Page 53 of Orc’s Gallows

Then the sigil blazes.

Not with warmth, not with the familiar pulse of his presence—this is different. Cold fire spreading from my collarbone through my chest, and with it: knowledge. The bond translating what my ears can’t hear across the distance between us. A trapdoor opening. A body dropping. A rope catching, too short, the wrong knot⁠—

He’s in the noose. Alive, barely. Dying.

I have seconds.

Maybe less.

Above me, Brannok’s life gutters like a candle in a draft.

Not enough. Every scrap of power I can push into the anchor stone fractures against wards that have been feeding a god for three centuries. I need more.

The thought terrifies me.

He’s going to die because you’re afraid of what you might become.

Brannok didn’t make that choice. He walked into this courtroom knowing he might die, knowing the Judge wanted his blood, knowing the only thing standing between him and oblivion was a death witch who’d been too scared to reach for her full potential.

He chose me anyway.

Then choose him back. Choose what you could become. Choose to stop being afraid.

I open myself to the ending magic.

Not the careful trickle I’ve survived on for years. Not the measured sips that kept me alive without overwhelming my senses. Everything. All of it. The full flood of accumulated ending that pools beneath the Grand Gallows, centuries of executions condensed into a reservoir of power that no death witch has ever dared to claim.

It hits me like a tidal wave.

The magic crashes through my defenses, through the careful barriers I’ve built around my soul, through every wall and ward and protection I’ve ever constructed to keep myself safe from my own nature. It fills me until there’s no room for anything else—no fear, no guilt, no carefully maintained humanity. Only death. Only ending. Only the vast, cold certainty of what I truly am.

My scars blaze with light.

Not the faint radiance that appears during executions, the gentle luminescence that marks me as a death witch. This is different entirely—brilliance that sears from within, power that throbs through my skin in waves that make the air itself shiver. The sigils tattooed on my palms ignite with fire that doesn’t burn, channels opening that I never knew existed.

I’ve been drinking from a stream my entire life.

Now I’m drowning in the ocean.

The anchor stone shatters.

The sound echoes through the transformed courtroom—a sharp, decisive snap that silences the Judge’s mocking laughter, that makes the spirits in the gallery seating turn toward me with expressions of shock and terror. The wards carved into the stone’s surface fracture, their magic spilling out like blood from a wound.

I drink that too.

More. There’s always more.

The ending magic of the gallows floods into me—not pooling, not accumulating, but becoming part of who I am. Every execution that ever happened on this platform becomes mine. Thousands of endings, compressed into a single impossible moment of awareness. The young witch with the broken neck. The merchant who screamed his innocence. The old scribe who cursed the Gallows Warden with his dying breath.

They’re all here. They’re all part of me now.

And they want vengeance.

The gallows begin to shudder.

Not the deliberate motion of the Judge’s transformed courtroom—this is involuntary. The ancient oak groaning under stress it was never designed to bear, the iron reinforcements screaming as forces they can’t comprehend tear through their structure. The death wards carved into every beam and post are failing, their magic draining into me faster than the entity can replace it.

I rise from my knees.