Page 5 of Orc’s Gallows

TWO

BRANNOK

Iknow exactly what dying looks like.

The final twitch. The release of bladder. The slow rotation as the body finds its eternal rest. The way the face changes color—first purple from lack of oxygen, then gradually gray as blood pools in the lowest points. The particular angle a head hangs at when the neck breaks clean versus when it doesn’t.

I’ve made a science of ending lives. Calculated the precise drop distance for every body weight, tested knot positions for maximum efficiency, refined the process until death became predictable. Controlled.

This is wrong.

The execution should be over. More times than I can count, I have watched the life leave a body, but the girl on the rope isn’t settling.

I’ve seen magical mishaps before. Residual energy animating corpses for a few seconds before the death wards suppress it. Standard procedure: wait for the wards to do their work, then dispose of the body through the usual channels. Nothing to concern the crowd. Nothing to disrupt the day’s schedule.

The witch-hair ropes prevent this. They’re braided specifically to suppress magical resistance, to drain any residual power before it can manifest. The death wards carved into every surface of this gallows contain exactly this kind of resurrection.

But her fingers keep moving.

I draw my blade—enchanted iron etched with severance wards, designed to cut the bindings that animate risen corpses. Standard equipment. I’ve used it a dozen times over the years, always successfully.

The witch’s eyes open.

Whatever looks out from that dead face isn’t the terrified girl I hanged three minutes ago. That girl prayed to gods she hoped might be listening. That girl trembled but didn’t beg, held herself with dignity even as the noose tightened around her neck.

This… this is a different creature entirely.

My professional assessment catalogues the wrongness in sequence, the way it always does in crisis: rope burns angled wrong for the neck’s current position, which means the vertebrae have shifted after death. Body weight distributed forward onto the balls of the feet—a standing posture impossible in a freshly hanged corpse. The discoloration of strangulation lividity moving upward along the jaw rather than pooling downward the way gravity demands. Every indicator I have been trained to read says this body should be inert. None of them account for the fact that it is looking at me.

The jaw works, producing sounds that no human throat should make.

“Justice…” A thousand voices layer into one, the accumulated screams of the wrongfully dead. “Justice comes.”

Behind me, my guards shift into combat positions. Good men, trained well. They know wrongness when they see it.

I step forward, blade raised. “Stand ready. Severance formation.”

The corpse’s head rotates toward me. Not turning—rotating, the neck moving in ways that broken vertebrae shouldn’t allow. Those glowing eyes find mine, and I experience what I haven’t known in twenty years on this platform.

Uncertainty.

“Gallows Warden.” The chorus speaks my title with contempt that spans centuries. “Dispenser of justice. Do you know how many of these deaths were wrong? How many innocents have fed my becoming?”

I don’t answer. Words are weapons for politicians and priests. I deal in actions.

My blade sweeps toward the thing’s throat.

It moves.

Faster than any risen corpse has a right to move, faster than the living girl could have managed. The blade catches its shoulder instead of its neck, carving a chunk from dead flesh that splatters across the timber. The thing doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t slow. Its bound hands snap free of the suppression chains—not picking the locks, simply breaking them through sheer impossible strength.

“Contain it!” I pivot, putting myself between the revenant and my men. “Don’t let it reach the crowd!”

Too slow.

The world turns into a blur of snapping bone and the spray of my men’s blood. I trained them for combat, but we aren’t fighting a person; we’re fighting a landslide of death.

The revenant’s attention returns to me. Still gripping my neck with one hand, it leans close enough that I can smell the beginning of decomposition on its stolen flesh. The glowing eyes bore into mine with terrible patience.