Page 16 of Orc’s Bones

She came through the chamber door fast — no hesitation, already reading the room as she crossed the threshold. She stopped in the doorway.

She took in the room. Not the construct pieces on the floor first — the walls. Three sealed alcoves, bone-locks intact, the remains inside technically undisturbed. Her gaze moved from wall to wall, reading the signal rather than the surface.

Then she looked at the floor. At the pieces.

Her face went quiet and cold.

Not surprise. Not the confirmation-of-worst-theory expression she’d shown him in the Crypt chamber with the wall marking. This was different — the face of someone who’d read the full implication before they’d finished looking — and disliked every part of it.

“Tell me what you’re seeing.”

She crossed to the nearest piece. Crouched. Two fingers to the bone fragment without touching it, reading the residual signal from a centimeter away.

“Assembled from the Aldrath lineage in the south wall and two mid-tier bloodlines from the east and west alcoves. None of them are missing. They’re all here. In pieces, but here.”

“I know.”

She turned. “You know what that means.”

“Tell me what it means to you.”

“It means the theft sequence is a secondary threat. Every bone in the Warline Crypts that can receive this command is a potential weapon. Not only the ones that were physically removed. The entire structure of the Crypt system.”

The stone-in-deep-water feeling. “How many bones can receive it?”

“I don’t know yet.” She moved to the third piece. “Someone has been down here writing sigils into the remains. Not visibly — deep in the bone memory, where they wouldn’t be detectable without direct contact.” She crouched, read, stood. “The Aldrath alcove is a mid-tier lineage. At the pace I’d estimate from the wall marking’s precision — twenty minutes, maybe thirty, for a bone this size.”

“The Crypts have three tiers. Hundreds of sealed chambers.”

“Yes.”

Flat. Clear. That single word carrying everything it needed to.

He was also watching because he couldn’t stop.

“Who built this?”

She didn’t look away.

“It’s my framework at the base. Not my work from there.” Her voice was level and underneath it, cold with something that had nothing to do with the Crypt temperature. “Someone took what I left behind and finished it.”

Silence.

He’d understood this was coming. He let it land.

“Who.”

The voice he used in the moments after battles, in the conversations where the answer was going to require him to act.

“I need more time in the Archive and the lower Crypt levels to confirm. There are only a handful of people who could have accessed my research after the exile and understood it well enough to extend it. The field is narrow.” She looked at the alcove wall, then back at him. “I have a name forming. I need evidence before I give it to you.”

“How long?”

“Faster if you give me the lower Crypt access now rather than tomorrow.”

He crossed the chamber toward her.

She didn’t move back. She stood in the middle of the chamber with the construct’s pieces around her feet, weight settled, eyes on his. Waiting. No performance.