Page 33 of Pumpkin Spiced Orc
The sky’s been brewing all afternoon. Clouds too low, too green, fat with something more than rain. The air tastes metallic, sharp at the edges, and the wind keeps changing direction like it doesn’t trust itself.
I know what’s coming.
I’ve known since she left.
The orchard needs an anchor. And the bond it’s tied to is unraveling.
Blood magic is ancient. It predates the glyphs and the covenants and even the orchards themselves. It’s not evil. Just wild. Demanding. A last resort for land that’s losing itself.
And right now, I can feel the center pulling.
The call isn’t in words—it’s in pulse, thrum, bone-deep ache. It drags at me, tugs at the line between shoulder and spine where the oldest glyph lives. The one I carved myself, without instruction. The one that links me to the orchard’s root system like I’m a damn sapling.
So I go.
I don’t take my coat. I don’t say goodbye. I just grab the old ritual blade from the wall of the barn, the one I haven’t usedsince the equinox rites five years ago, and walk straight into the storm.
The center of the orchard moves when it wants to. It’s not marked. Not fenced. But I feel it like gravity.
It’s darker here, thicker. The trees lean inward like a mouth preparing to speak. The breath-stones glow faintly beneath the moss, pulsing with a light that hurts to look at directly. The wind cuts like a blade. I drop to my knees and press my hand to the soil.
It shivers under me.
“I’m still here,” I say softly. “I never left. Even when she did.”
No answer. Just the rising sound of wind and leaves and something like a scream too deep for human throat.
“I don’t know what this orchard needs,” I go on, voice shaking now. “But if it’s blood… if that’s what keeps it breathing, then you’ll have it. All of it.”
I slash the blade across my palm and press it to the rootline, right where the breath-stones converge. My blood runs hot, soaking into the soil. The glyphs on my back blaze to life.
“Take it,” I whisper. “Take me if you have to. But leave her be. Let her find her way. Just… don’t make her suffer for my failings.”
The trees bow.
The wind stills.
And the storm breaks open like a heart too full to hold itself together anymore.
CHAPTER 21
IVY
The rain starts before I even reach the bend in the road, big, wet drops that slap against the windshield like they’re furious I took so long. The wipers are useless—smearing more than they’re clearing—and the dirt path that leads up toward the orchard has turned into something between a mudslide and a warzone. If I wasn’t in Lettie’s deathtrap of a truck, I’d be worried about getting stuck, but the old beast barrels forward like it knows exactly where I need to go and doesn’t give a damn about niceties like traction or sanity.
I don’t know what pulls me out of bed and into the storm. Maybe it’s the dream—the same one I’ve been having every night since I left, only sharper this time, more urgent. Garruk’s voice echoing in that way dreams do, deep and low and cracked with something I don’t want to name. Maybe it’s the way the orchard showed up in the corners of town—wilting vines on doorsteps, spoiled fruit where it shouldn’t be, whispers in the breeze that don’t belong to any wind I know.
Or maybe I just can’t take it anymore.
The aching.
The emptiness.
The way every morning feels like a mistake and every night stretches too long.
I don’t even knock when I pass the orchard gate. I don’t need to. The trees know me. Even now, even after everything, I can feel them shift when I step into the grove, their branches arching overhead like ribs curling protectively around something precious. Or maybe defensive. It’s hard to tell anymore. The orchard doesn’t feel like it used to. There’s a sharpness in the air, something wild and wrong, and when I close my eyes, I can feel the magic clawing at the edges of me like it wants answers I don’t have.
“Garruk?” I call, but the wind tears the word from my mouth before it can reach anything but branches.
