Snow started to fall— first in delicate specks, then in drifting sheets, soft as whispers. The sky had turned the color of wet parchment, its pale hue leaking down to kiss the rooftops and the curled iron fences that lined the narrow street. Trees, naked of their leaves, stood with arms outstretched to the heavens like ancient monks receiving benediction, while chimneys bled thin ribbons of smoke that curled and vanished into the cold hush. Streetlamps flickered on with a golden hum, their warm halos illuminating the white dust as it tumbled gently through the air, clinging to stone, metal, and skin.
The man stood with Kimmy beneath the amber glow, the girl tucked into his side, wrapped in her wool coat and laughter. Her scarf fluttered in the breeze, striped red and cream, half-wrapped around her neck, half trailing behind her like a ribbon caught in time. They were still. Just a moment. Just them. The world seemed to pause, silent, reverent, as if nature itself was holding its breath for their quiet joy. Snowflakes caught in Kimmy's hair, melting into glistening droplets on her lashes. She turned to look at him, and her smile was soft and knowing, a quiet thing blooming in the cold.
Out of nowhere, a dapple grey horse thundered through the snow-veiled street with the fury of war, its approach as sudden as it was violent— a storm bound in flesh and steel. Muscles churned beneath polished barding etched with heraldic patterns long forgotten by time, each stride a percussive crack that split the stillness. Frost clung to the creature's mane, and steam blasted from its flared nostrils like smoke billowing from the lungs of a forge. Its iron-clad hooves shattered the delicate crust of snow, gouging deep furrows into the once-pristine street, before slamming into the man with the force of divine judgment— no warning, no time to even draw breath.
He was weightless for just one second, and then the world snapped back. His body was hurled sideways, arms flailing, legs kicking wildly in the air, coat twisting around him like a broken sail. He hit the ground with a brutal crack, spine folding, bones jarred loose inside his skin. The snow didn't cushion. It crushed, clinging to him like cold ash.
Kimmy's scream erupted behind him, shrill and raw, as if her very soul had been torn open. She had been flung, too— but not with the same merciless precision. Her scarf, loosely knotted around her neck in girlish haste, unwound mid-fall like fate itself intervening. It slipped free, fluttering wildly as her tiny form twisted away from the worst of the impact. She crashed into a mound of snow with a soft thud, rolling into the drift like a doll discarded, half-buried, half-sobbing.
But the man didn't move.
The hoof had struck him dead center— ribs caving under the blow, something inside giving way with a wet, unnatural sound. The breath tore from his lungs in a jagged exhale, and then nothing. His eyes were open. His mouth, too. But he made no sound. Only the faint hiss of snowfall filled the void. Each flake fell with eerie grace, soft and slow, landing on his bloodied lips, his shattered cheek, the crimson blooming through the snow beneath him like petals of a poisoned flower.
The horse stood above, steam still curling from its body. It did not move now. It watched. Its breath billowed in short gusts, a terrible calm following the chaos. The silence that returned was not peace— it was judgment. A stillness that throbbed like a wound. The snow kept falling, indifferent and beautiful, as if it hadn't just witnessed a moment torn from the fabric of the living.
Above him, the horse reared slightly, plated legs kicking snow and steam into the air, its armored visage looming like a demon sculpted from steel and frost. The chamfron— etched with ancient sigils— caught the moonlight in cold gleams, as though it, too, were alive and aware. From the creature's nostrils burst twin jets of vapor, thick and furious, ghosting into the darkening sky like smoke from some infernal forge. The world had shifted. The snow no longer felt like a blanket— it was a canvas, ruined. Beautiful no more. It lay desecrated and marred, churned by hooves and red-stained from the broken thing lying beneath. Silence hadn't returned. Something colder had taken its place. Not quiet. Not peace. Observation. Something vast and unseen was watching the scene unfold with ancient dispassion.
The man, barely conscious, forced his eyes upward. He had to see.
There, atop the dapple grey beast, sat a towering rider, a statue carved of shadow and smoke, unmoving, unreadable. Cloaked in dark leathers and heavy fur that fluttered faintly in the wind, the man looked down at the man not with curiosity, but with judgment. His face was hidden, yet the weight of his gaze pressed down like a physical thing. Behind him, sound gathered like a storm. Hooves. Many. A dozen horses, maybe more, emerged from the falling snow— each one chestnut and clad in full ceremonial barding. Their armor was ceremonial and practical— caparisoned in richly dyed cloth weighed down by frost, their chamfrons shaped like snarling beasts, their crinets coiled tightly along their thick necks, flanchards hugging muscular flanks, croupiers shielding haunches like plate skirts. Plumes bobbed and swayed in the breeze, pale streamers that danced like spirits. The snow made it all the more surreal, like they had ridden out of a dream— or a nightmare.
The lead rider moved.
He dismounted with a fluidity that betrayed no hesitation. His boots struck the ground like twin gongs of judgment— one, two— and he began to walk toward the man. There was no urgency, only purpose. This was a man who had walked battlefields, who had stood before kings and traitors and decided fates with the flick of a hand. He was not fast. He was inevitable.
Behind him, the soldiers spread out in formation— tight, rehearsed, no wasted movement. They formed a ring around their captain and the broken body in the snow. No orders were given. None were needed.
Some of the soldiers were painfully young— barely out of boyhood, faces still round with youth, but eyes strained with effort as they tried to harden into men. One nudged his companion with a smirk and a weak laugh, the sound hollow. Another stood chewing a strip of dried meat, his face blank, as if this were just another shift in an endless watch. And yet, beneath the surface, fear trembled like an undercurrent. Bravado had its limits.
Apart from them, a figure stood rigid and alone. Broad-shouldered, thick-armed, his coat faded from age and war, Sergeant MacDoul watched with the quiet ache of a man who had lived long enough to regret. His arms were crossed, face unreadable but carved from something older than stone, etched with the years, lined with fatigue. He said nothing. But his silence was heavy. He watched. And that was enough.
One of the soldiers swaggered forward, boots crunching into the bloodied snow like they owned the world. His face twisted into something wicked— part grin, part snarl, all venom. He crouched, looming over the man's broken form, eyes gleaming with contempt.
"Look at 'im now," he spat, voice syrupy with mockery. "Not so proud, are ye, merchant-man? Wasn't smirking when we dragged that scroll from yer filthy hands, eh?"
The man didn't move. His body lay twisted like discarded cloth, crimson threading down his chin from a split lip. He blinked, barely, the frost clinging to his lashes. But his gaze wasn't here— it was somewhere unreachable, far from their taunts.
A sharp, rasping laugh cut through the air like a blade. Another soldier stepped into the circle, teeth bared in a grin too wide to be sane.
"Tell us again, trader-boy," he jeered, voice shrill and cracked with cruelty. "What were ye selling, eh? Poison for our wells? Maps to burn our homes?"
Still, the man gave them nothing. Just the sound of shallow, trembling breath and the faint twitch of pain behind glazed eyes.
A third approached— bigger than the rest, brutish and red-faced. He carried a dented metal bucket and sloshed it with theatrical flair. No warning. No ceremony. Just rage. The water hit like ice-forged shrapnel, crashing against the man's chest in a shockwave of cold. His body jolted violently, a strangled gasp wrenching from his lungs as he writhed, spine arching, teeth chattering uncontrollably. But not a word. Not a plea.
"Still breathin'," someone muttered from the back, their smirk faltering. "Tough little rat."
But the laughter didn't last. The man's lips began to move, barely. A rasp. A whisper. Fragile, but slicing.
"Do what you must," he croaked, voice splintered and dry. "I have no country left. Only ghosts. You're just men… killing men for lines in the dirt. For ghosts in crowns."
The silence that followed was absolute. It didn't just fall— it crushed. The kind of silence that stripped the air from your lungs and made boys feel like murderers. Even the smirking ones looked away, suddenly remembering their boots.
Then, from behind them, came the slow, deliberate crunch of heavy steps.
Sergeant MacDoul moved like a man bearing his own gallows. The others parted before him without a word, without breath, like shadows retreating from flame. He knelt beside the fallen man, knees pressing into the snow, and studied the ruin of the man's body. The broken ribs. The welts. The blood.
When he spoke, it wasn't loud— but it hit harder than any shout.
"What they did to you," he said quietly, "wasn't justice. It was fear. And fear... makes cowards of kings and dogs of men. I won't ask you to forgive it. But I'll not lie to myself about it either."
The man, barely holding on, turned his head. It was a tiny movement, but enough. Their eyes met, not as an enemy and a soldier. Just men— shattered, spent.
"Then you understand," The man said, voice thin as smoke.
MacDoul held his gaze for a long, terrible second. Then he nodded once, slow and bitter.
"Aye," he murmured. "Too well."
Suddenly, without a word or the faintest breath of wind to herald it, MacDoul raised his hand. No flourish. No barked order. Just a single flick of his fingers— sharp, deliberate, final. It wasn't the gesture of a man commanding soldiers. It was the gesture of a judge sealing a sentence, of a priest snapping shut the book of life.
The effect was instant.
Four soldiers dismounted in unison, their armor clinking like distant chains. They moved with grim efficiency, not one of them meeting Taejun's eyes as they approached. But it was the last man— dragging himself down from his mount— that turned the silence into dread. He was taller than the rest, gaunt, with a hood pulled tight against the cold. And in his gloved hands, he carried it. A rope.
It trailed behind him like a living thing— coiled and thick and damp with something darker than snowmelt. It didn't just drag through the snow; it gouged through it, carving a winding path like a snake in heatless ash. Each heavy length slapped the earth with a wet thud, and the wind, though there had been none before, seemed to rise for this alone, stirring the frayed ends and making them dance in slow, cruel spirals.
It wasn't just rope. It was execution incarnate. The kind of cord that knew too many necks, that had soaked up the breath of the dying, fiber by fiber. It smelled faintly of sweat, old blood, and the ghosts of gallows past. No man should've held it like that— but he did. Casually. Like it was his child.
The man watched it draw closer, his breathing shallow, heart a dull drumbeat in his ears. The rope left no illusion about its purpose. It wasn't there to bind. It was there to end.
