Page 40 of Orc’s Moon

It raises its own blade above me with the same unhurried, absolute certainty it’s shown since the moment it first opened its eyes, embers steady, patient, unafraid of anything I might still have left to offer it.

No blade remains in my hand to meet it.

Only the killing blow is already falling, and a woman behind me whose voice never stops speaking the only truth left to offer this city.

TWENTY-TWO

LYESSA

I watch the blade start its fall and know, in the same instant, that I am not going to reach him in time.

Not with knives. Not with speed. Every instinct I’ve trusted all night is screaming at me to run, to throw myself into the gap, to do something with my body that might buy Vorren even half a second he doesn’t currently have. None of it will work. The distance between us is too great and the strike too far gone to stop with anything as simple as a blade or a body.

I don’t have a blade left to throw between Vorren and that killing blow.

I have words.

The last line of the Oath sits finished in my chest, translated, memorized, carried this far through a night that’s tried everything short of the grave to stop me from finishing it. I don’t have time to decide whether I’m ready. I speak it anyway, voice tearing loose from somewhere past fear, past exhaustion, past every careful academic instinct that ever told me words were meant to be studied instead of used to change the world in front of you.

Every syllable costs me something I don’t have left to spend. I speak it anyway.

“By choice freely given, not by chain. By trust renewed, not command. I speak this Oath as every voice before me spoke it — not to bind what should stay free, but to remember what we chose to become when nothing forced the choosing.”

The Heart answers before I finish the last syllable.

Light floods the chamber whole, silver and gold and something older than either color, pouring out from crystal that’s been dying by the second and now simply refuses to keep dying at all. It doesn’t feel like magic the way the throne felt like magic, or the Heart’s first recognition, quiet and private and meant only for the two of us. This feels like a door thrown open on a room that’s been dark for a thousand years, every corner of it lit at once, indifferent to who’s watching because the truth inside it was never meant to stay hidden in the first place.

The lake beneath us catches the light and throws it back doubled, water that was black and churning a moment ago going still and silver as a mirror finding its reflection again after a thousand years of nothing worth reflecting. Every crack in every bridge I can see stops spreading. The whole chamber goes silent along with me, waiting to see whether this Oath is enough to matter.

The Keeper’s blade stops mid-fall.

I watch it happen from behind him — the strike that should have ended Vorren’s life freezing a hand’s width short of finishing, the Keeper’s whole massive frame going rigid — a memory finally catching up to a body that’s spent too long outrunning it. Light climbs the cracks in his armor instead of shadow, silver instead of black, tracing every fracture the way water traces the lowest path available to it.

For one unbearable moment, something in the ember-glow behind his visor flickers toward a color that isn’t fire at all.

I don’t know what he’s seeing. I know it’s costing him everything he has left to keep standing upright while he sees it.

“Vorren.” My voice cracks, raw from an Oath that took more out of me than I let myself admit while I was speaking it. “Now. Whatever you’re going to do, do it now.”

TWENTY-THREE

VORREN

I roll clear the instant the strike falters, and my fingers close around Nightfall’s hilt before conscious thought catches up.

Cold hilt. Familiar weight. My own grip fitted into steel that’s never once failed me, and I come up off dying crystal with my father’s sword back where it belongs and a First Keeper standing frozen in silver light that’s finally reaching whatever’s left of the man underneath a thousand years of ruin.

He doesn’t stay frozen long.

Whatever broke through a moment ago, the thing wearing his armor fights to bury it again almost immediately — shoulders squaring, embers hardening back toward their usual patient burn, a strike already forming that would have taken my head from my shoulders if I hadn’t already moved. I meet it, and the fight that follows doesn’t resemble anything from earlier tonight.

The chamber’s dying around us in earnest now. Crystal bridges shear away in whole sections, dropping into water that isn’t water anymore, and every foothold I find gives way the instant I trust it with my full weight. Twice I feel the span beneath my boots crumble mid-strike, forcing a leap I can’t spare the time to aim carefully, landing hard enough on the next surviving fragment to jar my teeth loose. Nobody slows down to acknowledge how close that fall came to ending this permanently.

I give ground twice, not from weakness this time but by choice—retreating onto a narrower span because it forces the Keeper to follow at an angle that finally opens the seam in his guard I’ve been hunting the entire fight. He takes the bait. Whatever fragment of the man he used to be is fighting its way back to the surface, it hasn’t relearned caution yet, and I press every inch of advantage it offers before it disappears again.

A section of bridge gives way entirely beneath his trailing foot, and for one half-second his balance wavers — not much, barely a fraction of a fraction, but it’s the first opening all night that isn’t defended the instant it appears. I take it. Nightfall opens a line across his forearm deep enough to draw genuine silver instead of shadow, and the sound he makes in response is closer to a man’s pained breath than anything I’ve heard from him since this fight began.

Steel meets steel hard enough to shatter the bridge beneath both our feet entirely, and we both drop onto a lower span that groans under the sudden weight, buying maybe thirty seconds before this piece goes the way of every other piece tonight. I don’t waste any of them. I press the angle I bought, driving him back toward the Heart itself, silver light climbing higher through his armor with every step closer he’s forced to take.