Page 60 of Orc’s Hex

His eyes are on mine.

There he is.

All of it in him and he is still looking at me.

The sigil erupts.

Not the directional glow of the consolidation draw. This is the curse cornered—three hundred years of Blood Law vengeance magic, fully concentrated and desperate, deciding that destruction is preferable to dissolution.

The stone cracks.

The entire floor of the Foundation Crypt—the single slab of black basalt that is the mountain’s bedrock—fractures from the outer ring inward. Not along the channels. Between them. The stone splitting under pressure that has nowhere else to go.

The walls crack next. Two lines up the eastern wall, one across the ceiling above us, and the temperature drops twenty degrees in the time it takes me to breathe and the chalk marks on the outer perimeter—three layers, the third layer I was not going to need—flare white and hold.

They hold.

But the sigil is not trying to escape through the perimeter.

It’s trying to drive through him.

Drazhul throws his head back and the sound that comes out of him is not pain—it’s deeper than that, older than that—a man being shown every single thing that has ever been done to him through this curse, all at once, with the mechanism no longer rationing itself but running everything it has through one channel.

His palms are still on the carving.

I need four more minutes.

Four minutes and the reversal runs and this is over.

Four minutes.

I cross to him.

FIFTEEN

DRAZHUL

The hallucinations before this were fractures he could navigate by holding both images and insisting on one.

This is not that.

With three hundred years of Betrayal Sigil fully consolidated in his body and the curse cornered and running everything it has through one channel, the hallucinations do not fracture. They assault. They arrive at full volume with no warning and no degrade curve, cycling through angles faster than he can hold both images—each one complete, each one carrying the full force of a real memory, each one landing in the place where a man’s belief in himself is most exposed.

The curse has been learning him his entire life. It knows every weak point, every angle, every response, and it has been building toward exactly this: a moment when it has everything in one place and he has nowhere to distribute the damage.

He sees her as a traitor.

Not the brief flash of the early surges—this is sustained, fully rendered, with detail. He sees her hands on his chest sigil and the motion is preparation, not examination. He sees her face closed in the way that closed faces are closed when they have already decided and are waiting for the right moment. He sees himself from outside himself, sees the moment his hand goes to her throat and the face she makes when it does—not fear, calculation⁠—

Not real.

The fracture is not real. He has said this to himself more times than he has words for. He says it again.

I know what she looks like. I know her face. I know exactly how she stands.

The hallucination cycles.

He sees her dead. The image arrives with the texture of memory—not a projection, not a fear, the curse has given it the shape of something that already happened, and the wrongness of it is that it is him. The thing that hurt her was him. He can see his own hands in the image doing what his hands do, and the image carries the full sensory reality of the crypt around him: the cold of the stone, the warmth of the sigil, the Bondmark burning on his wrist⁠—