The snow continued to fall, soft and silent, as if nature itself refused to witness what came next. The courtyard lay sunken at the edge of the crumbling city, its stone tiles warped and broken from centuries of storms and footsteps now long buried by dust. Faint twilight draped the scene in a dull, bruised glow, as if even the sky mourned what was about to unfold. The wind did not stir. Birds had gone silent. There was no audience— only the ghost of one, imagined in the silence.
The accused spy, the man, had long stopped speaking. He knelt in the dirt like something left behind by time itself, his limbs folded beneath him with a sluggish, uneven tremble. His skin, what little remained visible beneath the blood and swelling, looked pale and ruined, tender like something peeled. One eye was sealed shut with purple flesh, the other barely open, dull and distant, seeing only shapes, light, maybe memories. His mouth twitched with dry gasps, but no words came. His breath smelled like iron and rot.
MacDoul stood a few paces behind him, unmoving, back turned to the dying man as though facing him might shatter something long buried. In his calloused hands, the rope waited. It coiled on the ground like a sluggish, sleeping serpent— crude, frayed, and stiff with dampness. He stared at it for what felt like hours, his expression carved from stone. When he bent to pick it up, he did so slowly, as though it weighed more than a sword, more than a corpse. As though it carried the entire weight of the war.
He didn't speak. Not loud. Not at first. His lips moved soundlessly as he stared at the fibers, his fingers tightening over them until his knuckles paled. Then, beneath his breath, so faint it might have been mistaken for the wind: Damn this rope. Damn this war.
He moved to the kneeling man with the slow, resigned steps of a man walking toward his own punishment. The rope came down gently around the battered neck— not tight, just present, just inevitable. The man did not flinch. His head lolled slightly, as if offering itself. There was a pause, and in that stillness, MacDoul's fingers hesitated at the knot. He lingered— not because he feared the task, but because something inside him had cracked. A splinter of the past lodged like shrapnel in his heart.
His gaze lifted— not toward the man at his knees, not toward the bloodied ground or the bitter sky— but beyond, beyond all of it, past the present and into the grey haze of memory. His eyes fixed on a figure crumpled in the dust. Kimmy. So small against the yawning expanse of the world. She knelt as though the earth had swallowed her knees, her little hands limp at her sides, her head bowed low, hair hanging like a curtain to shield her face from grief too enormous to bear. Her doll lay forgotten in the dirt beside her, half-soaked in red.
MacDoul's breath caught, a brittle thing in his throat. His eyes darkened, and he turned away— not because he didn't see her, but because he saw her too clearly. Because he saw her, the one Kimmy reminded him of. The one he'd once sworn to protect. The one who would have stopped this.
He sighed, deep and quiet, the kind of sound that seemed to sink into the bones of the air itself. His shoulders twitched as if to shake off the thought, but it clung to him, stubborn and cruel. He muttered softly to the silence, his voice breaking not from fear but from the erosion of something once human.
"Milady, would've wanted something gentler," he said, like a prayer to a grave that no longer answered. His throat tightened. "But there's no gentleness left in me."
His hand closed around the rope. He didn't glance back. Not at the broken man wheezing behind him. Not at Kimmy, whose sobs would come too late. Not at the watching eyes peeking from doorways, nor the dimming sun that still tried to cast light on the ugliness of men. He simply turned, the knot firm in his hand, and began to walk into the long dark of the road, dragging behind him a silence louder than any scream.
The man lurched forward beneath the weight of death, coughing until it fractured into a wet, rattling wheeze. His knees scraped against stone, peeling away skin that had long stopped protesting. Behind him trailed a ribbon of blood, smeared and broken, vanishing into puddles and mud. And so began the long march— if one could name such cruelty with something as noble as a "march." It was not a ceremony. It was not punishment. It was a desecration stretched over miles. A pilgrimage of humiliation, dragged through the bowels of a city that pretended to look away while secretly savoring every moment.
The rope bit into his throat, jerking each time MacDoul moved forward. It wasn't a noose— it was a leash. He choked, not just on the tightening hemp, but on the grime and rot of the streets, on his own blood that painted his lips like war paint. His jaw smacked against cobblestones, teeth snapping in protest. His legs flopped behind him like broken limbs of a marionette with its strings cut. Somewhere along the way, his cries dulled into guttural murmurs. Not words. Just the body trying to remember how to suffer.
They passed through mud-churned roads where the wheels of wagons had carved old wounds into the ground. Through alleyways reeking of urine and the breath of the dead, where rot climbed the walls like veins along the carcass of the city. Flies buzzed close, drawn not just to the trail of blood but to the stench of slow death. Dogs howled in the distance, sensing something sacred being torn apart.
Windows cracked open. Faces peered from behind linen curtains and warped shutters. Children stared, eyes wide, fingers curled around wooden frames. Some turned away. Others watched with morbid silence, perhaps learning too early what power looked like. Whispers followed them— traitor, spy, deserved, no trial. But no one stepped into the street.
And MacDoul— MacDoul never turned his head. His stride remained steady, mechanical. His boots were caked with mud and the blood of the man behind him. His grip on the rope never wavered. There was no anger in it. No satisfaction. Just an iron certainty, a grim ritual carried out by hands that had long stopped believing they were clean. The King's will had been clear. Make it public. Make it last. This was not an execution. It was a performance. A message carved in flesh and stone, written with each labored breath that hissed through the dying man's teeth.
At one point, the man tried to crawl— not to escape, but to stand, to face the sky, perhaps for one last look. But the rope yanked him down again, and this time his head struck a stone with a dull crack. He didn't cry out. Just whimpered, a sound like wind dragging through hollow wood.
MacDoul's jaw clenched. His eyes remained forward, yet something in his shoulders had changed— stiffened, as if each step now cost him more than just muscle. He whispered something no one could hear, a name maybe, or a prayer he no longer believed in. And still he walked.
For over an hour, they passed through the heart of the city, a man and his ghost. By the time they reached the courtyard square, the sun had begun to fall. And behind them, the dragging trail they left was not just dirt and blood.
It was a memory. It was a shame. It was a silence that would never wash off.
People watched. From windows. From doorways. Behind mothers' skirts and tavern shutters. Some averted their eyes. Others stared in still, stony silence. No one moved to stop it. No one spoke. A dog howled once, far off, and fell quiet.
MacDoul's boots turned black with blood and soil. His grip never faltered, though once— only once his shoulders trembled. He said something beneath his breath, but it was lost to the road.
And at the far edge of the city, where the path grew darker, where the dragging left a long smear across the gravel, a little girl watched it all. She stood behind a broken fence, trembling, clutching a pale linen doll whose face had long since worn away. Her eyes were wide— too wide, too young for this. Her name was Kimmy.
She didn't cry at first. She didn't move. But as the dragging man's body passed her and left behind only silence and the stink of blood and death, something inside her gave way.
Her knees buckled, and she collapsed onto the dirt, her tiny hands shaking as she pressed them over her face. The sobs came violently, suddenly, sharply, helplessly. She didn't scream. Her tears poured soundlessly, her shoulders hitching with each breath like a child drowning in air. The doll slipped from her arms, landing in a puddle of blood that slowly soaked into its blank cotton body.
No one came to comfort her. No one noticed.
And MacDoul, somewhere far ahead, kept walking with that rope in hand, the rope that dragged not just a corpse, but a piece of his own soul. The dusk had turned to night. The final stretch of the road awaited. And still, he didn't look back.
The hill path coiled like a dying serpent toward the edge of the lower village, where crooked cottages leaned into the wind and shed roofs sagged under time's weight. Smoke drifted from their chimneys in thin, listless strands, swallowed by a sky thick with ash and evening. No birds sang. No dogs barked. Only the low drag of boots and the sickening pull of rope.
MacDoul walked at the front, shoulders broad beneath his weather-stained cloak, hands rough on the tether. Behind him, the condemned man stumbled forward, knees raw, lips cracked and bleeding. The rope bit at his neck like a living thing, tugging him from darkness into darker places still. His face was barely human now— swollen, crusted with blood, smeared with the grime of every mile he'd been forced to crawl.
And then, like ghosts called by the scent of pain, the villagers appeared.
They emerged from doorways, from behind barns and fences, from the shadows of apple trees gone feral. Old men with rusted pitchforks clenched in knotted fists. Mothers, sleeves rolled to elbows, clutching sickles meant for wheat but hungering for something far redder. Boys, barely out of childhood, held shovels like spears, their jaws clenched and eyes hollow with inherited hate. Not one wore armor. But they had dressed themselves in something harder: fury, raw and ragged, layered over grief like old wounds turned gangrenous.
A woman stepped forward— middle-aged, with hair like tangled wire and hands that had buried too many. Her voice cracked as it rose, not from weakness but from a sorrow sharpened into rage.
"That him?" she spat, eyes burning into the bruised figure. "That's the rat who sold names to the Caerwyn lot? My brother's buried with a blade in his throat because of filth like him."
Before the air could settle, a stone flew. A boy, no older than sixteen, flung it with shaking hands, and it struck the prisoner in the shoulder with a wet thud. He flinched, barely, and then another stone came, and another, until a grim hail began to fall from calloused hands.
Someone near the back shouted— voice thick with venom and drink, or maybe just grief. "Should've dragged him through fire, MacDoul. Not mud. Not this snowfield."
MacDoul stopped. His boots dug into the dirt as he turned, slow and deliberate, like a mountain deciding whether to break. His eyes scanned the crowd, not wild, not furious. Measured. Cold and heavy. His hand curled tighter around the rope, veins rising like roots beneath the skin. In that moment, the condemned man seemed to fade. All MacDoul saw was a mob foaming at the mouth of war's grave.
"Enough," he said.
Not shouted. Not barked. But spoken with the force of a guillotine falling. The word didn't echo— it landed. The kind of silence that followed wasn't stillness; it was fear. Torches flickered. Wind shifted. The boy with the shovel looked down at his boots. The woman stepped back, breath caught in her throat.
MacDoul turned once more, silent and slow, and with a single pull, the rope snapped taut like a whip of fate. The prisoner lurched forward with a hoarse, broken gasp, his body jolting as though dragged not by a man, but by the will of something far older and more cruel. His feet barely moved now— his legs were too ruined to walk properly. Instead, he was hauled like slaughterhouse waste, his body slumped and twitching, his breath escaping in thin, rattling strings. Blood dripped steadily from his nose and mouth, painting a jagged trail in the dirt behind him like some blasphemous offering to forgotten gods who no longer answered.
