Page 43 of Orc’s Gallows

“No.” The word breaks out of him. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“But you need to.” I step closer, cup his face with my free hand, force him to look at me. “You need to understand what you’ve been part of. What the gallows have cost. Because the Judge isn’t wrong about everything, Brannok. The system you’ve maintained is monstrous. The only question is whether you’re willing to tear it down.”

He turns his head, presses a kiss to my palm. The gesture is tender, vulnerable—nothing like the fierce claiming of last night. This is a man seeking comfort in the only place he knows to find it.

“Show me the rest.” His words come out rough. “All of it. I need to see.”

We walk deeper into the Quarter, hand in hand.

I show him the orphanage where children of the executed are raised—a crumbling building staffed by women who were once wives of hanged men, now caring for the next generation of execution victims. The children watch us pass with empty eyes, their faces bearing the resigned expressions of those who expect nothing good from authority. Brannok’s grip on my hand intensifies until I sense bones shift, but I don’t complain. He needs this anchor.

Through it all, Brannok says nothing. He absorbs each image, each accusation, each piece of evidence that the system he’s maintained has rotted this district from the inside out. But he never lets go of my hand. Never pulls away, even when the evidence of his crimes becomes overwhelming.

When we finally emerge from the Quarter’s narrow streets, I pull him into an alcove between buildings. He looks at me with eyes that have gone raw with grief, with guilt, with the crushing weight of understanding.

I don’t speak. Just wrap my arms around him and hold on.

He resists for a moment—the instinct of a man who has never allowed himself comfort. Then his arms come around me, crushing me against his chest, his face buried in my hair. Tremors run through him. Not tears—I don’t think Brannok Redrope knows how to cry anymore—but the dry shuddering of a soul confronting its sins.

“I have you.” I whisper the words against his neck. “Whatever you’ve done, whatever you’ve been—I have you.”

His arms band around me.

We stay like that for a long moment, hidden in the shadows of the Gallows Quarter, two people who have survived by feeding on a broken system, holding each other while the world they’ve helped build crumbles around them.

The graveyard stretches behind the Gallows Quarter like a field of broken teeth.

Stone markers bear execution dates rather than birth dates—identity defined by ending rather than beginning. The graves of the hanged are marked with rope symbols, crude carvings that identify them as execution victims rather than natural deaths. Some of the markers have crumbled with age. Others are freshly carved, the stone still pale and unworn.

I lead Brannok through the rows, watching his face as he reads the names. Some he recognizes. Most he doesn’t—anonymous dead, executed without witnesses, buried without ceremony.

“The council keeps records.” I stop at a grave marked only with a date and a rope symbol. “Names, charges, sentences. But they don’t keep track of innocence. They don’t note when the evidence was fabricated, when the trial was a mockery, when the execution served political convenience rather than justice.”

“How do you know which ones were innocent?”

“I don’t. Not all of them.” I kneel beside the unmarked grave, trace the rope symbol with my finger. “But the ending magic knows. Wrongful executions generate more power than just ones—the universe apparently notices when the innocent die.” I look up at him. “I’ve sensed the difference, Brannok. Every time you hanged someone who didn’t deserve it, I sensed the surge. The wrongness. The way the platform drank their death with special hunger.”

His face has gone pale beneath the dark green of his skin. “How many?”

“I don’t know exact numbers. But more than you want to believe. More than the council would ever admit.”

He turns away, walks deeper into the graveyard. I follow, and when I catch up to him, I slide my hand into his. He doesn’t look at me, but his fingers close around mine—holding on like I’m the only thing keeping him upright.

He stops at a section where the graves are packed close, markers barely a hand’s width apart. Mass burial. The potter’s field, where executed prisoners without family are interred in trenches and covered with lime.

“I told myself it was necessary.” His words are barely audible. “That the fear kept worse things at bay. That without the gallows, the city would tear itself apart.”

“Maybe it would have.” I move closer, lean into his side. His arm comes around me automatically, pulling me against him. “Or maybe that’s what you needed to believe. What the council needed you to believe, so you’d keep pulling the lever without asking questions.”

“I asked questions.” He turns to face me, and I see the anguish he’s been hiding beneath that stoic mask. “In the beginning. When I first took the position. I questioned sentences, challenged evidence, demanded reviews.”

“What happened?”

“The council reminded me of my place.” A muscle in his jaw flexes. “Made it clear that the Gallows Warden executes. He doesn’t judge. He doesn’t question. He does his job and trusts that those above him have made the right decisions.”

“And you believed them.”

“I wanted to believe them.” The admission seems to cost him. “It was easier. Cleaner. Pull the lever, go home, don’t think about whether the person deserved to die. Trust the system.”