Page 3 of Orc’s Gallows

They’re not her eyes anymore. Whatever looks out from that dead face isn’t the terrified girl I watched climb the platform. This is older. Hungrier. And it’s looking directly at me.

“Sister.” A thousand voices harmonize beneath the words emerging from Mira’s throat. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The crowd explodes into chaos.

On the platform, the Gallows Warden faces the revenant with his blade drawn.

He moves with brutal economy, no wasted motion. His sword is enchanted iron—the death-severance wards carved into the metal register even from here, designed to cut the bindings that animate risen corpses. Standard equipment for dealing with magical mishaps. He’s done this before. Probably dozens of times.

But this isn’t a standard mishap.

The revenant—Mira, don’t think of her as Mira, she’s gone—launches itself at him with inhuman speed. It moves in ways that living bodies can’t, joints bending wrong, head rotating at angles that shouldn’t be possible. The Gallows Warden’s blade catches it across the shoulder, carving a chunk from dead flesh, and the thing doesn’t even slow. Blood that should be congealing sprays across the timber, black and wrong-smelling, and the wound seals itself within seconds.

This isn’t ordinary animation. The death wards should prevent this. The witch-hair ropes should drain any residual magic. Whatever puppets this corpse is drawing on power far beyond what a single execution should generate.

It’s not a mere animated corpse. A presence is puppeting it from elsewhere, using it as a vessel. And whatever that presence is, it’s drawing power from a source the death wards weren’t designed to contain.

The gallows itself.

Accumulated ending pools beneath the Grand Gallows, concentrated and hungry. Every execution that’s ever happened on that platform has left traces. Every wrongful death has left more. The power has been building for generations, and now an entity is drawing on that reservoir.

An entity that called me sister.

I should run. This is my chance—chaos, distraction, everyone too focused on the horror unfolding to notice one more cloaked figure slipping away. I could disappear into the panicked crowds and be gone before anyone remembers I exist. It’s what I’ve always done. Survive. Hide. Let others die while I preserve my worthless existence for another day.

My feet carry me toward the gallows.

Stupid. Suicidal.

Every instinct I’ve honed over years of survival screams at me to flee, to hide, to do what I’ve always done and watch from the shadows while others die.

But the Gallows Warden is losing.

The revenant has him pinned against the platform’s central beam, fingers crushing his windpipe. His blade has fallen, out of reach. His face is turning purple, eyes bulging as air runs out. In seconds—maybe less—the creature will kill him, and then it will turn its attention to the crowd. To the city. To me.

I reach for the power flooding the square.

Not the trickle I usually take. All of it.

Energy slams into me, dark and overwhelming, pouring through channels that weren’t designed for this kind of volume. My veins blaze violet. My scars flare beneath my sleeves. The sigils on my palms sear through my ruined gloves, radiant with light that shouldn’t exist in a place of public execution.

The revenant turns. Its stolen face twists toward me, sensing the surge of power, and recognition shifts in those dead eyes.

I speak a word that exists only in the language of the dead.

It tears out of me, ripping through the air between us. The revenant’s bindings shatter—whatever held the puppet to its master, severed in an instant. The presence behind those dead eyes screams in rage as its vessel is torn away.

Not defeated. That registers clearly. Disconnected. Forced out.

Mira’s body collapses into ordinary death.

The civilians who were seizing on the ground go still, then begin to stir. The power in the square calms to a normal hum, the wrongness draining away.

And every eye in the execution square turns to me.

I stand in a circle of emptiness, the crowd having cleared a wide space around me during my display. My eyes still glow—the violet light bleeds from them. My scars blaze visible through my torn sleeves.

My name is Ismerie Ashfall, and I’ve spent my entire adult life hiding what I am. Feeding in secret. Surviving in shadows.