HARDIN
There are ways to send a message that don’t need ink. No parchment. No delivery crow. Just a shard of bone and a few carved words left at the edge of a place sacred enough to keep secrets and old enough to remember war.
I find the message in the first hours of dawn, crouched in the dew-heavy brush where Krista’s garden path brushes against the Hollow’s outermost ring. The bone’s smooth—white and curved with age—but the markings on it are fresh. Carved in hard, sharp jabs like someone held the blade too tight. Orcish script, southern dialect, the kind they used in the blood clans long before I walked away from all that rot. The runes don’t need much to say a lot.
“She bears the Hollow blood. You cannot keep her from it.”
I close my hand around it, the knuckles tight, tension flaring deep in my forearm. My thumb brushes the edge of the bone. The carving’s too familiar. The depth of the strokes, the rhythm, the way the last rune cuts across the grain instead of curling with it—that’s Korrak’s work. Sloppy. Loud. Meant to be found. I don’t need his name to know he left it.
I straighten slowly, jaw clenched, eyes scanning the mist-soaked trees. There’s nothing in the woods but the low pulse offog and the hush of breathless branches. No footfalls. No scent trail. No broken twigs underfoot.
But he’s close.
Not just close in distance. Close in intent.
That’s how he always moved: just outside of your reach until he wanted you to see him.
I carrythe bone like a live coal in my pocket while I walk the perimeter. The morning’s still heavy with that too-wet feeling, like the air is thick with ghosts trying to breathe through it. The old runes etched into the wardstones along Krista’s property still hum, but they’re fainter now. Not broken, not yet, but softened in the way old rope frays before the fibers split completely. The Hollow’s magic doesn’t fail. But it does strain. Especially when something ancient comes sniffing.
I feel it in my boots. In the pull of the ground under me. The pulse in the roots.
He’s testing the edges.
I check every boundary. Copper rods need reinforcement. The iron nails I buried at the back line are still there, but the soil around them’s been disturbed like something paced too close, dug in heels, thought twice. I fix the lines. Trace every glyph with blood and ash. Seal them with breath and pressure. My hands know the patterns before my mind does.
Back at the front porch, I lay the bone down on the wood and sit beside it. It doesn’t burn, but it might as well.
Krista finds me an hour later.Her robe’s pulled tight, hair tied up like she hasn’t slept, which means she probably hasn’t. The mug in her hand is steaming and smells like whatever calming blend she’s been trying to believe in. Her eyes flick to the bone before I speak.
“Korrak,” I say.
She sets the mug down without a word.
“My brother,” I add, just in case she’s forgotten the name I once spoke like a curse.
Her hand tightens around the edge of the table, but her face doesn’t move. She has that grace. Too soft to be steel, but just as strong.
“What does he want?” she asks.
“The same thing he’s always wanted. To take what isn’t his. And break anything that stands between him and power.”
Her throat works on a swallow. She looks toward the house, toward Mari’s window, and I know what she’s thinking before she speaks it.
“She’s marked,” I say. “It’s old magic. Older than either of us. She’s a beacon to it now.”
Krista doesn’t cry. Doesn’t panic. She just breathes slower, like she’s anchoring herself in this truth. That’s the thing about her: it’s not that she isn’t afraid. It’s that she doesn’t let fear tell her what to do.
“What do we do?”
“We make this place a fortress,” I say. “We shore up the wards. You keep learning. And I keep watch.”
The day disappearsinto salt and stone.
I stake fresh copper rods at each corner of the property, soaked overnight in a basin of holy water and charred rosemary, tied with thread spun under a moonless sky. I drive them deep, until the soil groans and accepts the protection.
Then I dig up the eastern line, bury new iron nails etched with sigils I haven’t used in a decade, the kind of magic that was outlawed in council circles because it draws on somethingprimal, something with teeth. But I trust those teeth more than any sanctioned spell.
Krista watches me all afternoon, asking questions when she needs to. She helps dig when I ask her. Her hands get dirty. Her voice stays steady. She doesn’t flinch when I show her how to use her own blood to seal a perimeter sigil. Just rolls up her sleeve and waits for the blade.
