Page 15 of Orc’s Moon

I cross to it. Set my hand against the statue’s base out of the same instinct that moved my hand at the Black Gates — not expectation, not really, just the pull of a question I need answered even if I’m not ready for what answering it costs.

The moonstone floor responds.

Quiet, this time — nothing like the flood that answered at the gates. A single thread of silver traces out from beneath my palm, tracking along the floor’s veins toward the chamber’s edge, faint enough that I’d doubt I saw it at all if Lyessa hadn’t gone completely still across the room, her hand frozen an inch from the wall she was reading.

“Vorren.” Barely a whisper. “It’s doing that for you. Not the room. You.”

“I know.”

“You don’t sound like you know. You sound like a man watching his own hand do something he didn’t order it to.”

She isn’t wrong. A lifetime of discipline built on the certainty that I control every motion my body makes, and this room’s just proven that certainty was only ever true because nothing had asked me a real question yet.

I don’t know how to price what it costs me to be recognized twice by things older than my entire bloodline. I only have the fact of it, silver light fading slowly back into stillness under my palm, and my own hand still shaking faintly against cold stone in a way I can’t seem to order it to stop. Twice now, something ancient has looked at me and decided I belong to it before I’ve had a chance to decide anything for myself.

It was this. Whatever this room turns out to be once it finishes deciding what to do with me.

EIGHT

LYESSA

The names don’t make sense until they do, and then they don’t stop making sense, and I have to sit down on the cold moonstone floor because my knees won’t hold the weight of what I’m reading.

I’d assumed honor roll. Every civilization that ever raised a wall this grand carved the names of kings on it somewhere, generals, high priests, the handful of men important enough to outlive their own bones in stone. That’s not what this is. Each name sits beside a title and a span of years — five years, most of them, some shorter, none longer than a decade — and beneath every span, in smaller script, the next name takes over the same title like a relay baton passed hand to hand down a thousand years of deliberate, unglamorous turnover.

Keeper of the Northern Granaries. Voice of the Dockworkers’ Guild. First Reader of the Public Archive. Seat of the Half-Fae Delegation. Ordinary offices, ordinary people, each stepping down on schedule instead of dying with the title still in their fist.

One name near the base of the wall catches and holds me longer than the rest — Orinna Duskfell, Keeper of the Northern Granaries, six years, followed without gap by Tomas Ashgrove, six years, followed by a hand I don’t recognize, six years again — three lifetimes of grain distribution passed hand to hand without a single year unaccounted for, without a single name repeating twice in a row to grab more than its share. Somewhere in this city, six years at a time, someone decided feeding people mattered enough to do properly and not enough to fight over.

“They gave it back.” I need to hear it outside my own head to believe it. “Every single office on this wall changed hands peacefully. No coups. No dynasties. Someone held power for exactly as long as they were supposed to and then let someone else have a turn.”

Seven years I spent defending a theory nobody wanted to hear — that the histories taught in every royal university were curated, not complete, that entire centuries had been quietly edited down to whatever made the current order look inevitable. Seven years of committees telling me I was chasing coincidence, that a civilization simply doesn’t govern itself this way and survive, that someone always ends up wanting more than their share and taking it by force because that’s what power is for. I believed them, some nights. Not fully. Never fully. But enough to lie awake wondering if I’d spent a career proving nothing at all.

This wall answers every one of those nights, carved in stone thick enough that no committee will ever get to argue it away again.

Vorren crosses to crouch beside me, near enough now that his shoulder brushes mine, reading the names over my head like he’s hoping they’ll rearrange themselves into something easier to hold. “That’s not how power works. Anywhere. In any kingdom I’ve ever served.”

“That’s precisely my point.” My voice cracks halfway through the sentence, and I let it. “Every history I’ve ever been taught treats power like something you take and keep until somebody stronger takes it from you. This wall says power doesn’t have to work that way. It’s a choice people stopped making somewhere between then and now, and somebody made very sure the choice got erased along with the city that made it.”

“You’re saying the Covenant didn’t just get buried.”

“I’m saying it got buried on purpose by people who couldn’t stand the idea of the rest of the world finding out sharing power was ever survivable.” The words come faster than I can slow them down, seven years of academic caution burning off in real time. “This isn’t a myth, Vorren. This is proof. A working, functioning, thousand-year proof that people don’t have to hoard control to keep from destroying each other, and somebody decided that proof was more dangerous than any weapon this city ever built.”

A long moment passes before he answers. When he does, the words land low and quiet, weight instead of volume behind them. “My whole family stood guard over evidence they’d have been killed for reading.”

“Your whole family stood guard over evidence somebody desperately needed kept quiet.” I meet his eyes, and whatever’s sitting in his face right now — grief, fury, a man watching everything he was ever certain of crack down the middle — I recognize it, because I’ve been wearing some version of it since the moment silver ink surfaced on that damaged parchment.

“Six generations.” The number seems to only just finish adding itself up behind his eyes as he says it. “Six generations of my family stood exactly where I’m standing and never once got to know what they were actually protecting.”

“They protected it anyway. That has to count for something.”

“It does. I’m just not ready to decide how much yet.” His fingers curl loose at his side, empty, like they want something solid to hold and can’t find it in this room. “Whatever’s guarded next, under my watch, gets guarded with the truth attached to it. I’ve decided that much, standing here.”

Whatever that costs him, it lands in my chest too hard to name, and there isn’t time to try. “We need to read every name on this wall. We need to copy as much of it as we can before⁠—”

The floor shudders beneath our boots.

Not the deep, distant groan from the bathhouse. This is close, immediate, a resonance that climbs up through the moonstone into my palms flat against the floor — stronger than the market district tremor, coordinated in a way loose stone never manages, and moving. Toward us. I feel it change direction like a thing enormous choosing a destination instead of merely settling into one.