Brannok
TWO
Iknow exactly what dying looks like.
The final twitch. The release of bladder.
The slow rotation as the body finds its eternal rest. The way the face changes color—first purple from lack of oxygen, then gradually gray as blood pools in the lowest points.
The particular angle a head hangs at when the neck breaks clean versus when it doesn’t.
I’ve made a science of ending lives. Calculated the precise drop distance for every body weight, tested knot positions for maximum efficiency, refined the process until death became predictable. Controlled.
This is wrong.
The execution should be over. More times than I can count, I have watched the life leave a body, but the girl on the rope isn’t settling.
I’ve seen magical mishaps before. Residual energy animating corpses for a few seconds before the death wards suppress it.
Standard procedure: wait for the wards to do their work, then dispose of the body through the usual channels.
Nothing to concern the crowd. Nothing to disrupt the day’s schedule.
The witch-hair ropes prevent this. They’re braided specifically to suppress magical resistance, to drain any residual power before it can manifest. The death wards carved into every surface of this gallows contain exactly this kind of resurrection.
But her fingers keep moving.
I draw my blade—enchanted iron etched with severance wards, designed to cut the bindings that animate risen corpses. Standard equipment. I’ve used it a dozen times over the years, always successfully.
The witch’s eyes open.
Whatever looks out from that dead face isn’t the terrified girl I hanged three minutes ago. That girl prayed to gods she hoped might be listening. That girl trembled but didn’t beg, held herself with dignity even as the noose tightened around her neck.
This… this is a different creature entirely.
My professional assessment catalogues the wrongness in sequence, the way it always does in crisis: rope burns angled wrong for the neck’s current position, which means the vertebrae have shifted after death.
Body weight distributed forward onto the balls of the feet—a standing posture impossible in a freshly hanged corpse.
The discoloration of strangulation lividity moving upward along the jaw rather than pooling downward the way gravity demands.
Every indicator I have been trained to read says this body should be inert.
None of them account for the fact that it is looking at me.
The jaw works, producing sounds that no human throat should make.
“Justice…” A thousand voices layer into one, the accumulated screams of the wrongfully dead. “Justice comes.”
Behind me, my guards shift into combat positions. Good men, trained well. They know wrongness when they see it.
I step forward, blade raised. “Stand ready. Severance formation.”
The corpse’s head rotates toward me. Not turning—rotating, the neck moving in ways that broken vertebrae shouldn’t allow. Those glowing eyes find mine, and I experience what I haven’t known in twenty years on this platform.
Uncertainty.
“Gallows Warden.” The chorus speaks my title with contempt that spans centuries. “Dispenser of justice. Do you know how many of these deaths were wrong? How many innocents have fed my becoming?”
I don’t answer. Words are weapons for politicians and priests. I deal in actions.
My blade sweeps toward the thing’s throat.
It moves.
Faster than any risen corpse has a right to move, faster than the living girl could have managed.
The blade catches its shoulder instead of its neck, carving a chunk from dead flesh that splatters across the timber.
The thing doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t slow. Its bound hands snap free of the suppression chains—not picking the locks, simply breaking them through sheer impossible strength.
“Contain it!” I pivot, putting myself between the revenant and my men. “Don’t let it reach the crowd!”
Too slow.
The world turns into a blur of snapping bone and the spray of my men’s blood. I trained them for combat, but we aren’t fighting a person; we’re fighting a landslide of death.
The revenant’s attention returns to me. Still gripping my neck with one hand, it leans close enough that I can smell the beginning of decomposition on its stolen flesh. The glowing eyes bore into mine with terrible patience.
“You maintain order through terror.” The voice drops to a whisper, a thousand voices speaking as one. “You believe fear keeps civilization intact. But you’ve never understood what fear truly is.”
I can’t breathe. Can’t speak. Can barely think past the pressure crushing my windpipe. My blade lies on the floor, out of reach. My guards are dead or dying. The crowd is screaming, fleeing, adding their panic to the chaos spreading across the execution square.
Then ending magic registers on senses I didn’t know I still possessed.
Thick and cloying, radiating from the dispersing crowd. Not the fading echoes of this morning’s execution—this is active. Feeding. Powerful enough to cut through the revenant’s presence.
