Page 26 of Orc’s Moon

I count Guardians instead of counting soldiers. Six woke to fight for this city tonight. One remains standing when the dust settles enough to see clearly, and even that one is failing, cracks running deep through plating that held for a thousand years of isolation and didn’t survive one night of finally being allowed to matter again. The others lie scattered across the chamber floor, plate and script gone dark and permanent, and I make myself look at each one instead of looking away. They earned that much. That long, unbroken span of misunderstood duty means somebody has to stand here and witness its end.

It finds its way to me before it finishes falling. Kneels the same way the first one did, that first afternoon in the plaza — except this time the visor doesn’t just tilt up. It holds there, steady, the way a man looks at someone he’s decided is worth his last clear moment.

“Captain.” The word costs it everything it has left. “The Heart remembers.”

Then it crumbles, plate and script and a millennium of silent, misunderstood duty collapsing into dust that the wind pulls through the shattered dome and scatters slowly across a floor that’s finally, for the first time tonight, gone still.

I don’t know what it meant. I know it cost that thing its entire existence to tell me, and I mean to find out exactly what it died to say. I kneel where it fell for a long moment, one hand flat against the dust that used to be a soldier who never once stopped believing in this city, and let myself feel the full weight of what tonight cost before I make myself stand back up. Six Guardians. A hundred years of buried names ground into powder by men who never once asked whether erasing history was worth what it would cost the people still living in its shadow.

Lyessa finds me kneeling over the dust a moment later, blood on her sleeve that isn’t hers, exhaustion written plain across every line of her, but her eyes still sharp, still working the problem even now. She doesn’t say anything about my state. She just kneels beside me, takes my hand off the dust, and holds it in both of hers until I remember how to breathe properly again.

“They fought for something that mattered.” Her voice has gone soft, the same gentleness she offered me the night we first shared a fire. “That’s nothing, Vorren. Whatever they were before tonight, they died being exactly what they were built for.”

I turn my hand in hers, fingers lacing through hers, and press my mouth to her knuckles the same way I did hours ago, because I need the contact more than I need to finish grieving properly right now. She lets me have it, in no hurry to get me back on my feet until I’m ready to stand.

“Vorren.” She’s already working the rubble loose beside the collapsed monument, fingers brushing debris aside from something half-buried beneath the dead commander’s grave. “You need to see this.”

I cross to her, still favoring the shoulder the commander had managed to open before the monument settled the argument between us permanently. She works the debris free with the same reverence she’s given every piece of this city’s true history since the moment she first set foot in it, careful even now. Dust and moonlight both settle slowly around her hands as she works, and for one strange moment the whole ruined chamber goes quiet enough that I can hear nothing but her breathing and my own pulse finally starting to slow.

A map. Old, Covenant-sealed, edges gone brittle but the ink still holding, marking a route I’ve never seen drawn anywhere else in this city — down, beneath the Hall itself, beneath the Underways, toward a destination marked with a single word neither of us has heard spoken aloud until tonight.

The Heart.

“That’s not a place I’ve read about.” Lyessa goes careful again, the way she does when she’s found something too large to process at full volume. “Not in any record. Not in any myth I’ve ever cross-referenced. Whatever this is, it was kept secret even from the people who built everything else in this city to be remembered — which tells me it’s either the most sacred thing the Covenant ever protected, or the most dangerous.”

“With our luck lately, I’d wager it’s both.”

Whatever the dying Guardian meant by its last words, the answer has been waiting the entire time. Buried under the one room in Blackspire that was always going to be fought over as hard as its history predicted, in a chamber that just proved, once more, that this city is worth every drop of blood it’s cost to defend.

“Then we find out what it is.” I fold the map carefully, the same way she’d fold it herself, and hand it back to her because some things belong in her hands more than mine. “Together. Soon. Whatever the Order was willing to burn a library and storm a sacred hall to keep buried, I won’t let it stay buried much longer.”

FOURTEEN

LYESSA

We give ourselves four hours before moving again — Vorren’s insistence, not mine, and only after I point out that a reopened stitch helps nobody halfway through unfamiliar tunnels. He sleeps in pieces, the way I’m starting to suspect he always has, waking each time with a hand already halfway to Nightfall before he remembers where he is. I redress his shoulder properly in better light than the plaza gave me, eat something that isn’t hardtack for once, and by the time we’re both back on our feet the wound’s closed enough to trust and the exhaustion’s dulled enough to work with, if not gone entirely.

The Underways don’t care that we have a map.

Every passage down here looks like every other passage — rough-cut stone instead of the finished black granite above, water running somewhere out of sight in old canals nobody’s maintained in a thousand years, bridges arching over drops too dark to measure by torchlight alone. The route Vorren’s ancestors sealed into that Covenant map should have taken an hour. We’re two hours in and I’ve stopped pretending I know exactly how much farther the Heart is.

Every so often the tunnel widens into a space that must once have been a platform — worn stone benches, iron rings bolted into the walls where lanterns would have hung, the ghost of a transportation system that moved a whole city’s worth of people through these passages once and hasn’t moved anyone in a thousand years. No script here. No moonstone veins catching light. This is the part of Blackspire nobody built to be admired, and it shows in every rough-hewn line of it.

“This place was never meant for visitors.” The words fall flat and small, swallowed fast by stone that doesn’t echo the way the city above did. “Transport tunnels. Service passages. The parts of a city nobody builds pretty because nobody official’s ever supposed to see them.”

“Which makes it the last place anyone would think to guard.” Vorren’s ahead of me, Nightfall loose but ready, eyes tracking every support arch we pass like he’s already decided one of them is going to be a problem before it has the chance to prove him right.

“You say that like you’re hoping to be right about it.”

“I’d rather be right and bored than wrong and surprised.” His mouth twitches, brief, gone before it fully arrives. “Experience says the two options are never actually that far apart down here.”

He isn’t wrong. He rarely is, down here, and I’ve stopped finding that as irritating as I once might have.

The first Ashbound drops without a sound.

No footstep. No breath. Just a shape unfolding from the dark above a support arch, curved blade already swinging for the gap between my shoulder and my neck, and I only know it’s coming because some old animal part of my brain clocks the wrongness of a shadow moving against still air a half-second before my conscious mind catches up. I drop under the strike and drive my shoulder into him low, using his own committed momentum to put him on the ground, and he’s already reaching for a second blade before I finish driving my knife through the meat of his forearm to stop him.

A second one lands behind me. I don’t turn to look. I trust the sound of it, spin low, and put a throwing knife through the gap in his mask before he’s fully found his footing — no scream, no gasp, just a body folding sideways into the dark like it never had a face to lose in the first place.