Page 33 of Orc’s Harvest

“An engineering marvel, is what it’ll be. Ashmoor’s first tower with its own weather.”

I laugh — actually laugh, sharp and surprised, loud enough that it startles a marsh bird into flight somewhere off to my left — and for a handful of heartbeats the fog around us doesn’t feel like it’s hunting anything at all. My mother’s voice fades first. Then Fenn’s mother. Then the rest of it, one by one, losing whatever grip it had once we stopped giving it silence to work inside.

“Keep going.” I reach for his hand without looking, and he laces his fingers through mine without missing a stride. “Tell me about the pond.”

“Absolutely not. You’ll find out when it floods the war chamber below it.”

We reach the Shrine of Seven Names an hour past midday, and the sight of it stops the whole patrol cold.

Seven stones ring a submerged basin half-swallowed by black water, dead willow branches strung with hundreds of wooden name tokens hanging motionless in air too still to be natural. Fog clings unnaturally thick to the water’s surface, nothing like ordinary weather would explain. I recognize half the names carved into the tokens nearest me — patients still lying empty in the Keep’s infirmary, waiting on threads that never came home.

I wade in without waiting for an order, water black and cold to my knees, and find the shrine’s central inscription as soon as I reach the first stone.

It’s been altered, not broken — the same patient, precise hand I’ve come to recognize from a doorframe rune and a stolen journal both.

“It doesn’t ask anymore.” I trace the altered symbols with two fingers, understanding landing heavy and sick in my chest. “It used to ask what someone chooses to give. Now it just takes whichever identity carries the strongest bond behind it. That’s why the Hollow Men go after love first. After loyalty. The shrine’s been rebuilt to hunt exactly the things people would never willingly hand over.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Maybe. Seven stones, seven memories — something that actually defines me, spoken out loud at each one.” I head for the first stone without waiting for an answer. “Watch my back. This is going to take time; I don’t have a good way to speed up.”

I speak the first memory into the dark — the morning I buried Koira, the cold handle of the shovel biting into my palms, the promise I made her grave that I’d keep the farm standing no matter what it cost me. The stone answers with a low pulse of gold, faint but real, and I move to the second.

Four stones in, four memories given freely into the water, and the marsh answers each one with a little more light.

Then the causeway behind me shatters.

I turn in time to see Molgar standing across the basin, and the sight of him steals a full breath out of my chest before I remember how to use it again.

He’s barely recognizable as the man from the granary anymore. Root and black bark have consumed most of his remaining arm, climbing up past his shoulder and into the side of his throat, and where his face used to hold that precise, unbothered calm, something closer to bark than skin has started spreading across one cheek.

“You’re persistent.” His voice still carries the same measured cadence, though it comes out wetter now, rougher, like something’s growing through his own vocal cords. “I’ll give you that much credit before I finish what I came here to do.”

The stone causeway that connected my half of the shrine to the patrol lies in broken pieces across the black water, and every warrior who crossed it a moment ago is scrambling back toward the far shore, cut off from me as completely as if the marsh swallowed the whole path on purpose.

It probably did.

TWENTY-FOUR

KALTHOR

I watch the causeway go and feel every plan I had for tonight collapse with it.

Zalie’s alone on the far side, three stones lit and glowing faintly behind her, Molgar’s ruined shape closing the distance across water that shouldn’t hold either of them and does anyway. Everything in me screams to abandon the line, to fight my way across whatever’s left of that stone bridge and put myself between her and whatever Molgar’s become.

I don’t move.

Water erupts around us instead — Hollow Men rising from beneath the surface in every direction at once, adapted to the marsh in ways I’ve never faced before, root-like limbs dragging warriors toward the black depths before they can plant their feet. Bruck goes under with a shout cut short. Fenn’s already wading in after him, and I don’t have the luxury of choosing between the woman I love and the men who followed me into this drowning field.

“Groups of three!” I’m shouting it before the thought’s fully formed. “One watches the water. One guards whoever’s speaking. One recites something true out loud, name, memory, anything solid enough to anchor all three of you against what this place wants you hearing instead!”

It’s clumsy. It’s untested. It works anyway, warriors falling into formation fast enough that the marsh’s grip on us loosens by degrees, three-person knots holding steady where lone fighters would have gone under in seconds.

I catch fragments of her across the water the whole time I’m fighting — not words exactly, something closer to the shape of her feelings pressed against the back of my skull. Fury, sharp and immediate, when Molgar says something about her mother I can’t quite hear. Pain, hot and sudden, when black roots find her arm. Determination underneath both, steady as a heartbeat, as she reaches for the fifth stone and then the sixth.

The seventh goes dark and stays dark.

I feel her falter through whatever’s left connecting us, feel the moment doubt finds a crack to work into, and across the water I watch her go down hard under a black root that catches her legs out from under her.