Page 2 of Orc’s Gallows

The thought curdles in my gut.

The girl reaches the top of the platform. Her legs shake so badly I can see the tremor from here, but she doesn’t fall. Doesn’t beg. She’s holding herself with a dignity that twists a knife in me, a composure that suggests she’s accepted what’s coming even as every instinct screams for survival.

She’s braver than I am. She’s going to die for it, and I’ll live—and somehow that makes me the smaller of us.

The Gallows Warden speaks.

“Mira Thornwood. By order of the City Council, you are sentenced to death by hanging for the crime of malicious curse-working. May whatever gods you worship grant you mercy in the hereafter.”

Mira. Her name is Mira.

I didn’t want to know that.

The noose drops around her neck. The Gallows Warden checks the knot, the drop distance, the positioning of her feet on the trapdoor. His hands are massive, scarred across the palms from countless rope pulls, steady as stone.

They’ve never trembled. I’d bet my life on it.

I should act. Speak. Step forward and shout that the charges are lies, that the real curse-worker is walking free while an innocent girl stands on the gallows.

I don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t do anything except stand in the crowd and wait for the power that will sustain me for another few days.

The drums fall silent.

The Gallows Warden’s hand closes on the lever.

Mira’s lips move in a final prayer—to whom, I can’t tell. Her eyes stay open, fixed on a point beyond the crowd, beyond the city, beyond anything the living can see.

The lever pulls.

The trapdoor opens.

Mira drops.

Power floods through me.

It hits with the force of a winter wave, dark and cold and impossibly sweet. My veins blaze with sudden energy, my scars throbbing violet beneath my sleeves. Strength floods my limbs. My spine straightens. Each breath fills lungs that haven’t drawn this deep in weeks—and the girl on the gallows stops breathing entirely.

The sensation makes me want to vomit. It makes me want to weep. It makes me want to claw off my own skin and scream until my windpipe bleeds raw.

Instead, I stand very still and let the magic sink into my bones. Let it fill the empty spaces. Let it do what it needs to do to keep me breathing.

The rope snaps taut. The crowd exhales. A few people cheer, quickly shushed by their neighbors. The vendor with the meat pies starts calling out prices again, cutting through the returning quiet.

Another death. Another day in Blackhook City.

Then the magic kicks wrong.

A ripple runs through the power I’ve absorbed, an agitation that sets my teeth on edge. The energy I took from Mira’s execution isn’t integrating properly. It’s churning, responding to a presence that shouldn’t exist.

Not the final release that happens after violent death. Not the slow ebb of departing life. This is different.

The body twitches.

Mira’s fingers flex against her bound hands.

The gallows groan. The death wards carved into the timber flare with sickly light.

And Mira’s eyes open.