Page 30 of Orc’s Harvest

I’m running before I’ve finished understanding what I’m running toward.

The gallery’s collapsing in slow, deliberate sections, Blood Law runes I never noticed carved into the support beams flaring red-black as they detonate one after another, and through the dust and falling stone I catch one clear look at Zalie standing at the center of it, gold threads erupting from the seed vault around her like the whole valley’s stolen names have chosen this exact moment to try leaving at once.

“Zalie!”

The floor gives out beneath her before I close the last twenty feet between us.

I lunge anyway, my hand closing on empty air where she stood a heartbeat ago, and watch her disappear into the dark below, leaving nothing but a fading flare of gold light and my own useless hand still reaching. For one wild second I consider jumping down after her without checking what’s waiting at the bottom, and only the sound of Darrow shouting for help two rows over drags me back into a body that still has a job to do up here.

“Varok!” I don’t wait for him to reach me. “Keep the evacuation moving. Get every civilian in this building out the front doors, and don’t stop for anything short of the roof coming down on your own head.”

“Where are you going?”

“After her.”

He doesn’t fight it. He’s ridden under my command long enough to recognize an order that isn’t actually a request when he hears one, and he’s already turning to bark instructions at the nearest cluster of frightened refugees before I’ve finished the sentence.

I fight my way toward the collapsed shaft alone, axe clearing a path through whatever’s still standing between me and the hole in the floor that took her, and every Hollow Man foolish enough to get between me and that opening finds out what happens when I stop holding back.

TWENTY-TWO

ZALIE

I land hard enough to lose the breath out of my own lungs, rolling clear of falling stone on pure instinct before my mind catches up to where I am — an underground chamber I’ve never seen before, walls threaded with the same black roots I’ve learned to recognize as corruption, torchlight throwing everything into shifting orange and shadow.

I’m not alone down here.

He stands near the far wall, and for one confused second I don’t recognize him at all—too thin, black threads running visible beneath skin the color of old parchment, one hand resting on a stack of ledgers like he’s been waiting for exactly this arrival. Then he turns, and Ashmoor’s Harvest Steward looks back at me with a face I’ve seen at a dozen council meetings, wearing an expression I don’t recognize on him at all, not from a single council meeting in a dozen years.

Calm. Entirely, horribly calm.

“Molgar.”

“You look like her.” His voice carries the same precise, unhurried cadence I remember from every council report he’s ever given. “Navy, I mean. Around the eyes especially. I’ve noticed it for years and kept that to myself, because mentioning it would have meant explaining why I noticed at all.”

Cold spreads through me, worse than anything the fall managed.

“You knew my mother.”

“I killed your mother.” No hesitation in it. No shame either. “Closed the ritual channel one second early, on purpose, and called it necessary balance in my own report. I’ve had the better part of thirty years to prepare an apology for this conversation, and I find I don’t actually have one to offer. I’m not sorry. I was right.”

“Right.” Flatter than I feel. “You were right to kill her.”

“I was right that individual identity is the disease killing this valley.” He sets the ledger down, precise, deliberate, a man arranging his evidence before a verdict he’s already decided. “Your grandmother’s voluntary system threatened to prove otherwise — a working, willing bond between two separate people, holding steady where the old system needed force to hold anything at all. If it had succeeded the way she intended, it would have delayed the Ascension by generations. I couldn’t allow that. I contacted the entity behind that ward decades before your mother ever stepped into that chamber, Zalie. Her death wasn’t an accident I stumbled into. It was a decision I made with my eyes open, because peace that ends every kind of grief forever is worth one life traded early.”

He picks the journal back up — Koira’s, the one taken from my ransacked room — and holds it toward me like evidence in a trial only he believes is still ongoing.

“Read it yourself, if you don’t believe me. The experiment was succeeding. Right up until I intervened.”

“And now you’re doing the same thing to me. To Kalthor.” I keep my voice steady through sheer will. “Calling it necessary. Calling it balance.”

“I’m calling it mercy, same as always.” He tilts his head, patient, the way a teacher regards a slow student he hasn’t given up on yet. “What you feel for him is simply attachment dressed up in nobler language, Zalie. It will cost you exactly what every attachment in this valley has ever cost someone eventually — grief, when he dies, or worse grief, when you outlive him. I’m offering to spare you both that math.”

“You don’t understand the first thing about it.” I plant my feet, refuse to let the shake in my hands reach my voice. “What I feel for him didn’t make either of us abandon this valley to save ourselves. It’s the reason we keep fighting for it harder than either of us would alone. You’ve spent thirty years turning people into numbers in a ledger, Molgar. You’ve forgotten they’re allowed to be the reason somebody fights instead of only the reason somebody grieves.”

Black threads unspool from beneath his sleeve before I finish the sentence, reaching for me fast and hungry, all patience finally spent.

“You’ll understand eventually.” His voice stays level even as the threads close the distance. “Everyone does, once there’s nothing separate left to argue with.”