The villagers came, as they always did. Not as mourners, not even as witnesses— but as scavengers of spectacle. They followed in a loose, whispering procession, their eyes catching the torchlight and reflecting it like wolves just beyond the treeline. The flames painted the hills in quivering orange, casting twisted shadows that danced like devils with broken backs. Some among them hummed the old war hymn, the one their fathers sang as they bled in ditches and froze in trenches— though now it came out thin, sour, hollow. A few cursed under their breath. Not at MacDoul. Not even at the prisoner. But at the war. At the grief. The way things used to be, before mercy became a luxury.
And then— a moment. A small child, barefoot and filthy, ran ahead of the crowd. His face was smeared with ash, his ribs showed through his shirt. He bent low, scooped up a fistful of earth, and flung it with all the force his little arm could summon. It struck the man's back with a wet thud, sticking to the raw, exposed skin where the whip had opened him. The man flinched, a twitch more than a reaction. He made no sound. No protest. The dirt clung to him like judgment, like shame smeared into open flesh.
MacDoul saw it. Of course, he saw it. But he didn't stop the boy. He didn't scold him. He didn't even glance over his shoulder. His eyes stayed forward, locked on a path that was more memory than road, more penance than duty. His jaw was tight, the muscles clenched hard beneath the stubble and the grime, and every step he took seemed heavier than the last— each bootfall dragging with it not just a man, but every order he'd followed, every face he'd forgotten, every mercy he'd buried.
The night deepened behind them, curling along the ground like smoke, like guilt. And with it came the silence. Not the hush of reverence, but the suffocating quiet of people too afraid to speak, too tired to care, too used to horror to call it by name. MacDoul walked on, not as a soldier, not as a hero, but as a man bound to the weight of something irreversible. And behind him, the body dragged, limp and slow, tethered by the rope that now felt more like a spine of fate than any manmade cord.
The march was not over. But something inside it already was.
Along the path that curved around the last breath of the hill, a figure moved from the edge of the torchlight. An old man, stooped with years, stepped beside MacDoul. He leaned on a hayfork rusted at the prongs, his eyes clouded but still bright with memory.
"You were once kind," the old man murmured, his voice soft as moss. "I remember. Before the war sank its teeth in your bones."
MacDoul didn't turn his head. His eyes stayed fixed on the castle that loomed ahead like a wound carved into the sky.
"It changed everyone," he said, low and toneless. "Kindness doesn't hold back the knives in the dark."
They walked in silence for a time— one dragging death, the other dragging years. Then the old man peeled away, swallowed back into the fog of villagers trailing behind.
The slope rose beneath them, cold and sharp. The wind grew cruel. When they reached the ridge, the land fell away and the castle revealed itself fully— its towers silhouetted against a sea of bruised clouds. High above, a raven circled, its wings like a curse scrawled across the sky.
Behind MacDoul, the man stirred. Blood caked his lips. His eyes, swollen to slits, blinked against the wind.
"You said…" His voice cracked like old parchment. "Milady. Who is she?"
MacDoul kept walking.
"A name I shouldn't have spoken," he replied. "Not on a night like this."
The man gave a ghost of a smile, crooked and bleeding.
"She'd be ashamed."
MacDoul stopped. Just a breath. Just long enough to hear the ache settle deeper in his bones.
"Aye," he said quietly, eyes still forward. "She would. A man like me… has less worth than the dirt that buries."
Behind them, the crowd began to thin. No torches beyond the last field. No voices beyond the wind. The villagers knew where their wrath ended— and where judgment began.
The path narrowed. The cold grew sharper. As they reached the castle gates, the guards stood like statues, their armor dark with frost and silence. They didn't ask. They didn't look. They stepped aside as if it were a ritual.
MacDoul passed through, dragging the man behind him. His breath came heavy. His shoulders sagged. His boots hit the stone with hollow finality.
He paused. Looked up at the towers. Spoke to the man behind him, and maybe to the silence above.
"We're here. If you ever had prayers… say 'em now."
He hauled the rope again. The man's body scraped over the stones, leaving a trail of blood behind like a thread unspooling toward ruin. The wind screamed through the walls. A bell rang from somewhere high above— deep, solemn, slow. Each toll fell like the closing of a chapter. The light was almost gone.
The rest of the soldiers saw as the rope tightened on MacDoul's hand as he kept walking.
Through winding corridors carved from stone older than memory, MacDoul walked, dragging death behind him. The walls were slick with condensation, but that wasn't what made them shine— there were stains beneath the moisture, darker than mold, older than lichen. Blood had cried here once, and the stone had remembered. These were halls that had echoed with shrieking centuries ago and had never quite stopped. You could feel it in the bones. Every step MacDoul took was muffled by centuries of grief.
The light above dimmed from dusk into a bruised violet, and then to black. Not the gentle black of night— but the oppressive, living dark, where shadows crawled without light and silence was not silence, but something breathing very, very softly. The rope in MacDoul's hand trembled. Not from his grip, but from the weight behind it. The man was making wet, rasping noises now. Not words. Not begging. Just the kind of sounds a body makes when it no longer knows how to live but hasn't yet learned how to die. His neck burned red where the rope sawed deeper with every stumble, every slip. The flesh bruised and split like rotted fruit.
MacDoul didn't speak. Didn't turn. There was nothing left to say. Words would have spoiled the sacredness of the horror.
And then— light.
Faint at first. Unnatural. Not like torchlight should be. It shimmered ahead in the distance, rising slowly from the ground like fireflies caught in mourning fog. The flames wavered without wind, each torch flickering erratically, like it was trying to breathe in a room already full of ghosts. One flame guttered low and turned blue, just for a moment. Then snapped back to orange— feeble, frightened.
The air turned colder. But it wasn't just temperature. It was a cruelty, a bitterness, like the breath of a dead mother in a nightmare. The world seemed to shrink. Sound dulled. The rope felt heavier. And up ahead, it stood.
An iron gate.
A monolith of sorrow and judgment, rising high into the night like the ribcage of some buried god. It wasn't built. It had been conjured. Forged not by men, but by something older and crueler. Its surface was a tapestry of torment, etched in relief so deep, it was as though the metal itself had screamed while being carved. Blades rose from the mouths of crowned corpses. Wolves with blind eyes and yawning maws peered from the corners, salivating iron tears. Crucified angels hung from barbed chains, their heads bowed and twisted backwards, wings cleaved to bone. They did not guard the gate. They suffered on it.
The whole door wept. Condensation beaded down its face in trembling streaks, but it smelled wrong— like rust, like sweat, like sorrow.
MacDoul stepped forward alone. He could feel the man's breathing— ragged, sharp— as if the man had realized, only now, that the walk would end. And what waited beyond was worse than anything behind.
MacDoul's hand rose and touched the gate.
It was colder than stone, colder than gravewater. It sucked the warmth from his fingers. He pressed his palm flat, despite the pain, and spoke. His voice was calm. Too calm. The calm of a man who knew damnation on a first-name basis.
"By command of His Majesty," he said, slow and solemn, "I return with the accused. May the gates yield."
The words hung there, trapped in the air like smoke from a burnt offering. And then— nothing.
Not for a second. For eternity.
Even the wind stopped moving. Time held its breath. A silence so deep it rang in the ears like a scream turned inside out. Somewhere far behind them, a torch fell from a villager's hand and hissed against the wet stone. No one bent to pick it up.
Then, the door moved.
Not like a hinge. Like a thing waking up. It groaned— high and long— like metal wailing in protest, or bones grinding in their sockets. The sound burrowed into the gut, a sound that didn't just echo— it crawled. Rust and rot gave way as the gate slowly parted, revealing not a chamber, not a hall, but a mouth. A gaping blackness so pure it felt wrong. There was no light beyond the threshold. Just the void. The scent of old breath escaped— cold, sour, ancient. The stink of sealed death and buried despair.
The man whimpered. MacDoul did not. His hand trembled only once, then tightened. And he stepped forward. Into the breathless dark.
And then, without warning, yet somehow heard by all, the King's voice emerged from the dark. It didn't echo. It didn't rise. But it filled the world.
"Bring him in… Let shadow walk beside shadow tonight."
The words crawled along the spine, dry and scraping like bones across stone. MacDoul didn't flinch, but his jaw tightened. Something in him twisted. He looked back once at the man, barely conscious, face slack, lips tinged blue from blood loss and cold.
Then he stepped forward, pulling the man with him into the yawning black. The torches behind them guttered again, as if in mourning. And the iron doors, like a patient executioner, slowly began to close.
The hall stretches wide and long like the gullet of a slumbering beast, its breath stale with forgotten centuries. Dying flames cling weakly to rusted sconces, coughing their last light onto damp stone. The air itself seems reluctant to move, thick with silence that presses against the skin like wet linen. Above, old banners hang limp and hollow, their faded insignias like bruises on cloth, sagging under the weight of memory. The walls do not echo. They absorb. They remember.
At the far end, draped in shadow, the King sits upon a throne hewn from stone so black it drinks the firelight and leaves only suggestion. The throne rises like a monolith— its edges jagged, wolf heads carved into the armrests snarling with stone fangs, as if frozen in a forever howl. The King is still. His robes are deep crimson, soaked through with the color of old wounds and centuries of oaths. His face is pale, more statue than flesh, lips bloodless, expression unreadable. But it is his eyes— those hollow, shifting wells— that hold dominion. They do not shine. They do not burn. But to look into them is to feel scorched, as though standing too close to a fire no one else can see, a flame that exists only behind your ribs, fed by your own secrets.
From the distant end of the hall, armored footsteps echo— measured, deliberate, like a funeral procession. MacDoul advances slowly, not from fear, but reverence carved into bone. His armor bears the grime of battle, the dust of the road, and flecks of blood that have already begun to dry. He stops five paces from the throne, then sinks to one knee, his head bowed not in submission, but in solemn loyalty, like a priest offering flesh instead of prayer. The man beside him— bound, broken, and hollow-eyed— topples to the floor with a soft thud, limbs folding inward like a marionette abandoned mid-performance. He trembles, bloodied lips twitching without words.
MacDoul remains motionless, his voice low, each word forged in the furnace of duty. "My King. The task is done. As you commanded, the traitor has been taken. He is here, brought not as a man, but as evidence."
