Page 1 of Orc’s Bones

ONE

XYA

The Ossuary Dominion does not welcome anyone.

It receives you. Presses down on your shoulders the moment you pass beneath the rib-arch gateways and holds you there — a weight that has nothing to do with stone and everything to do with what the stone remembers. I walked through without slowing, the way you walk into cold water. Fast. Committed. Hesitation makes it worse.

Four years. Four years I kept my hands off every surface in this city and my ear turned away from the hum beneath it, and the second my boots crossed the threshold it was there. Low and constant. Threading through the black basalt under my feet, climbing the bone-reinforced walls on either side, vibrating in the seams of the arch overhead — a pressure too deep to call sound.

Bone memory. Thousands of generations of it, woven into every wall and floor until the dead and the buildings they once inhabited became the same thing.

I knew it the way I knew my own heartbeat.

I’d spent four years trying to forget both.

The ghostfire lanterns flanking the gateway burned pale and steady — bluish-white flames, no heat, no fuel, sustained by the hum running through the stone beneath them. They lit the faces of anyone passing through rather than the arch itself, positioned lower than they needed to be, so the gateways looked back at you. I let them look. Even burn, no flicker. That, at least, was normal.

The outer districts were not.

I moved into the city and read it without sentiment — looking for wrong rather than familiar. The skull-lined walls marking the district boundaries stood intact. The bone-reinforced buildings rose on either side of the black-stone streets exactly as I remembered them, ancestral remains in their foundations not as ornament but as engineering, load-bearing as mortar. The Dominion had never built anything for show.

But the hum was wrong in places.

Not silent. Not collapsed. Off-pitch, briefly, over certain blocks — a note dropping and recovering, like a string losing tension and snapping taut again. I stopped at the third intersection and pressed two fingers to the nearest wall. Light. The way you’d check a pulse you weren’t sure you’d find.

The signal came back through my fingertips, and with it came the problem: a texture underneath it that was too precise, too directed, to be natural degradation.

Not decay. Interference.

I dropped my hand and kept going.

Lyssa Morvain was waiting at the edge of the Cathedral quarter. Slight frame, hands clasped, ink-stained from knuckle to wrist. She had the look she always got when things had passed manageable — that particular tightness around the eyes that said she’d been waiting a long time for someone to show up and take the weight off her.

I wasn’t here to take weight off anyone. But I’d take the information.

“Xya.”

“Lyssa.”

No welcome. She turned and walked, and I fell into step.

“How long has it been building?”

She exhaled through her nose — not a sigh, more a woman releasing an answer she’d been sitting on for weeks. “At least three months. Possibly longer. The earliest trace readings I have are from the start of cold season, but some patterns in the lower catalogue stacks suggest it began before that.”

“You should have sent for me sooner.”

“There was a vote.”

She said it without inflection. We both let it sit.

There had been a vote when they exiled me too. I’d won the argument and lost the room, and the four years since hadn’t changed how that felt — not to me, not to the people who’d cast those votes. I wasn’t here because they’d reconsidered. I was here because the problem had gotten big enough that they ran out of other options. I was keeping that distinction where I could see it, because the moment I let desperation read as forgiveness, I’d make mistakes I couldn’t undo.

“Tell me about the missing bones.”

She told me.

We walked while she spoke, and I tracked two things at once — what she said, and the evidence of it in the walls around me. Remains removed from the lower Warline Crypts. Not stolen openly: extracted with precision, leaving surrounding structures intact, no sign of force, no trail. The pattern of absence mapped to lineage anchors. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing had worked through the Dominion’s power infrastructure like a surgeon cutting nerves.