Drokhar
FIFTY
Istop. Turn toward a cluster of stones at the valley’s edge—a natural formation that might have been used as a command post, centuries ago. The pull is subtle but unmistakable. Not danger. Not exactly. But attention. Recognition.
A presence here recognizes me.
“To me specifically?”
“He says he knew your brother.”
The words hit me like a blade between the ribs.
Torval.
I haven’t heard his name spoken aloud since the battlefield beyond the Veil, since his voice emerged from Aradya’s throat telling me he forgave me for an argument we never got to resolve. The dog tags hang against my ribcage, beneath my armor, a weight I carry willingly now instead of as penance.
“Show me.”
Aradya leads me to the stone formation. Kneels beside a patch of earth that looks no different from any other. Places her hands against the soil and begins to whisper.
The dead man’s voice emerges from her throat a moment later.
“Stoneveil.” The timbre is old—not physically old, but old in the way voices get when they’ve been waiting centuries to speak. “You have the look of him. The same stubborn jaw. The same eyes that see too much and say too little.”
“You knew Torval.” I kneel beside Aradya, close enough to feel the magic radiating from her skin. “How?”
“Served under him. Border skirmish, forty years past. He saved my life three times before the battle that killed us both.” The voice carries a wry humor that sounds foreign coming from Aradya’s throat.
“Terrible strategist, your brother. Heart too big for the work we were doing. But loyal to the bone.”
I close my eyes. Torval was everything I’m not. Was. Is. The tenses blur when you’re talking about the dead.
“He forgave you, you know.” The soldier’s voice softens. “Told me about the fight you had before he left. Said he was going to apologize as soon as he got home. Said he didn’t mean any of the things he said.”
“He told me. Recently.”
A pause. Then: “So the rumors are true. There’s a death warden walking the roads with a mourning witch, giving the forgotten dead a chance to speak.” The soldier laughs—a dry, dusty sound. “Torval would have loved that. Always said the pyres were too quick. Always wanted more time for goodbyes.”
“What do you need?” The question emerges rougher than I intended. “What truth do you have left to speak?”
“None for myself. I died content—didn’t have anyone waiting for me, didn’t leave any words unspoken. Joined the army because there wasn’t anything else for a farmer’s third son with no land to inherit.” The soldier’s voice carries a note of wry acceptance. “But the others...”
The voice shifts, takes on the weight of responsibility. “There are thirty-seven of us buried in this formation. Most have moved on. A few haven’t. They’ve been waiting for someone who can hear them.”
Aradya opens her eyes. Meets mine. In her gaze I see the question she’s asking—whether I’m willing to stay, to listen, to do the work that used to be beneath me.
I nod.
We spend the rest of the afternoon beside the stone formation, giving voice to soldiers who died in a war no one remembers.
A sergeant who wants his son to know he was proud of him—the message will take us weeks to deliver, tracking down descendants who have no idea their ancestor fell in this valley.
A young private who never told the girl in his village that he loved her.
A general who questions, even in death, whether the battle was worth the lives it cost.
Each one is different. Each one has a story that no one else could tell.
The young private died thinking of a red door on a cottage by a stream.
He describes it in perfect detail as his voice emerges from Aradya’s throat—the way the paint was peeling near the bottom, the brass knocker shaped like a falcon, the garden his girl tended with herbs and wildflowers.
He wants her to know he thought of her at the end.
He wants someone to find out if she lived a good life.
The general is harder. He carries guilt that hasn’t faded with centuries of death—the weight of ordering men to their deaths, of making choices that seemed necessary in the moment but haunted him as soon as the battle ended.
He doesn’t want forgiveness. He wants acknowledgment that the war was a waste.
That all the deaths on both sides amounted to nothing.
“Tell them,” he says through Aradya’s mouth, his voice hollow with regret. “If you can. Tell anyone who will listen that war is never worth the price.”
I don’t know who to tell. The sides he fought for don’t exist anymore. The countries that sent these men to die have been absorbed by other nations, their borders erased by time and conquest. But I write his words in my record book anyway, beside the map notation that marks this grave at rest.
Some truths are worth preserving even when there’s no one left to hear them.
By sunset, they’re all at rest.
Aradya is exhausted—the kind of bone-deep weariness that comes from channeling too many voices in too short a time. I make camp at the valley’s edge, building a fire from scrub brush and dried grass, spreading our bedrolls in the lee of a boulder that blocks the worst of the wind.
She falls asleep against my shoulder before the last light fades from the sky.