Page 34 of Orc’s Bones

Moving.

“Xya Wyth.” Malverek’s voice was the same it had been in the Archive — that half-dead resonance, present but not quite living. “I wasn’t certain you’d come down tonight.”

“We’re past certain.” Moving toward the east wall. “You activated the grave fields. We had no choice about the timeline.”

“I accelerated the timeline. To demonstrate what’s possible at scale. What you saw from the Bone Bridge was a fraction of the grave field mass. I haven’t touched the inner ring yet. I’m showing you the system, not the full capacity.”

I kept moving. “Thruk.”

One word. He read it correctly — stepped forward, put himself between me and Malverek as I reached the east wall. The room rearranged itself around his presence the way the Dominion always did.

I pressed both palms to the east wall.

The founding tier hit me immediately — the oldest bones in the Dominion, the lineage structures going so deep I could feel them in my sternum, layers on top of layers on top of layers. All of it feeding the array now. All of it carrying Malverek’s activation sigils at the deep level, the same architecture I’d built and he’d extended, running through stone that had been here since the Dominion was founded.

I found the correct frequency and started writing.

“You’ve been studying my work for three years,” Malverek said to Thruk. Not quite a question. A man who preferred to talk. “Not directly. But you’ve read it. Every time you accessed the Crypt levels this year, the lineage connection ran different than it had the year before. You noticed. You didn’t know what you were noticing.”

“I noticed,” Thruk said. The voice he used when he was managing how much weight he put behind words. “I noticed the disturbance in the lineage structures and I found the person responsible.”

“You found the person I brought here to find it,” Malverek said. “Which was the point.”

The first anchor point settled into the wall under my palms. It caught — the barrier frame threading into the founding tier’s resonance, finding purchase in the oldest bone-memory layer where Malverek’s activation sigils ran thinnest. The east wall held. One corner of the frame in place.

Four more.

I started toward the south wall.

Malverek watched me move. He didn’t intervene.

“Let her work,” he said. “It won’t hold.” The white glow in his eyes moved from me to Thruk. “She’s already told me she won’t agree. I’m not arguing with her. I’m telling you.”

I reached the south wall and pressed my palms flat. Second anchor frequency, different from the first — the south wall ran at a lower register than the east, older by three generations of lineage additions. I adjusted and started writing.

“You built a system that uses stolen ancestral remains to replicate lineage authority,” Thruk said. He hadn’t moved from his position between me and Malverek — steady, not advancing. “I understand what you built. I understand what it does. I don’t need a demonstration.”

“You understand what it threatens,” Malverek said. “That’s not the same thing.”

He raised one hand.

The array shifted.

Not an attack — a demonstration, exactly as he’d described. The replication sigil at the array’s center flared to partial activation, the outer ring elements drawing upward rather than inward, and the founding tier in the chamber walls spiked sharply — a pulse moving outward from the Varyn anchor through every bone in the chamber, through the founding tier walls, through the stone floor and ceiling.

Through Thruk.

The channels in his forearms went incandescent. I saw it from the south wall — the lineage amplification running at full activation, every ancestral connection pulling at once, the array using the Varyn bloodline’s own pull as a lever to demonstrate exactly what it could do with direct access to the lineage anchor at its center.

Thruk’s jaw locked.

He didn’t go down. He took the full weight of the array’s partial activation through his blood and stayed standing, and the only thing that moved was the set of his jaw and the brighter-than-usual luminescence running through the ink, and I pressed hard against the south wall and kept writing because if I stopped writing now I’d need to start the second anchor over.

Keep working. He can hold this. He’s holding this.

“That,” Malverek said, steady as a man reading from notes, “is a partial activation.” He held the activation a moment, watching Thruk carry it. “You already know what this demonstrates. She’s been explaining it to you all week.”

The second anchor point caught. It settled, the barrier frame extending from east to south, a line of counter-resonance threading through the founding tier’s oldest layer.