There is no reply. Not at first. The silence lengthens, stretches— unnatural and surgical. The King does not speak, only leans forward, one hand curling over the carved wolf's skull at the throne's side as though preparing to hold it back from lunging.
When at last he speaks, his voice is low and dry, like bone dragged across stone— past, cruel, patient. "He does not stand. He crawls. Just as all liars do, in the end. Look at him— limbs soft as mud, spirit clotted with rot. There is no dignity in him, no oath that lived long enough to bleed. All spies end this way, dragging their bellies like worms through the ruin they tried to make of better men. Their courage melts first… then the mind… and finally, the face forgets how to wear anything but shame."
He rises, slowly, as though gravity fears him. His robes whisper across the stone. Each footfall is measured, deliberate— the sound of iron breaking marble, slow and merciless. He descends a single step, then another, until he stands over the crumpled form of the accused. The King does not look at the man at first. He looks at MacDoul. "Does he speak now?"
MacDoul lifts his gaze a fraction— just enough to answer without offense. "No, sire. He mutters like a dog in fever. No confession yet, no denial. Only the broken rhythm of guilt gnawing at what's left of his mind."
The King finally lowers his gaze to the man— a thing now, a sack of shivering breath and bone. "Then he has earned the deep stone. Let the bloodless hands take what remains of him."
From the flanks of the hall, like shadows peeled from the stone, two masked figures emerge. Cloaked in grey, faces hidden behind stitched leather veils, they carry no torches— only the glint of blades tucked beneath their aprons. They move without sound, without urgency. They reach the prisoner and lift him as one might lift a carcass— limp, unworthy of care. The man moans, high and broken, the kind of sound made not with the voice, but with the marrow.
The King has already begun to turn, drifting back toward his throne, not in haste, but as if the matter had bored him.
Then he speaks again, and though his back is to them, the words carry like smoke forced into the lungs. "Break his body, piece by piece. Slowly. Not for answers— I care little for the thoughts of vermin. Do it for memory. Let the stones know him. Let the walls drink his cries and never be clean again. Make of his pain a legend so vile that even the rats hesitate to whisper it."
He returns to the throne and sinks into it like a ghost returning to its bones. The darkness folds around him once more, wrapping him in silence. His voice lingers— thin, sharp, a whisper left to rot. "And when the sun rises, bring what the pain leaves behind to the square. Lay it bare beneath the bell tower. Let the crows come. Let them feast."
The grey figures begin to drag the man across the floor. His nails catch on stone. A whimper bubbles from his throat. The hall absorbs it. The flames flicker as the torchlight follows them down into the lower passage. Before the heavy door can even shut, the first scream has already begun—raw, confused, not yet understanding what awaits.
MacDoul watches. He does not flinch.
Then he speaks again, not to question, but to honor. His voice is softer now, but filled with something heavier than grief. Reverent, as if asking a god to speak plainly. "Sire… shall there be justice, then? Or only remembrance? Is pain now our scripture… and memory the only mercy left in your dominion?"
The King does not turn. He does not breathe. But somewhere in the dark, something shifts, and his voice returns like stone falling into a pit too deep to echo. "Justice is the balm of the living. It fades. It forgives. I do not. I do not forget. Memory… is all we give the dead. And I give it cruelly."
The air hangs dead, unmoving, like the breath of the hall itself had long since exhaled and never dared inhale again. The walls sweat faintly beneath the cold weight of stone, and the ceiling vanishes into shadow. Torchlight flickers in iron sconces, their flames struggling like strangled spirits, casting slow, dragging shapes across the walls—shadows that do not belong to any living thing.
At the far end, upon a jagged throne of blackened stone that drinks every ounce of warmth, the King remains unmoved. A monument to silence. His face, pale and smooth as sculpted wax, betrays nothing—but his jaw clenches slightly, almost imperceptibly, as if chewing on memory, or fury, or both. The air around him seems colder, not by temperature, but by presence. By command.
Before him, the man kneels. Or tries to. His legs buckle beneath him, swollen and bloodstained, barely holding. Cuts stripe his body like whip markings across parchment, dried and reopened with every movement. One of his eyes has nearly sealed shut, the other remains fixed ahead, glistening faintly— not with fear, but clarity. The kind of clarity born only when pain becomes constant enough to replace time.
MacDoul stands just behind, arms at his sides, shoulders drawn tight. Not from doubt. Not even pity. Only the weight of what must be done. His gaze does not leave the accused. There is no sword in his hand, but his presence cuts sharper than steel.
The man speaks, his voice a rough rasp, dry, broken, but without trembling.
"If I had known the hour death would come for me, I might have begged your god— whatever distant husk of him still lingers— to grant me one more day. Not out of fear, but out of spite. One more day to breathe in defiance. One more dawn to drag my feet through this world before it spits me out. But there is no god here. Not in this hall. Not under these stones that drink the blood of men. Only silence. Only cold. Only the gaze of those who feast on suffering like vultures on a carcass. I have felt the weight of your walls watching me, not with judgment… but with hunger. And I understand now— death is not an end. It is a door. And in this place, that door does not open gently. It screams on rusted hinges… and what waits behind it does not forgive."
He lifts his chin, blood trailing from his lips. His gaze meets the King's— not to challenge, but to finish the thought. His voice lowers, more intimate, like a final confession offered into a confessional that has never once granted absolution. "I have long accepted this fate. Death is no end— it is a cruel transition. A crossing of flesh into memory. And through that passage, pain walks beside us… like an old friend, eager to show us the way."
There is a pause so long it seems the hall itself has stopped listening.
The King does not speak. Not yet. But his eyes shift, deep within their hollows, and for a flicker of a moment, red swims in them— not a glow, but the memory of fire, the dream of blood. His jaw tightens again. Not rage. Something deeper. Something rooted in older days. His voice, when it finally comes, is iron dragged slowly over bone. "Then let pain be your priest… and confession your last sermon."
The architecture yawns into blackness above, arches high and sharp as spears. The stained glass windows, once vibrant with sun-born color, are now obsidian panes— black teeth along the wall. Torchlight stumbles across their edges. The banners of the Crowned Stag droop like executions awaiting rope.
In the center of the chamber, the man kneels once more— ropes tight across his limbs, head slumped slightly forward. Blood has dried at his jawline, painting his neck in brittle crimson. MacDoul stands beside him, still as a sculpture, his mouth a single, thin line, his gaze unblinking.
Then the King rises.
The sound is subtle— but unmistakable. Leather creaking. Cloth shifting like a predator's breath. His steps land with a dreadful regularity, the stone beneath echoing each movement like thunder arriving late. He descends the steps with no rush, no hesitation. Like this ritual had been performed a thousand times before and would be again, until the world itself wore out.
His voice arrives before him, smooth and low, so calm it becomes a mockery of mercy.
"If you ever hoped to learn to praise kings… then lentils were never your answer."
He circles the accused like a wolf scenting something rotten.
"But if you found comfort in lentils— if you believed that surviving meant groveling in dirt and calling it virtue— then flatter no king. They have no need for starving poets."
He halts, now standing directly before the man. The flicker of torchlight climbs the King's face, revealing lines carved not by age, but by sleeplessness and memory. His eyes are bloodshot, raw, restless, deeply awake in ways that mortals should never be. The quiet in the chamber breaks beneath his voice.
"So now tell me… are those lentils delicious?"
The man's eyes widen slightly. His lips part, but he doesn't speak. The King kneels— deliberate, not as a gesture of kindness, but as a descent into cruelty made personal. His hand reaches out, slow and unhurried, and grips the man's jaw— not as one might hold the face of a friend, or a foe, but the way a butcher tests the quality of a carcass. And in a whisper, he speaks: "This jaw… this soft, lying jaw… it moved freely where it should have been still. It spoke foreign names in familiar tongues. It whispered beneath foreign banners. It smiled at wronged girls and chewed bread bought with betrayal. But now…"
His grip tightens, knuckles whitening.
"…now this jaw belongs to me."
A pause. The hall held its breath— no wind, no whisper, no flicker of flame. Time hung limp, suspended like a corpse from a hook. The silence wasn't silence anymore; it had become a pressure, a presence. Heavy. Watching. Listening. Then, slowly, the King turned.
His grin stretched too wide. Teeth showed— too many, too sharp, too clean. The smile didn't belong on a man. It belonged to something that remembered being a man. His lips peeled back like torn cloth, revealing a maw too deep for his face, a mouth that hinted at a void behind the flesh. His eyes glinted— not with joy, not with cruelty, but with hunger. An old, patient hunger that knew how to wait through centuries.
The torches in the hall dimmed, their flames pulling inward, shivering like children. Shadows grew long, clawed things reaching out across the stone floor. The banners on the walls stopped swaying, stilled not by peace but by dread. The air thickened, turned cold and wet, like breath fogging on glass— but no one had breathed.
And the King— he grinned still, wider now, impossibly. The corners of his mouth cracked, tore. Blood didn't spill. Something darker did. Something thick and slow, like ink from a ruined gospel.
He leaned forward slightly, the way predators do just before the pounce. And the hall shuddered. Not from sound, but from memory. As if the stones themselves remembered something buried. Something summoned now by teeth. By silence. By that smile.
Something wrong had returned to the throne.
Then, slowly, the King releases his grip. He stands once more, letting the man's head fall. The silence after feels like drowning in tar.
The King's grip tightens on the man's face, the pale skin turning red where the fingers dig in. His voice is a whisper now, serpentine, curling around the man's fragile will.
"I want you to remember this moment when the fires touch your flesh. Not for your treachery, no. That's a common stain, easily erased. But for your arrogance. Your belief that you could walk among us, deceive us, and then find a place at our table."
In one swift motion, the King smashes the man's head into the cold, unforgiving marble. The sound rings out through the hall— wet, sickening, like the cracking of bone beneath a heavy boot. The man slumps, gasping, blood pouring from the jagged cut in his lip, pooling into the cracks of the stone floor. His body trembles, a broken heap, but the King does not flinch. He simply watches the slow, futile struggle for breath.
A blink— MacDoul flinches. Only a fraction. But the King sees it. Every tiny shift in his commander's stance, every fleeting twitch of his soul, and the King revels in it. He rises. His silhouette looms over the room, dark and imposing, an almost tangible aura of dominance that presses down on everything.
