I step forward. Into the throne’s shadow. Into the heart of the realm that wants my blood.
And I speak to the dead.
“I am Drokhar Stoneveil.” My voice echoes across the battlefield, amplified by magic I don’t understand but don’t need to. “The Ashwalker. The man who has burned more of you than any death warden in Blackreach’s history.”
The wandering soldiers stop. Turn. A thousand dead gazes fix on me—not with hunger, not with the King’s borrowed rage, but with attention. Real attention. Individual attention.
They’re listening.
“I sealed your graves without rites.” The words scrape my throat like broken glass. “Scattered your ashes without names. Denied you the closure you deserved—the chance to say goodbye, the chance to be remembered, the chance to rest.” I spread my arms. “And I am here to answer for it.”
The silence that follows is absolute. Even the King holds its thousand tongues, watching to see what I’ll do.
What am I doing?
The question echoes through me, but I already know the answer. Aradya showed me. Torval’s forgiveness showed me. The soldiers who attacked us in Blackreach showed me, when they stopped fighting to speak their final truths.
THIRTY-EIGHT
DROKHAR
The dead don’t want vengeance. They want to be heard.
“Speak to me.” I drop my blade. The curved iron lands in the blood-soaked earth with a thunk that seems impossibly loud. “Tell me what I took from you. Tell me what you needed to say before you died. Tell me everything—” I force the words past the knot in my throat. “And I will hear it. I will remember. I will carry your words until the day I join you.”
For a long moment, nothing happens.
Then the first soldier approaches.
He’s young. Barely more than a boy, his armor rusted through in places, his face half-dissolved by decay. But his eyes—the hollow sockets where eyes should be—fix on mine with an intensity that makes my ribcage ache.
His mouth works. Forms words after centuries of silence.
“I was going to be a father.”
The rasp cuts through me. Behind me, I hear Aradya’s sharp intake of breath.
“My wife—” The soldier’s lower lip trembles. “She was pregnant when I left. I told her I’d be home before the baby came. I promised. And then—” He gestures at himself. At the ruin of what he’s become. “I never got to hold my child.”
I burned you.
The realization crashes through me. Not this specific soldier, maybe, but others like him. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Young men who died with promises unfulfilled, their bodies dumped in mass graves before their families could find them, their ashes scattered by death wardens who never stopped to ask if they had anything left to say.
“I hear you.” The words feel inadequate, but they’re all I have. “Your child lived. They had children of their own, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Your bloodline continued even though you couldn’t be there to see it.”
I don’t know if that’s true. I have no way of knowing. But the soldier’s ruined face relaxes. The tension drains from his shoulders. The weight of centuries lifts from him in a single breath—all that grief, all that rage, all that desperate need to be remembered—released.
And then?—
He dissolves.
Not into dust. Into light. A soft glow that rises from where he stood and drifts upward, toward a sky that seems slightly less red than it was a moment ago. I watch it go. Watch him go. This stranger whose name I’ll never know, whose story I heard for the first time and the last.
Rest well, soldier. You’ve earned it.
The King makes a sound. A rumble of displeasure that shakes the ground beneath my feet.
“What are you doing?”