5th August 2026

Part 3 of the Veilstrike series

The work Brill and Deathknell actually offered him was less philosophical. Deathguard Simmer wanted farmers dead, with no more nuance attached to the order than that, and Veilstrike — a rogue, after all, killing being the one part of his old life that had survived the transition cleanly — accepted without much internal debate. Deathguard Dillinger wanted much the same from him, delivered with slightly worse manners. When the assignment came to poison a captured dwarf who’d done him no harm and earned no sympathy either, Veilstrike did it, and laughed doing it, and noticed afterward that the laugh troubled him a good deal less than it probably should have. He has not been sure whether that was something changing in him or something that had already changed making itself visible for the first time.

Shadow Priest Sarvis, who ran a fair share of Deathknell’s errands, struck him immediately as an idiot with excellent aim — issuing orders with the settled confidence of a man who’d never been wrong about anything, which was, on the available evidence, not remotely true. Veilstrike did the work anyway and kept his opinion of Sarvis to himself, mostly, and it was somewhere in that stretch that he noticed his own loyalty had become a good deal more selective than it used to be. He served the Forsaken. He didn’t have to like the ones giving the orders while he did it. The Scarlet Crusade, at least, required no such calculation — they hated everything he currently was, and killing them back required nothing more complicated than showing up.

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More in the Veilstrike series

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