6. Ismerie #2
She doesn’t need sight to deal. Her fingers know the deck by touch, by weight, by the subtle differences in texture that decades of handling have worn into the paper.
The cards spread across the table in patterns I don’t recognize—not fortune-telling, I realize.
Memory. She’s using the cards to organize her thoughts.
“The thing under the execution platform.” She lays down the ace of swords. “I’ve known about it for forty years. Watched it grow. Felt it feeding on every execution the council ordered.”
“Forty years.” I can’t keep the shock from my words. “And you never tried to stop it?”
“Stop it how?” Her blind gaze finds mine with uncanny precision. “I’m one old woman. The gallows have been feeding for centuries. By the time I understood what was happening, the presence was already too strong to destroy.”
Behind me, Brannok moves closer. The brand warms at his proximity, and I force myself to focus on Era’s words instead of his presence.
“You said presence. Not entity. Not creature.” I watch her lay down another card—the hanged man, inverted. “What exactly are we dealing with?”
“A consciousness born from wrongful death.” Era’s words take on the cadence of someone reciting a lesson learned long ago.
“Every time an innocent person dies on that platform, their ending leaves traces. Pain, fear, injustice—all of it pools beneath the gallows, mixing with the blood that soaks the soil. Over centuries, that accumulation gained awareness.”
“The Revenant Judge.” The name rises from my memory, though I don’t know where I heard it.
Era’s hands still on the cards. “You know that name.”
“I heard it. Somewhere.” The memory is hazy, more impression than fact. “In a dream, maybe. Or when I destroyed the revenant in the execution square.”
“The Judge has been reaching out.” Era resumes her dealing, laying cards in a pattern that spirals outward from the center.
“Searching for anchors in the living world. Death witches are particularly susceptible—our magic is already attuned to endings. The Judge can use that attunement to… communicate.”
Communicate. A polite word for the nightmares that have plagued me for three nights. The courtroom made of bones. The faces shifting through features of the wrongfully dead. The voice that calls me sister.
“It wants me.” The admission costs more than I expected. “Specifically me. It called me sister when it raised the revenant.”
“The Judge doesn’t want any death-witch.
” Era lays down the final card—the tower, lightning striking its foundations.
“It wants one whose power carries the gallows’ own signature.
An anchor must have absorbed that specific energy long enough for it to weave into their magic—not as a meal, but as a mark the Judge can recognize as its own.
” She tilts her sightless gaze toward me.
“Most practitioners feed at an execution once or twice, then move on. You returned to that platform for years. That power didn’t just sustain you—it became part of you. The Judge can sense it.”
“What does that mean? Being an anchor?”
A long pause. Era’s blind gaze shifts toward the bar, toward where Brannok stands in watchful silence.
“The Revenant Judge exists between states. Not fully alive, not truly dead. It can influence the physical world—animate corpses, move ropes, speak through the mouths of the executed—but it can’t manifest completely.
Not without help.” Her fingers tap the tower card.
“An anchor would give it that help. A living death-witch, bound to the Judge’s will, would serve as a bridge between what it is and what it wants to become. ”
“And what does it want to become?”
“A god.” The word is flat. Final. “The Judge believes it dispenses true justice. It wants to expand that dispensation beyond the scaffold. Beyond Blackhook. Beyond anything the living can stop.”
Blood drains from my face. The brand on my collarbone throbs, and I know Brannok has moved closer without looking—his presence solid and unwavering against the chill spreading through my chest.
“The claiming.” His words cut through the silence. “The mating brand I seared into her. Does that change anything?”
Era’s blind eyes flick toward him. Her expression shifts—not quite surprise, but close.
“You marked her.” Not a question. “The old way. Blood and magic and permanent binding.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve complicated things considerably.
” Era gathers her cards with methodical precision.
“The Judge can’t claim what’s already claimed.
Orc mating magic is older than wrongful death, older than the accumulated centuries of execution.
It supersedes lesser bindings. The Execution Hall’s wards offer no such protection—they were built to suppress what practitioners do with death magic.
The Judge doesn’t use death magic. It is death magic, and there is nothing for a suppression ward to grip. ”
Relief floods through me, sharp and immediate.
