Page 65 of Orc’s Grimoire

In the first scene, a young orc presses an execution brand to the chest of a bound witch. The witch screams, smoke rising from the contact point, and the orc’s face shows… relief. Peace. The satisfaction of a job well done.

In the second scene, a village burns. Not Thornhaven—somewhere else. Somewhere the Order determined was contaminated, that needed to be purged. Spell-burners move through the flames, methodically ensuring that nothing survives.

In the third scene, a family huddles in a cellar while boots thunder overhead. The door splinters. An execution brand glows in the darkness. Children scream.

Thornhaven. He doesn’t look away.

“Korrath.” I reach for his arm, but he flinches away.

“I know what this is.” His voice is flat. Dead. “The Author’s trying to break me. Using my past against me.”

“Then don’t look. Don’t⁠—“

“I’ve already looked.” He turns, and his ember eyes are haunted in a way I’ve never seen. “Every day, Thyra. Every day for twenty years. I know what I am. I know what I’ve done. He can’t show me anything I haven’t already seen in my own nightmares.”

TWENTY

THYRA

The scenes keep playing. More villages. More screams. More brands pressed to flesh while Korrath watches with that terrible, peaceful expression.

“He’s trying to show you that you’re a monster.” I step closer, forcing him to look at me instead of the walls. “Trying to make you doubt yourself. Question everything you’ve chosen.”

“I am a monster.”

“Yes.” I don’t soften it. Don’t try to comfort him with lies. “You are. And you chose me anyway. You saw what I am, and you stayed.” I take his face in my hands, force his gaze to mine. “The Author wants you to break. He wants you to fall apart so he can pick up the pieces. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

His jaw works. The scenes continue playing around us—his sins, catalogued and displayed like trophies.

“Then let’s move. Let him waste his energy on tricks that don’t work.”

We push through the gallery of Korrath’s guilt, past scenes of burning libraries and screaming spells and innocent people dying because the Order decided they were contaminated. A young woman clutches a spell-scroll to her chest, flames consuming her from the inside out. A child watches his father dissolve into ash, too young to understand what’s happening. An old scholar burns while reaching for a text he’d spent his life writing—his life’s work dying with him.

Korrath walks through it all without flinching. His jaw is tight, his eyes fixed forward, but he doesn’t break.

The mating mark burns steady—not his emotions, but his presence. His solidity. His refusal to let the Author see him falter.

The doorway at the far end leads to darkness.

We step through.

And the darkness shows me my own face.

The room is mine.

I know it instantly, viscerally, the way you know your own heartbeat. The Author has reached into my mind and pulled out every shame, every compromise, every terrible choice I’ve made in the name of preservation.

The three scholars stand before me.

Denn. Callia. Voss.

I knew them well—their faces, their rhythms, the small ways they’d made the Archive feel less like a prison. But their deaths weren’t accidents. They didn’t stumble into a hungry book or get caught by an awakening spell.

I fed them to the grimoire.

I knew what I was doing. I had always known.

Three lives, or three thousand.