Page 37 of Orc’s Harvest

We’re still catching our breath when the warning stones at Kalthor’s hip flare to life, Varok’s voice bleeding through distorted and frantic, nothing like the dry calm I’ve come to expect from him.

“Do not return through the western gate⁠—”

A scream cuts him off mid-word, raw and sudden, and the stone goes silent for three full seconds before another voice answers instead — measured, precise, unmistakably Molgar’s.

“Ashmoor has already chosen its new king.”

The stone goes dark. We both stay still a long moment, the wind finally carrying the smell of ordinary grain across a field that spent three hundred years remembering only blood and betrayal.

TWENTY-EIGHT

ZALIE

I’ve seen Hollow Men in every shape this valley’s had to offer over the last week, but nothing prepares me for the sight waiting beyond Ashmoor Keep’s western wall.

Thousands of them stand motionless across the wheat basin, stretching from the tree line to the horizon in ranks too even to be anything but deliberate, and half of them wear clothes I recognize from missing-persons reports pinned to the Keep’s message boards for days. A farmer’s canvas apron. A child’s mud-stained boots, too small for the straw-pale legs wearing them now. A wedding shawl, still tied at the shoulder the way somebody’s mother must have tied it for her the morning she disappeared. Somewhere in that silent field stands the woman who used to run the bakery two streets from my own farmhouse, and the only reason I know her is the flour still ground into the seams of her apron.

Destroying them means destroying whatever’s left of the people whose clothes they’re wearing. I understand that the second I see the boots.

Varok meets us at the gate with a report that costs him visibly to deliver, blood still drying on one sleeve from a fight he hasn’t had time to explain yet.

“Molgar’s inside the walls again.” He doesn’t dress it up. “Wearing a wounded warrior’s face this time, one of the men we lost at the granary. We caught him before he did more than whisper to a handful of refugees, but the damage is already spreading — people are talking about surrendering willingly. Joining the collective. Word’s going around that it ends the fear for good.”

“And the western gate?”

“Won’t survive another assault. Not a real one.” Something hard sets behind his eyes, dry humor gone from him entirely, replaced by something I don’t recognize on him at all. “This isn’t a war anymore, Zalie. It’s a sales pitch, and it’s working on people too tired and scared to keep arguing with it.”

Kalthor gathers every officer left standing in the Great Hall within the hour, and I watch him do the hardest thing I’ve ever seen a commander do in front of people whose trust he needs to survive the next day.

“I’ve renounced Wildstorm ownership of the Harvest Heart.” He says it plain, no hedging, standing in front of maps that used to represent his family’s authority over half this valley. “The system my bloodline built and profited from for three hundred years was founded on a betrayal I watched with my own eyes two days ago. Witches led to slaughter under a promise of peace, by an ancestor whose crest I’ve worn on my own armor without once questioning what it cost to earn.”

The silence that follows isn’t comfortable. I can see the fear moving through the room — officers who’ve built their whole understanding of this war around Kalthor’s authority, wondering out loud with their faces whether he’s just handed Ashmoor’s strongest defense away for nothing. An older captain near the back mutters something to the man beside him about madness and timing, not quite low enough to go unheard.

Darrow breaks it.

He crosses the hall and kneels in front of Kalthor, deliberate, unhurried, boots scraping against stone loud enough that every officer in the room turns to watch, and the gesture lands harder for how little sense it makes given what Kalthor just admitted.

“You gave me my name back when it would have been easier to write me off as another casualty.” His voice carries clearly across the hall. “I don’t kneel to a bloodline. I never did. I kneel to the man who decided I was still worth saving when the math said otherwise.”

One by one, the rest of the officers follow — not fast, not easily, but real, each one choosing it the same way Darrow did instead of assuming it the way they might have a week ago. By the time the last of them kneels, Kalthor’s authority in that hall stands on ground entirely different from the one it started the morning on.

The ritual needs a third anchor to work — someone whose stolen identity came back whole enough to prove the system can hold — and Darrow volunteers before Jazine finishes explaining what the role actually requires, standing up so fast his chair scrapes loudly against the stone floor.

“It could unmake you.” Jazine doesn’t soften the warning for anyone’s comfort, least of all his; her voice is clipped and precise the way it always is when something scares her more than she’s willing to say out loud. “Permanently, if the flow turns wrong at the worst possible moment. I need you to understand that before you say yes to this.”

“I understand it better than anyone standing in this hall.” Darrow doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even look toward Sable, sitting near the back of the room. “I’ve already been emptied once. I know exactly what it costs, and I’m volunteering anyway.”

Kalthor doesn’t order him into it, doesn’t so much as suggest it — the choice sits entirely with Darrow, the way every choice under this new covenant is supposed to. I pull Darrow aside myself before anyone finalizes anything, away from the others, because I need to hear this from him directly, not filtered through anyone else’s certainty.

“Tell me honestly.” I pitch it low, just for the two of us. “Is this guilt talking? Because guilt isn’t a good enough reason to risk what you’re risking.”

“It’s not guilt.” He meets my eyes without wavering. “I remember exactly what it was like to look at my own sister and feel nothing where love should have been. I refuse to let this entire valley become that empty if I can do anything to stop it. That’s not guilt, Zalie. That’s the opposite of it.”

I don’t have an argument left after that. I accept his choice the way it deserves to be accepted — as his, not mine to overrule, and I tell him so plainly before I let him go.

TWENTY-NINE

KALTHOR