"You felt that, didn't you?" The King's voice is a low rumble, dangerous, filled with something worse than anger. It's the calm before a storm. "A sting. Not in your blade-arm… but somewhere deeper. A doubt."
MacDoul holds his breath. His muscles stiffen, like a man caught between loyalty and his own humanity. He stands still, frozen in place.
"I felt only the weight of judgment," he responds carefully, his words clipped, controlled, but the edge of hesitation is there. The King notices it immediately, the shadow of something deeper pulling at the seams of MacDoul's resolve.
The King's lips curl into a faint, amused smile— too cold to be anything but mocking.
"Oh, no. You felt the question, MacDoul." His voice lowers, almost a growl now, as he steps closer, his presence swallowing the space between them. "Whether this is still justice… or something beyond it. You've worn that armor too long, Commander. It begins to rust the soul."
With one fluid motion, the King raises a gloved hand and sweeps it through the air like a slow, deliberate wave of darkness. His eyes burn with a quiet cruelty, watching the tension in MacDoul's shoulders, the subtle drop in his gaze.
"Then watch how clean the rust is peeled," he continues, his words soft but coated in ice.
The side doors groaned open— not like wood yielding to age, but like something ancient waking, dragging its rusted bones through the hinges. Cold air spilled in first, stale and dry like it had come from a sealed tomb. Then they entered.
Three figures stepped forward, clad in armor that seemed forged from night itself— plates so dark they didn't reflect light, they devoured it. Torchlight shrank away from them, twisting unnaturally, as though afraid to touch them. Shadows bled from their feet, slithering across the stone floor like oil, reaching hungrily toward the corners of the hall.
Behind them, two masked attendants from earlier flanked the doorway. Their masks were smooth, featureless, as if carved from bone, with only two hollow eye slits that glowed faintly red in the dark. They stood still, unmoving— like statues waiting for command, or corpses too obedient to fall.
The armored trio moved forward, silent as a plague. Their footsteps struck the stone with a rhythm too perfect to be human— each thud like a death toll, echoing with the sound of inevitability. With each step, the atmosphere thickened, the air growing heavier, as if the hall itself struggled to breathe around them.
And then, through the living shadow, the General emerged.
His silhouette loomed, unnatural, as if shaped more by dread than flesh. His armor bore the faded silver carving of a stag across the chest— but the emblem was scarred, warped, as though something had clawed at it in hatred. There was no honor in the steel he wore, only the memory of it, long since stripped away and left to rust in silence. His helmet's eye slits were black and hollow, empty of soul or man.
Slung across his back, the mace swayed gently as he walked. It wasn't just a weapon— it was a symbol. The head of it was misshapen, almost melted, caked with old stains that no polishing could remove. The very sight of it made the torch flames bend low, flickering toward the floor like bowing servants.
No words were spoken. None were needed. Their presence was not an entrance.
It was an arrival, and something unusual came with them. Something the walls remembered. Something the dead had warned of in whispers and blood.
"Your Majesty." The General bows, the sound of his voice a reverberating echo. "Shall we cleanse his tongue and soul alike?"
The King's gaze never leaves the man, whose breath now comes in shallow, agonized gasps. "Aye," the King replies, his voice cold as the grave. "The stone will be wet by dawn. And if his tongue splits before he speaks, burn it. Find another part to beg."
The knights move like shadows, seizing the prisoner. His body is limp with exhaustion, bruised and broken, but they drag him, undeterred, towards the dark corridor that waits like a mouth ready to consume him. His pathetic moans mix with the soft clink of chains, but no one listens. No one cares. The man is already as good as dead.
As they pass MacDoul, his gaze flickers to the ground— an act of shame, not fear, as if he is trying to outrun the growing realization in his mind. That even the darkest path can lead a man astray, and even loyalty can burn when it's tested in fire.
The King watches MacDoul closely, his eyes narrowing. "You walk with me, MacDoul… yet I wonder how far your feet will carry you when the river runs red."
MacDoul doesn't answer immediately. His voice, when it comes, is quiet— almost drowned by the weight of the moment.
"I serve," he says, though even he can hear the fragility in his own words. "That is my path."
The King steps closer, his voice barely above a whisper, but laced with something far more dangerous.
"Then tonight, walk it with open ears." The King smiles, his lips stretching into something dark and predatory. "Let the screams cleanse you."
As the doors close behind the knights and their prisoner, the last echoes of agony fade into the stone. But the King stands, watching the darkness, and for a moment, MacDoul wonders if anyone truly survives the things they're willing to do in the name of service.
The Hall Beneath the Throne — Midnight Sanctum of the Crown
Beneath the castle's marbled grandeur, far below the gilded halls where courtiers toast and jest, lies a sanctum carved not by masons but by intent— terrible, meticulous intent. It is no ordinary chamber. It is a cathedral of suffering, hewn directly from the mountain's marrow, where the bedrock weeps cold moisture like tears for what it's witnessed. The walls are veined with mineral streaks that gleam faintly under torchlight— veins that look almost alive, almost breathing, like the earth itself recoils from what takes place here.
The air is damp, yes— but not merely wet. It is heavy. Laden with a perfume of horror: scorched iron, decayed marrow, dried sweat steeped deep into the pores of the stone. The scent clings to the skin, burrows beneath the nails. Even the torches seem reluctant to burn, their flames stuttering, casting long, distorted shadows that shift like specters across the walls.
Chains hang like ornaments from the vaulted ceiling, some taut as though still in use, others gently swaying, untouched by breeze, yet never still. Hooks jut from the stone in cruel symmetry, forged with care, their elegant curves belying their purpose. Under flickering light, they shimmer with a beauty so precise it borders on reverence, their shadows performing a ghostly dance— like devils waltzing at a banquet no one was ever meant to survive.
There is a disturbing artistry to the instruments here. Every device gleams with polish and age, reverently maintained. Iron tongs shaped like the grasping fingers of a god. Racks stretched and warped from generations of tension. Flensing blades curved like smiles— cruel, delicate, and endlessly sharp. The cat-o'-nine-tails lies coiled like a serpent, its leather tongues stiff with dried, rust-brown blood that flaked like old petals. Mounted wheels— vast, sacred things— stand like shrines, not to gods, but to pain refined into tradition.
This place does not merely exist. It endures. It remembers.
The walls do not echo screams— they absorb them. The stone here has a memory. It hums faintly, always, with something ancient. Not just agony, but a strange, inverted glory. This is where truth is peeled back like skin. Where loyalty is measured not in words, but in how long a man can last before his bones crack.
And though it lies in darkness beneath the throne, this chamber is more honest than the courts above. Here, there are no masks. Only blood. Only truth. Only beauty in ruin.
The man is bound upright to a cross-shaped frame, limbs stretched until joints groan. His skin is pale under the hood, goose-pimpled with fear and cold. The confessor's tunic hangs off his skeletal frame, already soaked with blood, both his and not. His breathing comes in sharp little gasps, as though the very air rebels inside his lungs.
Screams echo down from other chambers— some human, some… less clear. One ends in a wet, gurgling rasp. Another rises to a high, animal pitch before suddenly snapping off. Then silence again. The silence is worse.
The General walks a slow, reverent circle around the man, his black boots clicking like a metronome of fate. The other knights work in ritualistic precision— laying out blades on crimson-streaked cloth, uncoiling leather straps, heating brands in iron braziers whose coals crackle hungrily.
The General circled slowly, his boots echoing against the damp stone floor like the ticking of a death clock. He paused behind the prisoner, leaning in close, his voice low and rasping with cruel amusement.
"Now then," he whispered, fingers grazing the man's spine as if reading scripture from skin, "shall we see what truths you carved into your bones?"
He lifts a slender spike— its tip glimmers like a star— and gently presses it against the prisoner's side. No motion. No resistance. But the man begins to whimper.
The General's lips curled into something that only barely resembled a smile— thin, cold, more surgical than human. He stepped closer to the prisoner, whose breath hitched beneath the leather hood, shivering in the chains. With a voice as quiet as a scalpel sliding through flesh, the General murmured, "Good. We begin where fear blooms loudest."
It wasn't a declaration. It was a promise and an omen, uttered like a priest announcing a funeral no one would survive. The hood is peeled off slowly, revealing a face mottled with bruises, one eye swollen shut, the other bloodshot and trembling. The General makes the first incision. A whisper of steel. A scream like nothing human rips from the man's throat— shrill, broken, a soul cracking open. But it doesn't stop. Not tonight.
The Confession Room — Later That Night
Deeper still, beyond even the memory of sunlight, the Confession Room breathes like a wounded thing beneath the earth. It is not simply forgotten by the castle above— it is denied, a tumor beneath the gilded skin of the realm. No windows mar its walls; no fresh air dares seep in. Only cold, coarse stone, pressing in on all sides, hungry to listen. The air here tastes ancient, a rancid mixture of candle soot, blood old enough to have turned to iron dust, and sorrow so thick it feels like oil coating the tongue.
Stubby candles— broken, defeated— cling to rusted sconces along the walls. Their flames shudder and cower, casting shadows that squirm across the chamber, twitching and clawing as if some unseen hand were dragging them upward, tearing them from the very stones. The light barely reaches the center, where a chair waits— a grotesque throne bolted into the floor, crafted from splintered wood darkened by centuries of blood.
Its arms and legs end in thick, rusted shackles, the iron corroded into ugly blooms of orange. The seat itself gleams darkly, so varnished with congealed gore that it seems lacquered by human suffering. Grooves carved into the stone floor spiral outward from the chair, subtle channels made to carry what drains away.
The man is dragged in— a puppet with broken strings, barely conscious, his limbs limp and trembling, his mouth slack. His eyes, glassy and unfocused, reflect no hope. He is not led like a man, but hauled like a carcass. Masked attendants, faces hidden beneath stitched hoods of tar-black leather, move around him with the mechanical indifference of insects. Their hands strip what remains of his tattered garments, leaving only bruised skin, flayed patches where the flesh has already split from earlier degradations.
Without ceremony, they clothe him again— if it could be called clothing. A hooded robe, stitched from ragged scraps of scorched leather and saturated with a stench that churns the gut: urine, bile, and old charred fat. It clings to him like a second skin. A heavy cloth is tied across his mouth, thick and wet, designed not to silence his screams but to devour them, making his agony something personal, intimate, a whispered secret between him and the stones.
