Page 18 of Orc’s Gallows

The mark warms against my neck. For a moment, I consider telling him everything—the mating mark, the awareness I can’t ignore, the terrible certainty that killing her will break a part of me I didn’t know I still had.

I don’t.

“The execution proceeds at dawn.” My words come out cold. Certain. The Gallows Warden, who doesn’t hesitate. Who doesn’t question. Who pulls the lever because the lever needs to be pulled. “Dismissed.”

Halvard salutes. His face reveals nothing.

But as he turns to leave, I see the doubt in his eyes. The same doubt that’s eating at me. The same question I can’t answer.

What happens if we’re wrong?

The door closes behind him. I’m alone with the execution equipment—the ropes and hoods and weights that have been my tools all these years. Everything neatly organized. Everything prepared for morning.

Everything except me.

I press my palm against the mark on my neck. The glow is steady beneath my hand—certain in a way duty has never been. The answer has been forming since the moment I walked through her cell door. I just had to stop fighting it long enough to let it arrive.

By the time the first gray light touches the execution square, I know exactly what I’m going to do.

FIVE

BRANNOK

Dawn arrives like a blade across Blackhook City.

The execution square already fills when I step onto the balcony of the Execution Hall. Citizens stream through the streets from every district, more people than I’ve ever seen for a single hanging. Word of the death witch has spread. They want to watch her die, these good citizens who cheered her destruction of the revenant yesterday. Fear has made them hungry for blood.

Hypocrites. Every last one of them.

I dress in full ceremonial armor. Black leather and iron, polished until it gleams. The crimson sash of my office crosses my torso. My blade hangs at my hip—not the enchanted one I lost during the revenant attack, but a replacement from the armory. Standard issue. It will serve.

The mirror shows me the face of the Gallows Warden. Cold. Controlled. Ready to dispense justice.

The sigil on my neck radiates faintly beneath the armor’s collar.

I ignore it.

Captain Halvard meets me at the base of the stairs, his expression carefully neutral. He’s assembled the remaining guards—twelve men, all that survived yesterday’s chaos. They stand at attention, but tension knots their shoulders. Uncertainty clouds their eyes.

“The prisoner is ready, sir.” Halvard betrays nothing. “The platform has been inspected. The crowd control positions are manned.”

“Good.”

“Sir.” He hesitates. A fracture in the professional facade. “The men are asking⁠—”

“The execution proceeds as scheduled.” I cut him off before he can voice the doubt I’ve been wrestling with all night. “Fall in.”

He salutes. The guards form up behind me. We march toward the gallows in perfect formation, boots striking cobblestones in unison, the rhythm designed to intimidate.

It used to make me proud, that sound. The discipline. The control. The fear it instilled in watching citizens.

Now it sounds like a countdown.

The execution square spreads before me, packed with bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder. Vendors work the edges of the crowd, selling meat pies and ale and commemorative sketches of the death witch. Someone has already written a ballad about yesterday’s events—I catch snatches of it from somewhere near the fountain, a tinny voice singing about the monster that rose from the gallows.

They’ve turned terror into entertainment. Turned survival into spectacle.

This is what you built. This is what you shaped yourself to be.