A death witch. Here. Feeding on my execution.
My nostrils flare despite the crushing grip on my neck. The scent cuts through blood and decay and old wood, hits a primal part of my brain that recognizes danger and desire in equal measure.
The revenant’s head snaps toward the crowd. Its grip loosens enough for me to drag in a ragged breath, and I use the moment to search for what’s caught its attention.
I find her immediately.
Dark cloak pulled tight around a slender frame.
Ash-blonde hair escaping a loose braid. Pale skin marked with faint scars around her wrists and throat—rope burns, I realize, though she’s too young to have survived a hanging.
Her eyes blaze violet with barely contained power, bleeding light in the chaos of the square.
Beautiful.
I crush the thought. Beauty is irrelevant. She’s a death witch—capital offense in Blackhook City. She’s been feeding on executions I performed, sustaining herself on deaths I dealt. She’s a criminal, a parasite, exactly the kind of creature the gallows were built to handle.
And she’s staring at the revenant with recognition in those luminous eyes.
The thing wearing Mira Thornwood’s body releases me entirely. I drop to my knees on the platform, gasping, watching through blurred vision as it turns its full attention to the woman in the crowd.
The corpse tears itself free from the noose entirely. Rips away, leaving shredded rope and a chunk of neck flesh behind. It drops to the platform floor in a crouch that’s more insect than human, limbs folding at impossible angles as it orients on its new target.
Its stolen head rotates to face the death witch. The mouth shapes words that cut through the screaming chaos with impossible clarity:
“Sister. I’ve been waiting for you.”
I force myself upright against the beam.
Every breath sears. The thing’s fingers left bruises I can already sense swelling, and my vision keeps trying to gray out at the edges. But I’ve worked through worse. Taken wounds that should have killed me and kept moving because the job demanded it.
The job demands it now.
The revenant drops from the platform into the crowd. People scatter, trampling each other in their desperation to escape. The thing moves through them without attacking—not because it can’t, but because it has a different target. A specific target.
The death witch.
She hasn’t run. Stands frozen in a cleared space as the crowd flees around her, those violet-lit eyes fixed on the approaching monster. Her gloves are torn, and I can see sigils tattooed on her palms—channeling marks, the kind practitioners use to control powers too dangerous to wield unfiltered.
She knows exactly what she is. What she does. The sigils are self-inflicted, applied with full understanding of the consequences.
The revenant stops three feet from her. Close enough that its stolen breath must wash over her face, close enough that she could reach out and touch the dead flesh if she wanted.
It towers over her—Mira Thornwood wasn’t tall, but the thing has hunched itself into a posture that adds bulk, presence, threat.
“You’ve been hiding.” The chorus carries across the square, cutting through the screams and panic. “Feeding on scraps while I devoured the feast. Taking enough to survive, never enough to grow.”
The woman’s chin lifts. A flicker crosses her violet-lit gaze—not fear, exactly. Recognition. Understanding.
Resignation.
“I know what you are.” She stands steady, stronger than expected from someone facing down a monster. “I know what made you.”
“Then you know why I’ve waited for you.” The revenant leans closer, dead lips nearly touching her ear.
Move. Retrieve your blade. Rally whatever guards are left standing. Contain this thing before it kills her and moves on to the rest of the city.
My legs won’t cooperate. The oxygen deprivation hit harder than I realized, and my body demands recovery time I don’t have.
The death witch smiles.
Not a pleasant expression. Not defiant or brave or any of the things I’ve seen condemned prisoners try before the rope takes them. This smile is hollow and deliberate and perfectly aware of what it costs her.
She pulls off her ruined gloves, revealing the sigils carved into her palms in full. They radiate violet to match her eyes, throbbing with power she’s drawn from the very air. “We are alike. Which means I know exactly how to hurt you.”
She reaches out and places her palm against the revenant’s chest.
The power that releases nearly blinds me.
Violet light explodes through the execution square, washing over fleeing citizens and scattered guards and the blood-soaked timber where I’m still struggling to rise.
The revenant screams—not with Mira Thornwood’s voice, but with a thousand voices layered into one, harmonized agony that shatters windows and sets dogs howling three districts away.
A tearing sensation.