He is slumped into the waiting chair. Shackles clank closed around his wrists and ankles, the iron biting through his already torn flesh. His head is wrapped tightly in a thin, damp linen bag that sucks against his features with every ragged, desperate breath, blinding him, muffling him, suffocating him by slow degrees. Only the wet rasp of his breathing tells the room he is still alive, for now.
The torturer steps forward at last. Emerging from the deeper dark like a figure birthed by the walls themselves, they are clad head to toe in crude black leather, stitched with raw sinew, their form almost androgynous, almost inhuman. Their mask is a horror of cracked leather stretched taut across bone, eyeless save for two gaping holes that reveal nothing but dull, lifeless orbs within— eyes drained of humanity, like cloudy glass staring through centuries of screams.
No words are spoken. There is no need. Here, language belongs only to pain.
With a slow, deliberate gesture, the torturer produces a set of iron pincers, blackened and sharpened with cruel precision. They glint weakly in the feeble candlelight. Moving with a sacred patience, the torturer approaches, tilting the prisoner's slack hand upward. Fingers twitch instinctively, helplessly. The pincers open— hinges screeching like rats— and clamp down around the bruised edge of a fingernail.
The first twist is slow. It is not the yank they seek, not yet. It is the breaking of will, the careful sowing of terror. The nail twists against the quick, separating with a sickening wet crackle. The man spasms against his bonds, a high, muffled wail seeping from behind the cloth gag. Blood wells up instantly, dark and sluggish.
The torturer waits, savoring the shudder that ripples through the man's body. Then, with a sudden, savage jerk, they pull.
The nail rips free with a sound like tearing parchment soaked in slime. Blood spurts, pattering warmly across the grooves in the floor. The prisoner bucks in his bonds, a muffled sob strangling in his throat, the veins in his neck standing out like ropes.
But it is only the beginning.
The pincers descend again— another finger, another nail. Twist. Pull. The rhythm is unhurried, ritualistic, almost tender in its cruelty. Between each act, the torturer waits, watches, lets the prisoner's mind crumple under the certainty that worse is always coming.
The nails are taken one by one, each shriek quieter, each convulsion weaker. The body can only endure so much before it betrays itself, before the soul begins to leak out through the eyes, through the rattling sobs, through the pitiful wetness pooling beneath the chair.
And when the fingers are bared to the bone, when the hands are ruined things of gore and exposed flesh, the torturer does not pause in pity. They exchange the pincers for another tool— a slender awl, polished so finely that it catches the light like a needle made from moonlight and venom.
The first stab is into the thigh, just beside the bone, avoiding anything fatal. It is a precise art— wounding without ending. Pain without escape.
Over and over, the cycle repeats: twist, tear, stab, carve. Blood sluices down the grooves in lazy rivulets, disappearing into some unseen mouth deep in the earth.
The candles weep wax. The prisoner weeps blood. The stones, ever thirsty, drink both.
And above all, the silence of the castle presses down. Beautiful. Absolute.
The King's justice, whispered into the marrow of the world.
The scream is strangled behind the cloth, rising like a trapped beast, a crescendo of agony so fierce it trembles the very flames of the candles, making them gutter and waver as if recoiling in fear. The torturer does not so much as flinch. They move with the steady patience of something less than human, something that has no heart left to betray them. A rasp of metal as pincers scrape against another nail. A hiss as flesh peels from its moorings. A pause, not of mercy, but of cruelty— long enough for the sobbing to sink its teeth deep into the man's soul, anchoring despair where hope once clung.
Again. And again.
Each cry is devoured by the walls, seeping into the stone as if the room itself were a living thing, gorging on suffering, hoarding every whimper, every muffled shriek, every shuddering gasp. No sound is ever truly lost here. They sink into the mortar, the blood-slicked grooves, the very air, so that the next who enters might breathe them in, might hear them weeping in the silence between heartbeats.
A branding iron is produced next, its tip already glowing faintly orange from the embers in a brazier sunken in the far wall. The torturer presses it against the prisoner's trembling thigh with methodical precision. Flesh sizzles, a sound so obscene it silences the room for half a breath, before the body convulses so violently the straps groan under the strain. A new shriek bursts out, muffled, broken, tearing itself against the cloth gag until the prisoner nearly chokes on his own suffering. The iron lifts away, leaving behind a charred brand that smokes, that blisters and bubbles, a ruin of what was once skin.
Blood pours freely now, mingling with the piss and sweat soaking the floor, forming viscous rivers that wind through the stone channels like tributaries to some unseen, greedy mouth waiting below. The scent grows heavier, a coppery miasma that sinks into the lungs, weighing every breath.
And still it continues.
Hours bleed away like veins opened wide. The torturer moves from tool to tool as a maestro might move across a harp, coaxing different notes of agony with each methodical stroke. Whetstones screech against blades, the high-pitched whine slicing through the thick air. Needles, long and impossibly thin, are driven deep into muscle and bone, finding nerve endings like a hound finds a scent. Hooks are slid beneath the skin and tugged with slow, cruel twists, drawing forth screams so raw, so broken, they no longer sound like they belong to a human throat.
The air itself begins to warp with the pain. Each scream echoes off the stones, and when it returns, it does not return the same. It comes back distorted, stretched thin, ragged, almost mocking, as if the agony has grown a mind of its own— has learned to speak in a voice born from suffering. Whispers slither along the walls, breathing over the candle flames. Shadows shiver like carrion birds eager to feast. Somewhere deep beneath the chair, something ancient stirs, pulling each drop of despair into itself like marrow from a shattered bone.
By the time the man's voice fails entirely, reduced to broken sobs and rattling gasps, the torturer shows no sign of fatigue. They move with the same steady, mechanical grace, as if they could go on forever, as if this ritual were not labor but worship.
The Confession Room demands sacrifice. And it will not be sated until every last piece of him is flayed away— not just flesh, but memory, dignity, soul— until there is nothing left but a hollow thing, too broken even to beg.
And even then, it would not be enough.
King's Chamber — Same night
The King sat enshrined in silence, the vastness of his private chamber folded around him like a funeral shroud. Velvet drapes sagged heavy along the walls, suffocating all but the fire's restless glow, which clawed at ancient stone and whispered across the faces of withered banners and the dim, accusing eyes of forgotten portraits. A goblet of wine stood by his hand, its contents dark and untouched, trembling slightly as if recoiling from him. His fingers brushed the stem in idle thought, twitching as though plucking the strings of some invisible instrument. Yet he drank nothing. He simply stared— into the fire, through the fire— his gaze distant, fathomless, seeing not the present blaze but something deeper, something older, that flickered behind his pupils like the dying memory of a sun.
A sound escaped him— low, almost a breath, almost a prayer.
The King leaned forward, the firelight licking at the edges of his figure but recoiling from his eyes, which remained buried in shadow: twin voids where no reflection stirred, two black embers that neither lived nor died.
"Pain..." he breathed, the word rolling forth slow and deliberate, steeped in a gravity that pulled the very air down with it. His jaw tightened, the sinew beneath his skin crawling like worms. A shuddered pause, and then again, voice dropping lower, into a register that no longer belonged to a man but something rawer, something feral. "...reminds the flesh it lived wrongly. It sings... it testifies to the sins carved deep into its marrow. In its screams, the truth squirms free."
His hand, pale and veined like the root of some gnarled tree, clenched the stone armrest so fiercely the skin strained to breaking. The goblet toppled unnoticed, spilling wine like old blood across the floor.
"Let the body confess what the soul dare not whisper," he said, voice heavy with a conviction too brutal to be called madness, too sacred to be called sanity.
And from somewhere far beneath— down in the buried bowels of stone, through endless black corridors and the hunger of time— a scream rose. It clawed its way upward, a ghastly, mutilated sound, and slipped into the chamber like an obscene vapor. The King's eyelids fluttered closed. His nostrils flared. He drew the noise into himself as a dying priest might inhale the scent of a final offering— slow, reverent, trembling at the threshold of ecstasy.
"Strip him," the King whispered into the thick dark. "Strip him of lies. Strip him of pride. Strip him of the very memory of defiance. And when nothing remains but breath and brittle bone— burn that, too."
He opened his eyes once more.
All warmth had fled them, leaving behind only a terrible lucidity— a clarity unclouded by pity, untouched by mercy. They shone with the cold, fanatical purity of a plague let loose upon the world: something righteous in its ruin, something devout in its devastation.
The fire crackled and twisted beside him, but its heat was a pale thing compared to the inferno raging far below, where flesh was remade in the crucible of agony. Another scream began— a wet, torn thing that spoke of surrender, not to pain but to annihilation— and the King's face remained still, carved from something older than stone.
For a fleeting moment, as the shadows stretched and clawed across his gaunt features, he seemed not a man seated in mortal throne, but a relic of some forgotten epoch, a blight crowned in human shape, smiling in the cold patience of eternity.
Castle Square — Dawn
The bell tolls— low and monstrous, each strike a grim heartbeat against the stone bones of the world. One... two... three. The sound shudders through the mist that clings to the morning like the final exhale of a dying man. Beneath the iron-banded doors of the keep, the accused is dragged forth— a ragged specter of what once was human. His body stumbles, moved more by memory than by strength, each step a convulsion, a dying echo of defiance long since beaten from the flesh. His robe, if it can still be called that, hangs in blood-clotted strips, and the leather hood seals his face from the living like a coffin nailed shut. He quivers in every limb. His skin— raw, blue-black, shredded— confesses more eloquently than any tribunal ever could.
The villagers choke the square, a press of breathless bodies, but they do not jeer. They do not shout. Silence shackles them. It is not born of pity. It is hunger— cold and bitter— the secret thirst for ruin that festers when justice is a thing too distant, too pure for mortal grasp. Their eyes shine with it. Hands are clasped tightly or folded against chests. Children worm between hips and elbows, mouths agape, their young faces alight not with fear, but a terrible, wondering awe.
