Page 34 of Orc’s Harvest

“Zalie!”

Every plan I had breaks at once. My feet carry me toward the water’s edge before I give the order myself, and Varok’s hand closes hard on my shoulder before I get three steps.

“Every warrior in this line dies if you abandon it now.” His voice is rough and urgent, with nothing dry left in it. “You know that. Find another way, or lose them all trying to save one.”

He’s right. I hate that he’s right.

I don’t choose between her and them. I refuse the choice entirely, tearing broken stone up out of the shattered causeway with my bare hands and driving it forward into the water ahead of me, shield-first, a moving wall of rubble I fight behind instead of a bridge I wait to cross. My warriors close ranks behind it without needing the order, and the marsh’s grip on the line starts to give way as we drive forward, one hard-won foot at a time.

I send her the only thing I have left to give across whatever distance still separates us — not words, I don’t have time for words, but a memory instead, as clear and complete as I can hold it: her standing in the wheat that first night, covered in someone else’s blood, informing me flatly that these monsters were currently tangled in her roots and therefore hers to kill. Defiant. Furious. Utterly unwilling to be anything but exactly herself in front of a stranger twice her size. Everything I saw in her in that single moment: the woman who rewrote every plan I’d ever made for the rest of my life without asking my permission.

I don’t know if it reaches her. I send it anyway, with everything I have left.

TWENTY-FIVE

ZALIE

The memory hits me like a hand closing around my wrist and hauling me back up out of the dark.

I know exactly what it is the second it lands — not my own memory, his: the wheat field, the exact way he looked at me that first night as I’d already rewritten something in him he hadn’t finished naming yet. Defiance. Fury. A woman who never waited to be told who she was allowed to become.

The seventh stone doesn’t want who I’ve been. It wants who I’m choosing to be next.

I drag myself upright against the pull of black roots still wrapped around my legs, and I speak the answer into the dark before Molgar can close the last few feet between us.

“I am not my grandmother’s penance.” My voice comes out raw, but it carries. “I am not my mother’s replacement, standing in for a sacrifice she never should have had to make. I choose to be the one who builds something better than either of them ever got the chance to — a system that keeps people whole instead of feeding them to the land one grief at a time. That’s who I’m choosing to become. Starting now.”

The seventh stone ignites all at once, gold light tearing through the fog in a pulse that rolls out across the entire basin, and every Hollow Man hidden beneath the black water lights up from within, stolen names wrenching loose and streaming upward through the surface like a hundred trapped breaths finally let go.

Kalthor’s shield-wall reaches the shrine seconds later, warriors spilling across the shattered ground to pull me clear of the roots still twitching weakly around my ankles.

Molgar’s already tearing away, a full section of his own regrowing shoulder left behind in the mud where Kalthor’s spear catches him a heartbeat too late, and he disappears into the fog with a wound that won’t slow him down for long.

“The granary already gave him enough.” Molgar’s voice drifts back through the mist, distant, almost amused. “You didn’t stop anything tonight, witch. You only decided which ward I have to corrupt next to finish what’s already begun.”

Then he’s gone, swallowed by fog and standing water both.

The instant the warriors clear a path, Kalthor’s hands come to my face, tilting it up so he can look me over properly before he lets himself do anything else. Whatever he finds there satisfies him enough to fold me into his chest, both arms wrapping tight, and he holds on like letting go might undo the fact that I’m still standing here at all. I let myself lean into it, shaking, cold, entirely unwilling to pretend the last hour didn’t cost me something.

“I heard you.” Rough against his chest. “Not words. Just — you. In the wheat field. I don’t know how.”

“I don’t either.” His arms don’t loosen. “I’m not questioning it tonight.”

Around us, the shrine’s pulse keeps spreading outward, gold light rolling across the marsh and beyond it, out toward every corner of Ashmoor I can’t see from here. Somewhere, in villages and infirmaries and farmhouses across the valley, I know it’s happening before anyone tells me — every survivor touched by tonight’s working speaking their own name out loud at the exact same moment, a chorus of identity refusing to stay stolen any longer.

Beneath all of it, rising slow and patient from somewhere far beneath the valley floor, a voice answers that belongs to none of them.

“I have no need to steal what they will soon beg to surrender.”

Above the marsh, the Harvest Moon turns the color of an old wound.

TWENTY-SIX

KALTHOR

The shrine’s pulse hasn’t finished fading before the ground beneath it shows us exactly where this goes next — a second thread of gold burning bright and insistent toward the west, past Mirefen’s borders, toward a region every map in Ashmoor Keep has left conveniently blank for longer than anyone alive remembers why.

“The First Reaping Field.” Zalie traces the pulse with two fingers before it fades entirely. “Whatever’s there, the shrine wants it activated before anything else in this valley finishes healing.”