“But.” Era’s words carry warning. “The claiming doesn’t protect you from the Judge’s influence. It can still reach you. Still speak to you. Still try to convince you to break the mating bond willingly.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“You might.” Her blind gaze pins me in place.
“The Judge is patient. Persuasive. It has centuries of wrongful death to draw upon, centuries of injustice to use as leverage. It will show you things. Make you feel things. Convince you that breaking the mating bond is the only way to save everyone you love.”
Breaking the claiming bond. I hadn’t considered that possibility. Hadn’t thought about what it would take to sever the claiming Brannok seared into my skin.
“Can the bond be broken?” The question comes out firmer than I feel.
“Everything can be broken.” Era stands, tucking her cards into a pocket of her worn dress.
“But breaking a mating bond requires both parties to agree. Both must want the separation. Both must perform the ritual.” She pauses at the edge of the table.
“If the Judge convinces you to want that separation—truly want it—then your Warden’s desire to keep you won’t matter. ”
Brannok’s hand closes on my shoulder. Not restraining. Grounding. The claiming sigil throbs where his fingers rest near it, heat spreading through my chest.
“That won’t happen.” His words are absolute. Certain.
Era smiles, but it doesn’t reach her blind eyes.
“You sound very sure. I hope you’re right.
” She turns toward the door. “The Judge has been dormant since the claiming. Your attack on the platform disrupted its gathering, forced it to retreat and rebuild. But it won’t stay dormant forever.
Days. Weeks at most. Then it will try again. ”
“And when it does?”
“Pray that your claiming holds strong enough to resist.” She pauses at the threshold, and something moves across her blind face—a hesitation, quickly suppressed. “There is a way to end it. But I won’t tell you yet.”
“Won’t?”
“Knowing how to destroy it before you understand what you’re truly facing would be like putting a noose in the hands of someone who’s never tied a knot.” She opens the door. “You’ll come back to me when you’re ready. I’ll know when that is.”
The door closes behind her.
I sit at the table, staring at the spot where Era’s cards lay moments ago. The Last Drop feels smaller now, the walls pressing in, the weight of centuries pressing down.
Brannok’s hand is still on my shoulder. The constancy of his touch anchors me when everything else seems to be spinning.
“She’s wrong.” His words are low. Meant only for me.
“About what?”
“About the bond breaking.” His fingers tighten briefly before releasing. “I’m not letting you go. Not for the Judge. Not for the council. Not for anything.”
I should argue. Should remind him that we’ve known each other less than a week, that a brand seared in desperation isn’t the same as a chosen claim, that he has no idea what he’s promised.
Instead, I press my hand over the claiming sigil on my collarbone and feel the heat of his brand thrum beneath my palm.
“Then we’d better make sure I don’t give it any reason to try.”
The dream comes that night.
I’m standing in a courtroom made of bones.
The walls are ribcages, interlocking arches of human and orc remains that curve upward into a vaulted ceiling.
The floor is paved with skulls, each one bearing the face of someone I recognize—condemned prisoners whose executions I attended, whose deaths I fed upon, whose endings sustained me for one more day.
You know what you’ve done. You know how many have died so you could live.
A figure sits at the judge’s bench—a towering presence in robes woven from hanging ropes.
Its face shifts constantly, cycling through features I’ve seen distort in death.
The young witch from the revenant incident.
A merchant falsely accused of treason. A child whose only crime was being born to the wrong parents.
All of them dead. All of them feeding the thing before me.
“Sister.” The Judge speaks with a chorus, a hundred wrongful endings harmonized into a single terrible sound. “You’ve finally come.”
“This is a dream.” I force the words out, though my throat feels filled with ash. “You can’t hurt me here.”
“Hurt you?” The shifting faces arrange themselves into an expression of wounded dignity. “I don’t want to hurt you. I want to save you.”
“Save me from what?”
“From the one who claims you.” The Judge leans forward, and I see its robes writhe with captured souls. “From the executioner who has killed hundreds in the name of order. From the monster who seared his ownership into your flesh without asking permission.”
“He saved my life.”
“He saved his possession.” Contempt drips from the voice. “Do you truly believe he cares about you? About who you are, what you want, what you need? He marked you because his instincts demanded it. You’re a trophy. A prize. A thing to be owned.”