surprise.
“Oh, blood-keeper. I’m not inevitable. I’m already here.
I’ve been here since the orcs first broke the Veil, growing in the cracks between worlds, feeding on everything the boundary consumed.
Your claiming didn’t stop me—it just made me hungrier. ”
It moves.
Faster than anything that size should be able to move. One moment it’s standing at the edge of the tear. The next, it’s inches from us, those blade-fingers reaching for Eirene with terrible certainty.
I throw myself between them.
My blade catches the Sovereign’s hand—catches and holds, the steel screaming with stress but not breaking. The impact drives me back, boots scraping against stone, but I don’t fall. Don’t falter.
“You don’t touch her.” The words come out as a snarl. “Not now. Not ever. You want her, you take me first.”
For a moment, the Sovereign goes still. Its stolen faces cycle through expressions—confusion, consideration, and then, horrifyingly, delight.
“Take you?” The laughter this time is darker. More personal. “Oh, executioner. I don’t need to touch her. I just need to take you.”
I don’t understand. Don’t have time to understand.
Shadows erupt from the ground around my feet—not Veilspawn, but pure darkness, tendrils of concentrated malice that wrap around my ankles, my legs, my waist. They’re cold. Colder than anything I’ve ever felt, a chill that seeps through armor and skin and bone to freeze the blood in my veins.
“Varkhul!” Eirene’s scream is distant, muffled by the roaring in my ears. I feel her magic blaze—feel her reach for me through the mark—but the shadows are faster. They’re wrapping around my arms now, my chest, my throat.
They’re pulling me toward the tear.
“The claiming makes you vulnerable.” The Sovereign’s voice follows me as the shadows drag me backward.
“Whatever I do to him, you’ll feel. Whatever I take from him, you’ll lose.
So I won’t touch you at all—I’ll just break him apart, piece by piece, while you watch through the Veil you’ve become part of. ”
I fight. Gods help me, I fight with everything I have. My blade hacks at the shadows, but they reform as fast as I can cut them. My strength means nothing—the darkness doesn’t care about muscle or fury or twenty years of combat training.
Eirene is running toward me. Her hands are blazing with twilight magic, blood streaming from fresh wounds she’s torn open. She’s going to reach me—I can see it in her eyes, that desperate determination I’ve come to know so well.
But the Sovereign is faster.
“No—” The word tears out of me as the shadows close around my face. Through the narrowing gap, I see Eirene reaching for me. See the terror in her gold-threaded eyes. See her mouth forming my name.
Then darkness. Complete. Absolute.
The shadows drag me through the tear in the Veil.
The last thing I feel is the mark on my chest—burning, blazing, screaming with the agony of separation. Eirene’s presence in my mind stretches thin, thinner, until it’s just a thread. A whisper.
Then even that is gone.
And I fall into the Shadow Court, alone.
Cold.
The Shadow Court is cold in ways that have nothing to do with temperature. It’s cold in my bones, my blood, my soul. The chill seeps into me from all directions, numbing flesh and thought and hope.
I try to move. Can’t. The darkness has me—not just holding me but invading me, sliding between my muscles and my bones, wrapping around my organs with possessive hunger.
I’m suspended in nothingness. Chains of pure shadow wrap around my limbs, holding me spread-eagle in the void. The mark on my chest aches with distance. Eirene is out there—I can feel her, faintly, a warmth at the edge of my frozen awareness. But she’s so far away. So impossibly far.
Below me, glimpses of darkness—faces, an immensity of faces, pressing against surfaces I can’t name, their mouths moving in screams I can’t hear. The Sovereign’s domain. I feel its weight even from up here, the sheer accumulated mass of everything it has consumed.
So many executions. Such a pretty number. Such a wealth of sin.
I don’t respond. Don’t have the strength to respond. The cold is stealing everything—my will, my defiance, my ability to think clearly.
Let me show you what you’ve done, executioner. A face forms in the darkness before me—the twelve-year-old boy, the one who asked if he’d done bad. Let me show you every life you’ve ended. Every question you refused to ask. Every moment of doubt you buried beneath duty and discipline.
The memories come.
Not like Eirene felt them—not filtered through the claiming, softened by time and distance. These are raw. Immediate. The Sovereign forces me to relive them as if they’re happening now, trapping me inside each execution while it watches and feeds.
Steel descends. Blood sprays. Eyes go dim.
Again. And again. And again.
I scream. The sound echoes in the void, swallowed by darkness, heard by no one except the thing that’s consuming me.
This one was innocent. The Sovereign’s voices chorus as the gray-haired woman’s execution plays out. This one begged for mercy. This one had children waiting at home.
“Stop.” The word comes out broken. Barely a whisper.
You didn’t stop. The darkness presses closer. Why should I?
The memories keep coming. The torture keeps going. And somewhere across the Veil, I feel Eirene screaming with me—feeling everything I feel, suffering as I suffer.
That’s what finally breaks through the cold. Not my own pain—I’ve learned to bear pain. But hers. Her agony, reaching me through the claiming even here, even now.
The Sovereign is hurting her by hurting me.
And she’s coming.
I feel it in the mark—faint but unmistakable. Determination blazing through the thread that still connects us. She’s not going to leave me here. She’s not going to let the Sovereign win.
She’s walking into hell to save me.
No.
I want to scream it. Want to warn her, stop her, beg her to stay where it’s safe. But my voice is gone, stolen by the cold, silenced by the endless parade of my sins.
The only thing I can do is hold on. Endure. Survive long enough for her to reach me—or die trying, so she doesn’t have to die too.
The memories keep coming.
I let them.
Not because I want to. Not because the pain is bearable. But because each memory, each death, each moment of forced witnessing—it’s time. Time for Eirene to reach me. Time for whatever plan is forming in her brilliant, desperate mind.
The Sovereign thinks it’s breaking me. And maybe it is—maybe I’ll never be whole again after this, never be able to close my eyes without seeing every face I’ve ended.
But I’ve been broken before. I’ve been hollow before. And I found a reason to keep fighting anyway.
I feel her. Distant but undeniable. The woman I love, bleeding herself dry to cross into the Shadow Court. The witch who chose me despite seeing every sin I’ve ever committed. The only person in the world who knows exactly what I am—and loves me anyway.
I hold onto that. As the memories crash through me, as my sins parade past in an endless procession of blood and regret, I hold onto her.
She’s coming.