Upon the platform stands MacDoul— his figure carved from the same pitiless stone that built the keep behind him. Sword in hand. Shoulders broad beneath the weight of duty. The sun, veiled behind rotting clouds, bleeds a silver pallor across the square, bleaching warmth from every living thing until even the blood in their veins seems to slow. High above, shrouded by silk and shadow, the King watches from a narrow window, a silhouette pressed against thin glass, colder than the stone that frames him.
The man lifts his head, as if hauling the entire weight of his sentence with it, tendons straining like ropes pulled to fray. His cracked lips part slowly, with the heavy finality of a door long barred and now swinging open into oblivion. When he speaks, his voice is a breathless rasp, broken and spent, yet impossibly steady— the last note of a life too battered to tremble.
"So... this is the bridge... to the other world..."
The words drift into the mist, swallowed before they can travel far, as though even the dawn itself wishes to keep them sacred, secret. It is not a cry. Not a prayer. Not even sorrow. It is a simple recognition, a final glimpse across the chasm where life falls into whatever comes next. His tone bears the weightless solemnity of one who has seen the far shore, its horizon etched into the dying light, and knows there is no turning back.
MacDoul's eyes do not waver. He offers no mercy, no comfort, no false absolution— only a nod, slight and grave, as if acknowledging the man's passage to whatever gods waited on the other side. Then, without hesitation, the blade rises— a single, brutal arc through the dim light, gleaming for the briefest instant like a shard of winter torn from the sky.
There is no scream. No final gasp. Only the dull, irrevocable sound of steel meeting mortal coil— the muted thunk of flesh and wood parting company— and then, silence. A silence so pure, so profound, it hollows the air, as if the very earth must pause and mark the leaving of a soul.
High above, from the tower, the bell tolls once more. The fourth bell. The last. The end.
Dusty Village Square — Dawn
The sun limps above the horizon, smothered behind a sky of bruised ash, shedding no warmth— only a bleak, pallid glare that bleaches the earth like lime poured over a grave. From the castle's yawning gates, the procession surges forward— slow, heavy, alive with a terrible rhythm, like a festival where death wears the crown.
At its head rides the King, a figure wrapped in sable and blood-red velvet, silver crown crooked like a halo of thorns. His black stallion clatters forward, hooves striking sparks from the cold stone, its mane braided with war-ribbons and bells that jangle like laughter at a funeral. Behind him, rank upon rank of soldiers march, armored in soot-dark plate, spears gleaming wickedly, boots pounding a jubilant, merciless drumbeat into the earth.
Trailing after them, pulled like an offering, comes MacDoul, grim and grinning beneath his hooded brow, his gloved fists tightening the thick rope knotted around the condemned man's throat. The man crawls in the dust, a ruin of flesh and spirit, knees flayed raw against the gravel, ribs showing through torn skin, mouth gaping in a soundless, rattling prayer to gods long since deaf. His breath is a wet, sucking noise, obscene in its stubbornness.
The villagers throng the road in eager, heaving knots, their faces alight with a dreadful anticipation that tastes of iron and old sins. They clutch torches, pitchforks, prayer beads— children are hoisted onto shoulders, their wide eyes glistening with a giddy, innocent hunger. The murmurs that slither through the crowd are neither prayers nor curses— they are gossip, excitement, the giddy relief of those grateful it is not they who bleed today.
At the square's black heart rises the scaffold, built high and broad for spectacle— a monument to righteous cruelty. Its timber weeps from the last rain, already darkened and sticky from earlier sacrifices. At its center looms the guillotine, monstrous and cold, its blade momentarily flashing as a gap in the clouds spills a single, mocking ray of light across the square.
A staircase coils up the platform's side, each step scorched with searing brands— betrayal, cowardice, silence, shame. The King dismounts, boots hitting the earth with a jarring finality, then ascends— slow, deliberate, each footfall a proclamation. As he rises, the village falls into a giddy hush, the kind of hush that trembles with the anticipation of blood. Even the birds seem to clutch the air in their claws, waiting.
At the summit, he turns. His cloak, stitched with blackened feathers and dried gold thread, flares like the wings of some carrion angel. The King lifts his arms, and when he speaks, his voice rips the dawn in half.
"Hear me— not as sovereign, but as witness! Here stands the price of treason, of rot festering in our house, of silence where there should have been loyalty, of shadows where there should have been fire!"
Each word pounds against the crowd, and they sway beneath it, torches lifting higher, teeth bared in silent roars. The King's voice thunders, not with sorrow, but with cruel exultation— he is not mourning a death. He is offering it. He is giving them all a feast of vengeance, a sacrament of blood.
The man shudders where he kneels, eyes swollen shut, head bowed. He is no longer a man but a vessel for terror, a breathing sacrifice bound for the blade. And as the crowd's fever grows, there is no pity left, only hunger, only the electric, giddy terror that crackles like a storm barely held back by the iron sky.
The guillotine waits— silent, patient, inevitable. As the sun, smothered and sullen, watches without blinking.
His words about the man— this ruin of flesh, whispered poison, traded our oaths for silver— fall not like accusations but like curses, each syllable stripping layers of humanity from the broken figure kneeling before them. The King doesn't merely name the crime— he scrapes the soul from the man's bones. And when he proclaims, Even shadows flee from fire, it's not a flourish; it's a death sentence stretched across every hidden corner of fear. There is no sanctuary. No darkness deep enough. His wrath will burn until there is nothing left to hide behind.
The crowd does not roar. They simmer, a seething mass of flesh packed too tightly, hearts hammering, lungs holding breath that tastes of iron. It's not excitement that coils in their bellies. It's dread, coiling like smoke. This is no triumphant justice; it is a ritual unveiling something fouler than treason. It's the rehearsal of collective damnation.
When the King commands, Let this dawn be etched into your blood, the execution is no longer punishment— it becomes scripture. Every scream will be a hymn. Every whimper, a verse. Pain, a sacred revelation carved straight into their memory. In this theater, the price of disobedience is no longer death— it's dismemberment of the soul.
And then— Let the Jester make the final laugh.
That's when true horror peels itself from the edges of the square like a skin being torn from the world.
From the shadows stitched between platform and sky, he emerges— not walking, not striding, but shuddering forward in jerks and twitches, as if yanked by unseen wires. The Jester. Cloaked in patchwork horror, rags stained the color of old wounds, stitched with bells that did not dare to sing. His face— white as a bleached skull— grinned wider than any mortal smile, teeth carved into his mask with a frenzy that bordered on worship. His eyes, those hollow pits, held no laughter, only endless, yawning vacancy.
He spun once on the platform, arms flinging wide in a grotesque parody of welcome, then bowed low, a sweep so deep it seemed he might snap in half.
"Oh, what a crowd," he breathed, the words oily, threading themselves between every heartbeat in the square, "what a crown... what a corpse-to-be."
Two knights dragged the condemned forward, not as men dragging a man, but as butchers hauling a carcass to a hook. The body shivered in their grasp, its limbs flopping with the loose helplessness of meat that had long since given up hope. They forced him beneath the guillotine's looming shadow, strapped him down— belly to slick, blood-dark wood, each knot tied not for restraint, but for display.
But death was a mercy not yet due.
The General raised a hand— a gesture almost lazy— and from the ranks emerged another knight, bearing iron implements wrapped in sodden linen, dripping with the scent of rust and old gore. He knelt beside the condemned. And without ceremony, without even the false kindness of a warning, he began to work.
Steel kissed flesh. Flesh recoiled. Skin split.
It was not swift. It was not clean. The knife worked with a deliberate patience, peeling back the man's back as if unwrapping a desecrated gift, revealing the slick red scripture hidden beneath his flesh. The first scream that tore loose was no human sound— it was the shriek of something dragged from the pit, high and sharp and jagged enough to make bones ache.
The crowd reacted not with horror, but awe— some gasped as if in worship, some wept openly, others laughed in short, choking bursts that sounded more like the death rattle of their own innocence. From trembling hands flew rotten vegetables, a stone, handfuls of barley tossed like a bride's offering to a groom who would never walk again. The celebration of ruination.
Another knight stepped forward, cradling a steaming bucket. Salted water. The scent hit first— sharp, metallic, brutal. Without pause, he threw it across the raw, exposed flesh.
The body convulsed so violently that the bindings strained. No sound came now— the scream had broken somewhere deep inside the condemned's ruined throat. Agony poured out of him in silent convulsions, each twitch a psalm of suffering offered to the sky.
The Jester hummed under his breath, skipping in a wide circle around the tableau, spinning a longsword in one hand like a child with a pinwheel. Its blade caught what little light slithered through the ashen dawn, flashing in quick, cruel bursts.
He sang, in a voice both lilting and hideously sweet:
"Flesh for the crown and bones for the bell, His soul's going up and his meat down to hell~"
The Jester twirled, paused beside the prisoner, and leaned close, the wet tip of his tongue flicking across cracked lips as he whispered something no one else could hear. Whatever it was, it made the condemned shudder in a way that even the knives had not.
The King watched in silence, his face a mask not of anger, but of pure, immaculate satisfaction.
And the crowd— oh, the crowd— they dared not cheer. They dared not breathe too loudly.
Because by now, they understood: this was no execution.
This was a transformation. The King had not merely broken a traitor. He had baptized a kingdom in terror.
And from the silence that swallowed the square whole, a single truth echoed louder than any roar:
They were not mere witnesses to this cruelty. They were now its children.
Then, with a sudden pivot, the Jester brought the blade down— not to kill, but to ruin. A diagonal slash, cold and deliberate, carved from nose to chin, flaying the man's face into a yawning, obscene grin. Blood sprayed in a sickening arc, misting the stage in a fine red veil. The man's eye, wide and glassy, did not flutter closed. It stared. Trapped. Conscious still, forced to witness his own unmaking, inch by stolen inch.
A breathless hush fell over the square— an unnatural, suffocating silence, thick as tar.
With a flourish more cruel than theatrical, the Jester seized the guillotine's lever and yanked.
The blade fell— not swiftly, but as if dragged down by unseen hands, groaning through the air. It struck with a sound not born of metal or flesh but some monstrous marriage of both: a wet, rupturing chunk that seemed to split the world itself. The head toppled, heavy and graceless, into the wicker basket. Blood fountained upward in a gruesome exhalation, spattering faces in the front row— none of whom recoiled.
