Page 31 of Orc’s Harvest

I don’t wait for Kalthor. I don’t wait for anyone.

I’ve been carrying bloodroot charges since the seed vault, primed and ready in the pouch at my hip for exactly this kind of last resort, and I press three of them directly into the collection machinery humming behind Molgar’s shoulder instead of wasting a single second trying to outrun threads faster than I am.

The explosion tears the collection channels open from the inside, gold light bursting free in every direction at once as thousands of stolen identities go screaming loose from whatever’s been holding them down here — and Molgar’s black threads snap taut and useless around my wrist, severed clean by the same blast that just cost him whatever machinery he was using to reel me in.

Kalthor comes through the chamber wall the second the light dies down, axe already swinging for the space Molgar occupies, and Molgar barely gets his own arm up in time to avoid losing his head entirely.

“Kalthor, the spear⁠—”

He’s already switched grips before I finish the warning, driving the spearhead through Molgar’s shoulder and into the stone wall behind him with a force that pins the man in place like a specimen under glass.

Molgar doesn’t scream. He looks down at the spear buried through his own shoulder with something closer to mild irritation than pain, and then, with a calm that turns my stomach worse than any scream could have, reaches across his own body and severs the arm clean at the joint with a blade I never saw him draw.

The black threads running through him simply rebuild what’s missing, root and stolen flesh knitting closed over the wound before either of us can stop it, and he’s moving for a service passage in the far wall before Kalthor can free the spear from stone.

“He’s getting away.”

“Let him.” Kalthor’s already turning from the passage, scanning the chamber instead of chasing the retreat. “Mirefen’s the only direction that leads, and he won’t get far missing an arm. Right now there are people trapped three levels up who don’t have that kind of head start.”

He crosses to me before he says another word, hands running quickly down my arms and across my ribs, checking me over like gentleness is a luxury that can wait. Satisfied I’m whole, he pulls me against him hard enough to knock the breath out of me, one arm locked tight across my back, and holds on a beat longer than the moment strictly allows before duty pulls us both back into motion.

We spend the next hour hauling refugees free of a building that’s dying around us one collapsing section at a time, and by the time the last civilian clears the doors, the Great Eastern Granary has stopped being salvageable by any measure that matters. Hundreds walk out alive. Ashmoor’s winter doesn’t.

I find Kalthor near the wreckage of the threshing floor once the worst of it’s over, checking a warrior’s burned hands by torchlight, and I catch his sleeve before he can move to the next one.

“You could have caught him.” I don’t dress it up. “If you’d chased instead of staying.”

“I know.” He doesn’t look away from what he’s doing. “I made the choice anyway, and I’d make it again exactly the same way.”

Whatever’s rising in my chest right now doesn’t feel like anything a declaration could have managed, steady and enormous, too big for the moment to hold. I don’t have a word ready for it, not tonight, not with the granary still groaning behind us and half the valley’s food gone up in smoke. But I know exactly what his choice just told me about the man standing in front of me, and I curl my fingers into the front of his shirt instead of trying to find the word, and he doesn’t ask me for one. He tucks me in closer against him, chin resting on the top of my head, and neither of us moves to break it first.

We’re still standing there when the granary gives its final, complete collapse, silos folding inward with a groan that shakes the ground under both our boots, and every Life Thread released tonight — thousands of them, gold and drifting — rises into the night sky above the wreckage.

Then they stop.

All at once, no warning, every single thread hangs suspended in the dark for one held breath before turning, in perfect unison, toward the center of the valley.

The black wheat around us bends in the same direction — a whole field’s worth of stalks leaning as one toward something none of us can see yet, like the entire valley just took a breath and held it.

From somewhere deep underground, faint enough that I feel it more than hear it, comes the slow, heavy sound of something enormous beating once.

I understand it before Kalthor says a single word.

“We just fed it.” Hollow, sick with what I’m only now piecing into place. “Releasing that many identities at once, all in the same place, at the same time — we didn’t free them from the Harvester King. We handed him the whole vale in one motion.”

Across Ashmoor, in every direction I can see from where we’re standing, Hollow Men still scattered through the wreckage lift their ruined faces toward the rising Harvest Moon at exactly the same moment, and begin, in perfect unison, to march.

TWENTY-THREE

ZALIE

Dawn comes gray and reluctant over what’s left of the granary, smoke still rising off collapsed silos in slow, stubborn columns, and by the time full light breaks, half of Ashmoor’s surviving refugees have gathered along the perimeter to stare at the wreckage like staring hard enough might undo it.

I hear the muttering before I see who’s doing it — a knot of villagers near the wagons, voices pitched low but not low enough, the word witch surfacing more than once in a tone that isn’t kind.

“Maybe it’s simpler.” An older man, a farmer I don’t recognize, doesn’t bother lowering his voice when he catches me looking. “Give her to the thing under the Keep. One life instead of a whole valley’s worth. Feels like easy math to me.”

Nobody in the crowd contradicts him. That’s the part that lands worst — not the man saying it, but nobody stepping forward to tell him he’s wrong.