TWENTY-NINE
IVALYS
An orc enforcer—massive, scarred, nearly Rathok’s size—breaks through our makeshift perimeter. His axe descends toward my skull.
Rathok intercepts. Their weapons clash with a sound that rings through the room—metal on metal, strength against strength. The orc enforcer is fresh. Uninjured. Fighting because the contracts in his blood demand it.
Rathok is dying. Covered in claiming script. Fighting because I’m behind him.
He shouldn’t win. Can’t win. The enforcer is faster, stronger, unburdened by thousands of debts trying to devour his soul.
Rathok wins anyway.
Not through strength. Through experience. Two centuries of combat have taught him things this younger orc hasn’t learned yet. Where to strike when axes lock. How to shift his weight to create openings. The exact angle to twist a blade so it slides between armor plates.
The enforcer falls. Rathok’s axe buried in his neck.
Rathok falls too. The contracts surge across his face, sealing his eyes, trying to claim his sight. He claws at them with his freehand—the one still working—but they reform faster than he can tear them away.
“Rathok—” I drop beside him. Press my palm to his face. Feel the contracts writhe beneath my touch.
His hand finds mine. Grips hard. Even now, even dying, he reaches for me.
“Go.” The word forces through lips the contracts are trying to seal. “Please.”
“Never.” I lace my fingers through his. The sigil on my palm burns where it touches his claimed skin. “You don’t get to decide that. You don’t get to sacrifice yourself and call it love.”
His grip tightens. Something flickers in his contract-covered eyes—recognition, or hope, or something I don’t have a name for.
More enforcers close in. Gror appears, bloody and battered, holding them off with desperate sweeps of his borrowed blade. He won’t last much longer. None of us will.
I watch the man I love destroy himself to protect me.
And I understand.
∗ ∗ ∗
I’ve been thinking about this wrong.
The Ledger Master claimed thousands of debts. Thousands of souls bound by contracts they didn’t understand, trapped by terms they couldn’t escape. He fed on them. Grew fat on their suffering. Built an empire from their stolen lives.
But he never owned those debts. He stole them. Every claim he made was fraud, every term he enforced was a lie, every soul he consumed was taken under false pretenses.
I can’t break thousands of contracts. My mother couldn’t have done it. No truth-speaker in history has ever held that much power.
But I don’t have to break them.
I just have to tell the truth about who they belong to.
Rathok goes down again. This time, he doesn’t rise. The contracts have covered his entire body now—a second skin of scrolling terms, claiming every inch of the orc I love. His axe slips from fingers that no longer obey him.
I throw myself over him.
An enforcer’s blade descends toward us. Gror appears from nowhere, parrying the strike, driving the attacker back. My brother stands over us both, bleeding from a dozen cuts, his borrowed sword shaking in his grip.
“Do it, Ivy.” His voice cracks. “Whatever you’re going to do—do it now.”
I press both palms against Rathok’s chest.