Then the applause— violent, fevered. The square exploded into a frenzy of sound. Children squealed and clapped. Drums beat like warhammers against the ribs. A drunk lost an arrow skyward, whooping. Men hoisted mugs, women whirled barefoot in the blood-slick dust. It was not mourning. It was not relief. It was delirium. It was hunger finally fed.
At the far end of the platform, Commander MacDoul turned his back. His hands, white-knuckled behind him, trembled once. His throat worked soundlessly. He could not look— not at the ruin on the scaffold, not at the revelers. Not at the kingdom he had once sworn to protect.
High above, the King watched, his arms crossed like a statue over a tomb. His face was a mask of something worse than cruelty: indifference. His voice, when it came, was a whisper thinner than smoke.
"Let the people feast," he murmured, "but let the commanders remember."
Later, blood still wept from the guillotine's blade like rain from a slashed sky. The Jester wiped his sword across his own sleeve, smearing the gore like a madman's warpaint. The stage was a ruin of stained wood, a cathedral of suffering. And all around it, life bloomed: Children perched on shoulders, giggling. Men bellowed toasts. Women crowned each other with herbs and laughter. Roasted meat filled the air with savage sweetness. A fiddler played a tune wild enough to tear open the heavens. It could have been a harvest festival. It could have been a coronation. But it was neither.
It was communion.
The King stood atop the platform, his boots drinking the last of the blood. His cloak snapped open behind him, caught by a merciless wind, spreading like the broken wings of a fallen angel. His face bore no joy. No pity. Only the cold patience of a man for whom brutality was not a sickness, but a sacrament.
He raised his arms. The crowd was silenced as if a hand had closed around their throats.
"Let it be known," he thundered, "from stone to sea, from cradle to pyre— this kingdom remembers. And it remembers well."
His voice sank into the marrow of every soul gathered there.
"We remember betrayal. We remember the worms that gnawed at our roots. And we reward their devotion with truth— truth carved in steel and sanctified by flame. You who till the fields, who cradle the wounded, who hammer iron to sword— you are the spine of this realm. And the spine must not bend to serpents."
He paused. The crowd leaned in, starved for his next words.
"Today," he said, his voice low and ringing like iron over stone, "was not execution. Today was an exorcism."
The cheers that followed were thunderous, primal, shaking the ground— but within the roar, something else coiled. Thin. Whimpering. A shadow beneath the light. It slithered behind MacDoul's clenched jaw. Behind the children's wide eyes. Behind the Jester's painted leer.
The kingdom had fed. And it had fed on itself. Somewhere, between the drumbeats and the drunken laughter, the blood remembered.
And deep beneath the scaffold, beneath the merry cries and roasting meats, the man— what was left of him—drifted beyond his body. His skull no longer held him. His broken teeth, his gouged flesh, his peeled back—none of it mattered. His body was suggesting now. Smoke coming undone. Pain clung in tatters, but even agony had grown thin. Yet one thing remained, cruel and stubborn: Awareness.
Sound. Laughter. A hideous, howling laughter from the earth, from the rooftops, from mouths too small to know cruelty but not too small to revel in it. Giggling children wreathed in flowers stomped their feet as if to pound the blood deeper into the dirt. Drunkards spat wine across each other's faces, roaring through split lips. Women clapped with hands stained red to the wrist, slick as butcher's aprons. The Jester shrieked— a sound that pierced the sky like a blade, twisting upward, higher, thinner, shriller, until it felt like the air itself was peeling away. The villagers' roars thundered, crashing over the square like a tide through a field of unmarked graves.
Laughter, not music, not mirth— something hungrier. Like teeth snapping. Like clocks grinding themselves into dust. It did not welcome him. It devoured him. Gnawed his dying mind down to splinters.
Then came the darkness. Not sleep. Not peace. But annihilation— a vacuum so violent it caved the mind inward like a cathedral imploding. Drowning in ink, sinking into a sea where no light had ever been born, where even memory burned out like a dying coal. And yet—
One thing remained. A single image, crucified against the black. MacDoul.
He stood just beyond the gore-slick platform, straddling the divide between slaughter and salvation. Half in shadow, half in sunlight— like a man torn between executioner and mourner. His helmet was gone. Sweat pasted his hair against his skull. His jaw hung slack. His eyes were not proud. Not loyal. Only hollow— shattered the way only men who still remember the names of the damned can be. And in that last flickering heartbeat of life, the dying man thought: That one sees me.
Not as a traitor. Not as a husk paraded before the mob. But as a man. As someone who once had hands that held instead of hurt, lips that kissed, and a voice that once sang when no one listened. MacDoul saw the ruin of what once lived behind these flayed bones. And in that agonizing moment of recognition, something weak, something warm, struggled and flickered.
Not enough to save him. But enough to let him die as something more than meat.
Then the floodgates shattered. All sensation fled. Color, sound, shape— all ripped away, shredded into the black. His last breath was no gasp. No cry. Just a sigh— a crumbling, defeated thing— bleeding from what remained of him. He slipped into nothingness. And the world never paused. Never noticed.
Behind him, the square convulsed. Drums howled like wolves feasting on a corpse. The crowd sang, clapped, spilled mead over trampled flowers and bone-white mud. Children mimed the Jester's mad twirls, sticky with spilled blood. A woman sobbed tears of joy as she threw barley into the air, as if baptizing the carnage. The guillotine towered above them— not a tool anymore, but a monument, a god sated by sacrifice.
And yet, one man did not cheer. MacDoul stepped down from the gallows without a word. His gloves, flayed raw with rope burn, twitched at his sides. Blood freckled his greaves like the first kiss of rust before decay. Behind him, the music swelled and raved. But he turned away, pushing through the dancers as if he were a phantom no one dared touch. No one hailed him. No one met his eye.
He slipped into the alleys where celebration curdled into rot. Into spaces where even sunlight recoiled. He walked alone, and the thing dragging behind him was not a shadow, but guilt, a thick, crawling thing, a serpent spun from smoke and memory and old oaths broken at the altar of survival.
Deep inside him, something fractured. Not a clean break, but a grinding, splintering collapse that would never heal. The kingdom would call him a commander. The bards would shape him into loyalty's cold statue.
But the blood remembered. And so did he. And then, darkness slammed into him. Not fading. Not a soft descent.
It hit him like the world itself had been ripped free of its moorings, like the sky had been torn apart and hurled down, a suffocating mass of broken stars and smothering pitch. It didn't swallow him. It smashed into him. Shattered him. Every breath, every memory, every dream detonated inward like glass exploding in the furnace of a dying sun.
No warning. No mercy. No escape. Only oblivion, merciless and complete.
The shriek of his mind splitting in two was silent here, so silent it became its own sound, vibrating through the marrow of a soul already coming apart at the seams. His senses didn't fade— they shattered. Sight. Touch. Breath. Thought. All ripped away in an instant, like the cords of a marionette severed mid-motion. One moment, there was being. The next, only rupture. No farewell. No descent. Only erasure. Like a trembling machine torn from its power source, smoking and twitching in the dark. And yet... something remained. A poison in the wreckage. A taste.
It festered on his tongue, molten and metallic, rotten like iron left to bleed in the sun. Not flavor— memory. A necrotic echo of the last words he'd ever heard, rotting syllables fermenting on his teeth. He wanted to vomit them out, purge them, scrape his own tongue from his mouth. But his jaw hung slack, frozen, idiot-wide like a corpse abandoned to the elements. His mouth filled instead with blood— thick, syrupy, slow— pooling from ruptured gums and seeping down his chin into the endless abyss beneath him.
Then— a flicker.
Not mercy. Not hope. Violence.
His eyes snapped open with a force that felt surgical— like rusted hooks had been buried under his eyelids and wrenched upward by unseen, uncaring hands. Vision flooded him like acid, not light. He saw— but nothing that a sane mind could grasp. No earth beneath him, no sky above. Only a vast, unnatural plane stretched below, shimmering like oil atop stagnant water. It reflected nothing. It yielded no weight. It was there, and it wasn't. It was false. And yet, it cradled him— like a cradle of razors, humming with hunger.
He convulsed. Not movement— spasms. Twitches. The grotesque, panicked jerks of something no longer sure it possessed a body. His arms flailed, scraping against the non-reality around him, but the void offered no resistance, no purchase, only a mocking absence that let his fingers tear themselves apart for nothing. Phantom pain bloomed in him— pain not fresh but remembered. Ancient. Stamped into the very architecture of his nerves, each flail peeling old scars open anew.
He screamed. But no sound came— only the dry, cracking rattle of a soul trying to claw its way out of a collapsing body. His mouth tore open, throat shredding itself bloody from the strain, a flood of foam and blood gushing from between his snapping teeth. It poured down the unseen ground, soaking the emptiness in his own filth, leaving a red trail in the blackness like a wounded animal dragging itself through the slaughterhouse.
And then— It broke.
The void cracked, not like lightning, but like a wound ripping itself wider in a diseased body. From the tear gushed not light, not salvation, but blood. Endless, boiling, ravenous blood, hissing as it hit the false ground. It carried with it scraps— torn veins, shredded fat, half-melted teeth that spun grinning as they drifted by. It was a river of rot. Of all the things the world had ever tried to bury, vomited back into existence.
The blood found him. It licked his foot.
Instant agony. Not touch— immolation. The memory of fire seared through his veins, nerve endings shrieking, consciousness unraveling. His limbs thrashed in frenzy, every motion a betrayal of his body's shape, like a marionette jerked by a sadistic puppeteer. He screamed, and kept screaming even when the scream shredded his voice to bloody rags. But the river followed, swelling, consuming, reaching higher.
Faces surfaced. Not strangers. The faces of the dead.
Children he knew, their cheeks sunken, skulls grinning through paper-thin flesh. His mother, eye sockets yawning black and empty. His brother, jaw twisted into an impossible grimace of betrayal. Teachers, friends, neighbors— all ruined, all staring. They watched with peeling smiles as wide and broken as split fruit, teeth exposed, tongues black with rot.
Their mouths widened, skin tearing, smiles gaping until the heads collapsed inward like hollowed gourds. And from their ruined mouths, a single voice crawled out: his own.
"Why didn't you save me?"
"Why didn't you stop it?"
"Why did you live?"
The words crawled into his ears, burrowed under his skin, and nested in his bones. The river rose past his chest, his throat, until he slipped beneath the surface.