Page 39 of Orc’s Harvest

The flare that follows drives it back out of both our heads at once, a clean, violent snap that leaves my ears ringing and Zalie gasping across the platform.

The ritual doesn’t finish what it started, not entirely, but it does enough — the Harvester King’s exposed form takes visible damage, cracks running gold and black through twelve feet of stolen bodies, and hundreds of partial victims across the basin come back far enough to remember their own names even if the rest waits on a cleansing we haven’t finished yet. Some of them weep where they stand. Others simply sit down in the wheat, hands over their faces, as if remembering costs more than any of us accounted for.

It also shows me something I needed to see. Through the crack running down the Harvester King’s chest, past bone and root and stolen faces, a path opens downward — the route to the Heart itself, finally visible instead of buried under centuries of corruption.

Then the western wall gives out behind us, stone crumbling under a strike from something the Harvester King’s ruined body still has strength left to deliver. Refugees who’d gathered near the wagon barricades scatter screaming toward the inner gate, and a bloodglass tower two hundred feet to my left shatters top to bottom, gold light spilling out of it like water from a broken jar.

“Fighting retreat!” I’m already moving, pulling Zalie off the platform before the ritual’s fully cold. “Into the Keep, all of you, now!”

We fall back in stages, Varok’s shield walls buying every foot of ground they can, warriors dragging the wounded between them while Darrow leans heavily on Jazine’s shoulder, still upright but barely. Zalie’s hand stays pressed to her ribs the whole way, blood still seeping dark between her fingers despite the rough field dressing Jazine forced on her mid-retreat, but she doesn’t slow down once, and I don’t insult her by suggesting she should.

I keep one hand fisted in the back of her collar the entire way, not gentle about it, hauling her clear of a falling support beam twice before she’s finished registering it’s coming down, the Harvester King’s massive hand crashing against the Keep’s outer stone behind us close enough that dust rains down on both our heads.

We make it inside as the gate slams shut behind the last of the warriors, and I don’t slow down long enough to catch my breath before I head for the hidden foundation stair—the one path down to the Heart the ritual just revealed to both of us.

“You don’t have to come,” I say it anyway, knowing exactly how she’ll answer, because some habits are worth keeping even when the outcome’s already decided.

“Try leaving me up here.” She’s already three steps ahead of me on the stairs, torch already lit in one hand like she planned this before I finished speaking. “I dare you.”

We descend side by side, torchlight throwing shifting shadows across stone older than the fortress built on top of it, the sound of the battle above fading with every step until nothing’s left but our footsteps and the low, patient hum of something waiting in the dark below. We’re barely halfway down when the door above us seals shut with a grinding finality that’s clearly nobody’s accident.

A voice speaks from the dark below, familiar, impossible, patient in a way that raises every hair on my arms.

“You came too late.”

Koira Bouchier’s voice, unmistakable, and this time nothing about it feels false — no borrowed tremor, no gap where the real woman’s certainty used to sit.

Hundreds of identical eyes open across the chamber walls at once, all staring, and not one blinks.

THIRTY

ZALIE

A figure steps out of the root-covered wall wearing my grandmother’s face, down to the silver braid, the dirt-stained hands, the same faded work dress she wore the last decade of her life — and I don’t run to it the way every part of me wants to. The chamber around us breathes slow and warm, gold veins pulsing through black root in a rhythm that never quite settles into anything I could call a heartbeat, though it comes close enough to unsettle me standing this near to it.

“Another one,” I say it out loud mostly for my own benefit, the way I’ve been naming every horror in this valley since the day the wheat first lay down flat. Calling a thing what it is has never made it less dangerous. It’s just made it easier to keep breathing while I decide what to do about it.

“I’m not her.” It says the words before I can ask, gentle, matter-of-fact. “I’m what she left behind trying to fix this place. A memory pattern, not a person. I won’t pretend otherwise, granddaughter. You’ve had enough things wearing her face lying to you already.”

That honesty is the only reason I follow it instead of putting a blade through it on principle.

It leads us through a gallery I recognize instantly from Koira’s sketches — wall after wall of alcoves, each one holding a name, a date, a reason, stretching back further than I can walk in a single afternoon. Dust hangs thick in the air, undisturbed for centuries, and light bleeds up faint and amber from the seams between the stones themselves, less like a vein of ore and more like the whole gallery is still quietly bleeding. The earliest ones read like gifts. Voluntary offering. Shared famine rite. Gift returned at spring planting. I trace my fingers along names three hundred years dead, people who chose this, who understood exactly what they were giving and why.

The inscriptions change the further we walk.

Criminal forfeiture. Clan enemy. Necessary balance. Unrecorded witch.

I stop counting how many alcoves carry a Wildstorm seal beside the reason once the numbers stop meaning anything I can hold in my head. Beside me, Kalthor goes rigid, jaw locked, staring at his own family’s crest carved into a wall built entirely from what the valley took from people too weak to refuse it. His hand finds the hilt of his own knife once, an old instinct with nothing left to fight here, and he lets it drop again.

“I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t matter.” My voice stays steady, close enough that only he can hear it. “It matters. Every single name on this wall matters. But we’re not here to decide whether your bloodline gets forgiven for it. We’re here to make sure nobody’s ever reduced to an inscription on this wall again.”

He doesn’t answer with words. He reaches for my hand instead, and he doesn’t let go for the rest of the walk, his grip tightening every time we pass another alcove bearing his family’s crest.

The memory shows me the rest without either of us asking.

The Hollow Men were never an invasion. They were drawn through the Veil by the Heart’s own corrupted hunger, trained across centuries of sacrifice to require identity the way it once only needed surplus life. My mother volunteered for the first full ritual — paired with Torvak Wildstorm, willing, certain, exactly the woman Koira’s journals describe. I watch her take her place at the center of a working that should have saved this whole valley, and some part of me still hopes, uselessly, that this time it goes differently.

It doesn’t. Molgar, terrified of losing his grip on Ashmoor’s stores if the old system ended, opened a channel to the Harvester King and closed her return path one second early. Torvak tried to reopen it, hands moving fast and desperate over a working he didn’t build and didn’t fully understand. Molgar’s own Blood Law authority blocked him before he finished.