Page 33 of Orc’s Moon

It doesn’t fall. It barely staggers.

But something in the pressure behind its next strike shifts, just slightly, and for the first time since this began I let myself believe I’ve found a weakness worth chasing. Whatever’s keeping this thing standing, it isn’t limitless. It’s borrowed, the same way the Heart’s light is borrowed right now, bleeding slowly through a crack that keeps widening no matter how fast the rest of the chamber tries to heal itself.

I press forward, chasing the opening before it closes again. The Keeper gives ground — one step, deliberate, almost curious, like a teacher testing how far a student’s managed to come rather than a man actually threatened by anything I’ve landed. There’s no fear in the movement. No urgency. Just patient, measuring attention —the same quality I’ve seen in every truly dangerous opponent I’ve ever faced: the ones who lose interest in winning the moment they quickly realize they’ve already won.

That should have warned me.

I never get the chance to chase it properly.

The bridge beneath my boots groans, and I understand, half a second too late, that the Keeper hasn’t been fighting me at all. It’s been herding me, one economical strike at a time, toward exactly this stretch of crystal — every step back I took, every roll clear, every half-beat I thought I’d earned through patience instead of granted through design.

“Vorren, move!”

I hear Lyessa’s warning a fraction of a second before the Keeper finally moves, and it isn’t toward my chest.

It’s toward the bridge itself.

Crystal shatters under a single untroubled blow, the whole span giving way at once instead of cracking slowly like everything else in this chamber, and the floor I’m standing on simply stops existing. There’s no time to jump clear. No time to do anything except feel the world tilt out from under me as I fall toward a drop I can’t begin to measure from up here.

“Vorren!”

I hear Lyessa scream my name the way I heard her shout a warning about a collapsing monument what feels like a lifetime ago, raw and desperate in a way that costs her more than the fight has, and then there’s nothing beneath me at all — only dark, and falling, and the last thing I see before the light above disappears entirely is her reaching for an edge that’s already too far away to catch, her fingers closing on nothing, her voice already breaking on the second syllable of my name before the dark swallows the sound of it whole.

I don’t know how far the fall goes. I don’t know what’s waiting at the bottom, or whether the crystal down there will catch me the same gentle way it caught us the first time we fell into this chamber, or whether this time the ground simply intends to finish what a thousand-year-old blade already started. The dark rushing past offers no answers, only speed, only the cold rush of air that means I’m still falling and haven’t found out yet which kind of landing is waiting for me.

I know only one thing with any certainty as the dark closes over me completely.

She’s still up there, alone with a man who’s spent his whole life justifying silence and a thing that means every gentle word it offers and intends to erase her regardless, and there is no version of what happens next that I’m willing to accept if it doesn’t end with us standing in the same room again.

EIGHTEEN

LYESSA

I don’t scream again after the first time.

I don’t have the breath to spare for it, kneeling at the broken edge where the bridge used to be, staring down into a dark that swallowed him so completely it didn’t even leave an echo behind. No distant impact. No answering shout. Just black water somewhere far below catching what little light survives this chamber, and silence stretching out long enough that some cold, clinical part of my mind starts doing the arithmetic on how far a fall has to travel before nobody survives landing it.

I don’t let that part finish the calculation.

My hands are shaking. I notice that the way I’d notice a stranger’s hands, distant and academic, like the tremor belongs to someone else’s body I’m only borrowing for the moment. Somewhere behind me Rikmal hasn’t moved either, silent for once, and I understand distantly that even he doesn’t know what to say to a woman staring into a hole where the man she loves used to be standing.

I get up instead.

There’s a section of floor near the chamber’s lower gallery I noticed on the way in and dismissed as decoration—pale crystal underfoot, veined with the same six-pointed script I’ve spent a week teaching myself to read at speed. I cross to it now because standing still means feeling everything that just happened, and I am not ready to feel that yet. Maybe I never will be. Right now it doesn’t matter. Right now there’s work, and work is the only thing standing between me and a grief I can’t afford to indulge until this night is over.

I drop to my knees on cold stone and start translating.

The script runs deep, layered generations thick, like the wall in the Hall of Oaths, except this isn’t names. This is a voice — one voice, unbroken across the entire gallery floor, written by someone who understood she was running out of time to say everything she needed to say. The last Moonkeeper. I recognize the hand from the vision that flooded through me the moment I first touched this chamber’s bridge, hurried and precise in equal measure, a woman writing faster than her own hand could comfortably move because slower meant risking never finishing at all.

My fingers trace each character before my mind catches the meaning behind it, old muscle memory — read, translate, commit to memory, move to the next line before doubt has time to creep in and ask whether any of it matters. Right now none of it matters except that it’s the only thing keeping my hands from shaking hard enough to be useless. I’ve done this before, in smaller ruins, with smaller stakes. I’ve never once done it with this much riding on getting every letter right.

The Oath was never meant to bind. It was meant to be chosen, fresh, every generation, by every voice willing to speak it. Here are the words, in case the world ever needs them spoken again and no one living remembers how.

Beneath that, half a verse of something that reads less like law and more like a promise — old Covenant phrasing, formal in a way that tells me this was meant to be spoken aloud, not simply read. I copy it into memory letter by letter, refusing to let my hands shake even though every other part of me currently feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.

I don’t let myself think his name. Not once, not directly, because the moment I do I know exactly what happens — the careful wall I’ve built out of translation work and stubbornness comes down all at once, and I can’t afford that collapse right now. There will be time to grieve him properly if grieving turns out to be what this night requires. Until then, there’s a dead woman’s final words still waiting to be read, and reading them is the only thing I currently have any control over at all.

The next line is harder to make out, water damage blurring two full words into an educated guess rather than a certainty. I lean closer, tracing the ghost of a stroke with one fingertip, and force myself to keep working instead of letting the guess become one more thing I can’t be sure of tonight. Everything else about this night has already refused to hold still long enough to be certain of. This, at least, is a puzzle I know how to solve.