TWELVE DROKHAR
TWELVE
DROKHAR
The mark burns.
The fire caught. The bodies burned. And my chest split open with heat that had nothing to do with the pyre.
I thought I was dying. Thought the dead had found a way to drag me down with them. Instead, I found myself branded with a mark I didn’t understand—a mating brand that glowed ember-bright for three days before going dormant, cold, waiting for a woman I convinced myself would never come.
Now it’s awake.
Now it blazes through my armor, reaching toward the woman who stands before me in the wreckage of the death warden compound. The wards outside have failed completely—I can feel the absence of them, the way the air has changed without their protective hum.
The mourning witch. Aradya.
She’s pale as bone, swaying on her feet, blood crusted on her lips from magic she shouldn’t have survived using. Ash coats her dark hair, her mourning clothes, the delicate lines of her throat. She should be terrified of me—every mourning witch in Blackreach knows the stories of the Ashwalker.
She isn’t afraid. Not anymore.
I should be grateful for that. Instead, I’m terrified of what it means.
The law is clear. Mourning witches who disturb the dead are executed, their bodies cremated to prevent their magic from lingering in bone or blood.
The Blackreach Council will demand her death the moment they learn what happened in the crypts.
Any death warden who refuses will be stripped of rank and burned on the same pyre.
I know this. I’ve enforced this law a dozen times. I’ve dragged witches to the Judgment Pyre myself, watched them burn, added their faces to the thousands I carry. That’s what the Ashwalker does. That’s who I am.
Who I was.
The mark won’t let me think about burning her. Every time my mind turns toward duty, toward the law, toward the decades of training that should make this decision automatic, the heat in my chest flares brighter.
She’s watching me with eyes that see too much. I can feel her pulse fluttering in her throat, rapid and unsteady. She’s exhausted, depleted, barely able to stand—but her gaze is sharp. Assessing. She’s reading me the way she reads the dead, searching for truths I’m not ready to speak.
“You can’t spare me.”
Her voice cuts through the chaos in my head. Steady despite the trembling in her hands. She lifts her chin, meeting my gaze without flinching.
“Whatever is happening between us—whatever this is—” She gestures at the light blazing in both our bodies.
“It doesn’t change what I did. I awakened a dead boy who killed his own mother.
I gave voice to a force that’s raising corpses across the city.
” Her shoulders stiffen. “The Council will demand my execution. And if you refuse to give it to them—”
“The Council can rot.”
The words come out before I can stop them. Harsh. Bitter. Two decades of suppressed doubt pouring through fractures I didn’t know existed.
She blinks. Her lips part, but no sound comes out.
I should stop. Should maintain the proper distance between a death warden and his prisoner. Should remember that I’m the Ashwalker, that I burn witches, that I don’t let them close enough to see past my armor.
I take another step anyway.
“The Council uses people like you.” My voice drops to a rumble that won’t carry beyond the two of us.
“They grant permits to mourning witches who pay the right bribes. They tolerate your kind because grief is profitable—because wealthy families will pay anything to hear their dead speak one more time. And then, when the magic becomes inconvenient, when someone dies who shouldn’t have, they execute the witch and pretend they never looked the other way. ”
“That’s how it’s always been.” Her voice is careful. Measured.
“It is.” I stop an arm’s length away. Close enough to see the rapid flutter of her pulse, the fine tremor in her hands, the way her pupils have dilated despite the dim light.
Close enough to catch the scent of her beneath the ash and blood—wildflowers and herbs, remnants of a life that has no place in this world of smoke and endings.
“Profit over principle. Convenience over justice. The Council doesn’t care about the dead.
They care about keeping the living quiet and compliant. ”
“And you?” Her head tilts. “You’ve served them since before I was born. Burned the witches they condemned. Followed every law they set down.”
“I have.” The admission tastes like ash. “I told myself it was necessary. Told myself the alternative was worse.” My teeth grind. “But I never looked too closely at who was making those laws. Or why.”
She studies me for a long moment. The wariness doesn’t leave her face—she’d be a fool to stop being wary of me—but a new awareness joins it. Recognition.
Or understanding. I’m not sure which would be worse.
“And now?”
“Now a worse threat is coming.” I force myself to focus on the crisis, on the puzzle pieces that have been clicking into place since the Undercroft. “The corpses in the crypts—they spoke about a king. A gravetide. An entity formed from every soldier buried in the mass graves beneath this city.”
Her face goes paler. The light beneath her ribs pulses faster.
“I heard it too.” Her voice drops to barely a whisper. “During the rite. It spoke through the Venn boy—used him as a door it was pushing open. I could feel it pressing against the Veil, trying to break through.”
“It’s been feeding.”
Her breath catches. “And every time I gave voice to a corpse—”
“You showed it what it was missing.” A laugh scrapes out of my throat, harsh and humorless. The sound echoes off the burned walls around us. “You demonstrated that the dead could speak, that grief could be heard, that closure was possible. And you made it hungry for what it couldn’t have.”
The silence stretches between us. I can see her working through the implications—the brilliance behind those exhausted eyes, calculating faster than anyone I’ve worked with.
She looks at me then with an expression that isn’t fear or pity or even understanding. It’s worse.
Hope.
“Then how do we stop it?”