Page 56 of Built Orc Tough
She nods like she understands—which she probably does. “What kind?”
“Orc tradition,” I tell her. “Something with meaning.”
She perks up at that. “You remember the old rites?”
“Every one.” I grab a bundle of dried ashleaf and start breaking it down with my thumb. “We start with yarrow—for healing that doesn’t ask for permission. Then wild hyssop. Cleanses the past. Smells like honesty.”
“What else?”
“Dust sage, for courage. Mint root, because nothing stays buried. And bellflower.” My voice dips on that one. “Because it means come home.”
Terra’s quiet for a long moment.
Then she stands, brushes the dirt from her knees, and disappears into the shed.
When she comes back, she’s holding a bundle wrapped in silk—deep green and tied with a knot I recognize. Orc ceremonial bind.
She hands it to me without a word.
I open it slowly.
Inside are seeds. Herbs I thought had gone extinct in the northern plains. Lira moss. Wolf’s tear. Emberroot. Each one rare, stubborn, beautiful in its own way.
“These were hers,” she says, nodding toward the horizon. “Our mother’s. She saved them. Told me they were for ‘when the world needed grounding.’”
I can’t speak.
Terra doesn’t press.
We plant them together.
Slow. Intentional. Hands brushing, shoulders bumping, breaths syncing in that old rhythm we used to have before everything fell apart.
By the time the last seed is in the soil, the stars are out. The garden smells like memory and magic and something just beginning.
“You think she’ll come back?” Terra asks as we sit back against the bench.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly.
But I reach into my pocket, pull out the carving I kept from the shop—her flower, her stem, her impossible wildness—and place it at the edge of the garden.
“If she does,” I murmur, “I want her to see this first.”
The carving’s done by sunrise.
I sit on the back porch, the sky painted in slow golds and silvers, while the birds start their fussing like they know something big’s about to shift. My hands ache from the hours I spent hunched over it—shaping, sanding, staining—but it’s the good kind of ache. The kind that says you didn’t give up when you wanted to.
It’s more than just a carving now.
It’s a piece of her world and mine knotted together in stubborn wood. The frame is built from juniper branches—protective, grounding—wrapped at the base with braided ivy cord I found drying in her greenhouse. Inside it, pressed into resin, is a delicate mosaic of the herbs we planted last night: yarrow, sage, bellflower, lira moss. In the center sits the wooden bloom I first made for her, now fitted with a crystal she once called “completely unnecessary and thus absolutely perfect.”
It’s not traditional.
It’s not flashy.
But it’s us.
And I don’t feel like I’m running from something. I feel like I’m building toward it.
