Page 57 of Orc’s Gallows

The moment I reach the platform’s center, the Judge moves.

Its strike catches me across the ribs before I can set my stance.

I fly backward, armor crumpling under the force of centuries of accumulated rage. My body hits the transformed platform with enough impact to splinter the warped oak, and before I can rise, spectral chains wrap around my wrists. My ankles. My neck.

The guilt-forged links bite cold against my skin—not the heat of the claiming sigil, but its opposite. The frozen weight of every wrongful death I’ve ever performed, every innocent I’ve hanged, every time I pulled the lever knowing the condemned didn’t deserve to die.

Ismerie screams my name from somewhere across the ruined courtroom.

I can’t see her. The spirits have risen between us—hundreds of translucent forms flooding from the gallery seating, from the witness stands, from every shadow in this nightmare space. They press against me in waves, their empty gazes finding mine with recognition that cuts deeper than any blade.

My victims.

Not all of them. Even the Judge’s power has limits. But the ones that matter most have found me. The ones whose faces I remember. The ones whose deaths still live in the corners of my memory, surfacing in quiet moments when discipline fails.

The young witch floats before me first.

She was twenty years old when she climbed my gallows stairs. Accused of cursing a merchant’s crops. I knew the charges were false—the real curse-worker had paid off the council to frame her, and I’d seen the evidence buried in the case files. I hanged her anyway. The council demanded it. Order required it.

Her neck is still broken. The angle wrong beneath spectral skin, the same angle I’ve seen a thousand times when the drop goes clean. She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t need to. Her presence is accusation enough.

A merchant materializes beside her. Aldric Voss. I remember his name because he was the first innocent I knowingly executed. The council wanted him silenced—he’d discovered their embezzlement scheme, threatened to expose them to the city. They signed his death warrant, and I carried it out without question.

He screamed his innocence as the trapdoor opened. The crowd cheered anyway.

An old man joins them. Garrett the Scribe. Seventy-three years old when he stood on my platform, white hair wild around a face carved with defiance. His crime was writing pamphlets questioning whether execution was truly justice or merely terror wearing judicial robes.

His dying words still echo in my ears: “May you sense the rope around your own neck someday, Gallows Warden. May you know what it is to die for another man’s sins.”

He was right. I understand that now.

The Judge descends from its dissolving throne, robes trailing through the chaos of its collapsing courtroom. Its rotating visages have slowed—cycling through expressions of vindicated triumph as it surveys its captive prey.

“At last.” The voices harmonize into a satisfied chord. “The Gallows Warden in chains. The executioner awaiting execution.” The stolen features arrange themselves into cruel amusement. “I’ve waited centuries for this moment.”

Spectral hands seize me, lifting me from the splintered platform. The spirits of my victims carry me toward the center of the transformed space, toward the trapdoor that once served as the Judge’s throne, toward the noose that dangles in cold white light.

The sigil on my neck heats—Ismerie, still alive, still fighting. Her position thrums in my awareness at the edge of the square, determination radiating from where she works at the foundation. She’s trying to reach me, trying to break through the wall of spirits that separates us.

She won’t make it in time.

The noose drops around my neck with terrible familiarity.

I know this rope—witch-hair braided fibers, the same weave I’ve used a thousand times, now oiled and set with a short drop the Judge has measured to strangle rather than snap.

The rough fibers scratch against my skin. The knot presses into the soft tissue behind my ear—the exact placement I’ve trained my assistants to achieve. A proper hangman’s knot. The kind that kills cleanly when the drop is right.

“Not a clean drop, Gallows Warden.” The Judge’s voices settle into soft satisfaction. “You don’t deserve a clean drop.”

But the Judge doesn’t want me to die cleanly.

“Do you know how long I’ve contemplated this moment?” The entity circles me, its form flickering between stability and dissolution as Ismerie’s assault on the wards continues to drain its power. “Three hundred years of watching wardens dispense death from my platform. Three hundred years of sensing every innocent soul feed my becoming while you walked away unbothered.”

The spirits press closer. The young witch’s vacant stare never leaves mine. Neither do the merchant’s lifeless eyes, or the scribe’s, or the dozens of others I can’t name but whose faces I recognize from the endless parade of condemned.

“Your predecessors were easier to hate.” The Judge takes on a contemplative tone. “They were cruel men, most of them. They enjoyed the killing, savored the power, used the gallows to settle personal grudges. But you…” The rotating visages pause on an expression of genuine puzzlement. “You were efficient. Professional. You killed without passion, without hatred, without satisfaction.”

“That’s supposed to make it better?”