Page 50 of Orc’s Bones

“I’m going to dismantle it from the inside. Stay down. Don’t fight the pull — let it pull and hold the connection. If you resist, it scales up to match you. Let it have what it wants and I’ll cut the sigils from behind.”

His hand came up and covered mine against his face. Brief. Hard. His thumb pressed once into my palm.

Then he released me.

I stood.

I walked into the construct.

FOURTEEN

XYA

The outer ring hit me the way deep water hit — not a blow but a pressure, immediate and total, from all directions at once.

I had expected it. I knew what the system under load read like. I’d held five anchor points under full array fire in the founding chamber and kept working.

This was not that.

The founding chamber’s construct had been Malverek’s work — built on my framework, but filtered through his incomplete understanding of it. What I was standing inside now was my framework read back at me directly, perfectly, without the interpretation error that made Malverek’s version feel foreign. This was mine. And mine, apparently, was enormous.

The outer ring’s bone columns stood at intervals of roughly three meters — ancient remains embedded vertically in the Vault floor, resonating at frequencies the lineage system had never catalogued because nobody had known to look for them before the lineage system existed. Between the columns, the sigil architecture ran in the air as a visible warp in the Vault’s ambient glow. I moved between the first two columns and stopped to read.

The fidelity gap. I went for it first — the vulnerability in the stabilization solution, the hole I’d known about since I read Malverek’s work in the Archive.

Gone.

Closed. Sutured with exactly the technique I would have used — a counter-frequency layer running beneath the primary sigil, absorbing the bleed before it could develop into a gap. The architect had thought the way I thought.

Of course they did. They’ve been reading my research for longer than I’ve been doing it.

No gap meant no clean collapse from outside. Without it, a push would be uncontrolled. The rings could collapse inward. Toward the center. Toward him.

New problem. New approach.

The binding node — the single point where all the rings were held in sequence. Destroy it and the collapse would run inward and self-contain rather than blowing outward. Safe for everyone outside.

I needed to find it first.

Moving. Reading. The node would be at the lowest point in the architecture — where everything converged. I circled toward the inner ring’s edge.

Thruk was visible through the field — shape clear, details distorted, the way you saw through deep water. The glow off the bone-ink was extraordinary. He was doing exactly what I’d told him: holding the connection open, not resisting the pull, every line of him braced and still. Jaw hard. Eyes on me.

Not fear in them. Watch.

He’s tracking me through it. Making sure I can see him.

The node was at the base of the central relic column. I could see it — a dark point in the Vault’s glow where all the sigil architecture converged. I had to cross the inner boundary to reach it.

“You’re taking too long.”

Their voice, from outside the ring. Patient and immovable. “The demonstration requires the full sequence.”

“I know what the full sequence does.” I kept reading. “Temporarily strip the Bone Lord’s lineage authority. Demonstrate that the bloodline connection is removable. That’s what you need documented.”

“Yes.”

“I’m not going to let that happen.”