Page 52 of Orc’s Gallows

“But responsibility isn’t surrender.” Brannok hardens. “I can be guilty and still fight you. I can acknowledge what I’ve done and still refuse to let you do worse.”

The Judge laughs. The sound echoes from countless mouths—bitter, mocking, ancient.

“Fight me? You stand in the heart of my power, bound by the weight of your own crimes. What possible resistance could you offer?”

“Enough to buy time.”

My heart stops.

He knows I’m here. He senses me the same way I sense him.

The Judge’s faces contort with sudden suspicion. It sweeps its gaze across the transformed square, searching for whatever its accused prisoner thinks might save him.

I freeze behind a collapsed awning. Hold my breath. Draw the concealment tighter until my vision grays at the edges from the power drain.

The dead eyes pass over my hiding spot without stopping.

“Time.” The entity lowers itself back onto its throne. “Time for what? Your mate to rescue you? The death witch who feeds on the same magic that sustains me?” The stolen features arrange themselves into mockery. “She’s hiding at the edge of the square, thinking I can’t sense her. Thinking her pitiful concealment can fool a being born from centuries of death.”

Ice floods my veins.

It knows. It knows I’m here.

“Let her hide.” The Judge waves a rope-wound hand in dismissal. “She cannot reach the anchor before I pronounce sentence. She cannot twist the wards while I hold court. And when your execution is complete—when the Gallows Warden dies on the very platform that gave him power—her grief will make her careless.”

The terror clawing at my stomach transforms into cold fury.

It’s toying with us. Playing with its food before the feast.

Fine. Let it play. I’ll use every second it wastes.

I abandon stealth and run.

The concealment shatters around me as I sprint toward the gallows’ base. The Judge’s laughter follows, echoing across the transformed square, but it doesn’t move to stop me. Why would it? In its arrogance, it believes I can’t reach the anchor in time.

Maybe it’s right.

The spirits in the gallery seating turn toward me as I pass—translucent faces warped with hatred for the living, for anyone who still breathes when they cannot. A few reach for me, spectral hands passing through my flesh with touches of freezing cold.

I ignore them. Focus on the platform. On the base of the transformed structure where the anchor stone waits buried beneath centuries of blood-soaked earth.

The entity doesn’t pursue. It watches from its throne of warped wood and coiled rope, cycling faces arranged in expressions of amused contempt. It thinks it’s already won. Thinks the trial is a formality, a bit of theater before the inevitable execution.

I reach the gallows’ base and drop to my knees.

The earth here is wrong. Saturated with centuries of ending magic, thick with the accumulated endings of thousands. My hands sink into soil that feels more like congealed blood than dirt, and the power hits me immediately—a flood of death energy so intense my vision whites out for a moment.

The anchor stone throbs beneath my palms. The wards carved into its surface push back, the old protections that were meant to contain the magic pooling beneath the gallows. They’re corrupted now—twisted by the Judge’s influence into conduits that feed the entity rather than imprison it.

I start to work.

Above me, the trial continues. The Judge pronounces charges in its chorus of dead voices. Brannok accepts them with the same stoic dignity he brings to everything. The spirits watch, waiting for the execution they’ve been promised.

The wards resist me. They’ve been feeding the Judge for so long that they’ve forgotten their original purpose—containment rather than amplification. I pour my power into the stone, trying to remind them what they were built to do, trying to turn their magic against the monster they’ve been sustaining.

It’s not enough.

The Judge has centuries of accumulated power behind it. I have decades of passive feeding, of taking only enough to survive, of always holding back from what I could become. The mathematics are brutal: I can’t overpower wards that have been strengthening for three hundred years.