Rakhal gave a slow nod. “They’ll see justice instead.”
The guards brought Kardoc from the pit. He was thinner, sharper—his rage worn down to the bone. The wind caught in his hair as he stared up at his brother, and for an instant, Rakhal saw the child he had once protected from storms. Then the look hardened.
“You’ve come to end it,” Kardoc rasped. “Good. It was a poor world for two sons of the same father.”
Rakhal’s voice carried easily over the crowd. “No. I came to finish what he started—and end what you became.”
He took the iron fetters from the guard’s hands. They were heavy, still smelling of rust and old sweat. He raised them high, then brought them down against the standing stone. The ring of metal cracked the air. The second blow made the ground tremble. On the third, the shackles broke.
The crowd stirred—shocked, murmuring. No one had expected mercy to sound like thunder.
Rakhal dipped his fingers in the ash bowl beside the altar and drew two dark bands across Kardoc’s wrists. “Not forgiven,” he said, voice steady. “Finished. You live. You walk beyond the mountains. You do not return.”
Kardoc’s jaw worked, fury and disbelief tangled in equal measure. “You think mercy makes you strong?” he hissed. “You’ll choke on it.”
“Then let the law choke with me,” Rakhal said, turning away.
Shazi stepped forward, voice carrying like flint struck against iron. “Witness the oath,” she commanded. “The pit is closed. The bloodline cleansed.”
The clans murmured—a sound between approval and unease. The old guard bowed their heads; the young shifted on their feet, restless, hungry for simpler justice. Yet none moved. The silence held.
Rakhal stood tall beneath the carved stones, the last of the day burning along the edge of his blade. “Hear me,” he said. “I will not rule by fear. The pit is gone, and with it the debt of blood. The Shadow obeys me because I have bound it to mercy. If I break that bond, it will consume me—and all of you with me.”
His words rippled outward. A moment’s pause—then one voice called out: “Marakhal!” Another followed. Then another.Soon the chant rolled across the plain, not shouted in worship but spoken in recognition.
Rakhal lifted a hand for silence and turned toward Eliza. “Come.”
She stepped into the circle, head high, her gaze steady as the wind pressed her veil against her hair. The orcs parted before her without command.
“This is Eliza of Maidan,” Rakhal said. “Keeper of Light, voice of peace in the dark.”
The clans bowed—not deeply, but long enough for respect to take root. When she raised her hand to her heart, the air itself seemed to ease.
Night fell swiftly. Fires bloomed around the stones, their smoke curling upward in dark threads. Shazi lifted her cup and shouted, “To oaths that need no chains!”
The cheer that followed was wild, uncertain, but free.
Rakhal stood beside Eliza, the warmth of her shoulder brushing his arm, her face lit by firelight and wind. The drums began their low, rhythmic pulse—the sound of a people remembering how to breathe without war.
Above them, the first stars appeared, mirrored by the flames below. The night stretched vast and clean.
And in the hollow between heartbeats, Rakhal thought:This is what power feels like when it stops devouring.
Chapter
Seventy-Eight
They returned by the long road, where wildflowers had already begun to reclaim the ditches. The city appeared slowly—towers pale in dawn light, war scars blurred by mist.
No trumpets greeted them. The people waited in silence—bakers dusted with flour, children on barrels, unarmed soldiers in plain tunics. It wasn’t celebration. It was something harder, more honest: the beginning of belief.
Eliza did not ride. She walked, cloak sweeping the cobblestones, her boots gray with dust. Rakhal and Shazi stopped outside the gate. This was her moment to claim.
The palace hall was colder than she remembered. The great marble throne gleamed in the faint light—too polished, too distant. She climbed the steps and sat not upon it but below it, on the stone stair.
“The throne is for justice,” she said to the gathered court. “And justice waits to be earned.”
The first decree came swiftly: the disbanding of conscription.
