Page 65 of Orc’s Gallows

“Anything.”

“What?”

“Hanging anything. Not anyone.” I press my lips to her temple, brief and fierce. “It stopped being anyone three hundred years ago.”

She nods against my shoulder, then pulls away to face the thrashing Judge. Ending magic coils around her hands—weaker than before, but still blazing with power that makes the air shiver.

“I’ll hold it.” Her words carry harmonics that weren’t there before—echoes of the spirits she woke, the power she claimed, the death witch she’s allowed herself to become. “Do what you do best.”

I turn back to the makeshift gallows.

The Judge hangs from the crossbar, its form twisting against the suppression wards that bind it. The faces have stopped shifting—frozen in expressions of fury and terror and disbelief. The chorus of voices has broken into individual screams, the spirits trapped within at last finding their own voices after centuries of imprisonment.

“In the name of everyone you’ve consumed.” My words carry across the ruined square with the weight of formal pronouncement. The words I’ve spoken a thousand times, but never with this meaning. “In the name of everyone I wrongfully executed. In the name of justice that should have been and wasn’t.”

The entity thrashes. Fights. Throws everything it has against the suppression wards and Ismerie’s anchoring power.

They hold.

“I sentence you to death.”

I pull the rope one final time.

The noose tightens around the Judge’s neck—around all its necks, every merged neck, every stolen body. The witch-hair fibers bite deep, severing the links that bind the entity to existence.

The Judge hangs.

For one eternal moment, nothing happens. The entity dangles from the makeshift gallows, its body twitching, its faces frozen in expressions of absolute denial.

Then Ismerie pours her power into the execution.

Not to sustain it. Not to feed it. To end it.

Ending magic floods the noose, severing the bindings that hold the Judge’s consciousness intact. The entity’s form begins to dissolve—merged flesh coming apart at the seams, stolen faces separating from the mass, individual spirits pulling free from the prison that has held them for centuries.

The young witch emerges first. Her spectral form tears away from the Judge’s body, her broken neck straightening as she escapes the entity’s grasp. Her eyes find mine across the chaos—not with accusation, not with hatred, but with gratitude.

Then she’s gone. Dissolving into light that rises toward the pre-dawn sky.

Others follow. The merchant. The scribe. Dozens of spirits I recognize and hundreds I don’t—all of them tearing free from the Judge’s collapsing form, all of them escaping the vengeance that had consumed them.

The entity screams. Not with one voice but hundreds—every soul it ever consumed crying out in release as the bonds broke at last.

The Judge dissolves into nothing.

Three hundred years of accumulated wrongful death, unmade in a single moment of execution. The form collapses into ash that scatters on a wind that shouldn’t exist. The faces fade like dreams at dawn. The chorus of voices falls silent, replaced by the quiet sound of spirits finding peace.

I stand beneath the makeshift gallows, the rope slack in my hands, and watch the thing I helped create die.

Ismerie collapses.

I’m at her side before she hits the ground, my arms wrapping around her, pulling her against my body. She’s cold—too cold, her skin pale, her scars no longer radiant. She gave everything she had to anchor the Judge for execution, and now she’s paying the price.

“Ismerie.” Her name comes out rough, desperate. “Ismerie, stay with me.”

Her eyes flutter open. Dark brown finding amber, the death witch and the executioner in the ruins of everything they’ve destroyed.

“Did it work?” Her words are barely a whisper.