12. Ismerie
TWELVE
ISMERIE
The Grand Gallows have become a throne.
I crouch in the shadow of an abandoned vendor stall at the edge of the execution square, ending magic pulled tight around me like a shroud.
The power costs me—drains reserves I’ll need later—but without it, the Judge would sense me the moment I stepped into the square.
So I hold the concealment firm and watch the nightmare unfold.
Brannok stands at the courtroom’s center, surrounded by the silence of the dead.
My Brannok. My impossible, infuriating orc.
The bond tells me exactly where he is, as it always does. He can’t move.
The Judge towers above him on its transformed throne—the same composite horror from my nightmares, made flesh and given a courtroom. Stolen faces cycle across its form in the endless parade I know too well by now.
“Brannok Redrope.” The words echo from a chorus of dead throats. “Gallows Warden. Executioner. Dispenser of selective justice.”
Brannok doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t cower. He stands straight despite his bindings, his amber gaze fixed on the entity that his executions helped create.
“You stand accused of crimes against the dead.”
I need to move.
The plan was simple: Brannok draws the Judge’s attention, I reach the gallows’ foundations, I unmake the anchor that binds the entity to this place.
Simple. Clean. The kind of plan that sounds reasonable when you’re safe in the Execution Hall with the man you love, his arms around you, his heartbeat firm against your spine.
The kind of plan that seems insane when you’re watching him face judgment for a lifetime of death-dealing.
I ease forward, keeping the vendor stall between me and the transformed platform.
The square is empty of the living—citizens fled when the Judge manifested, their terror leaving behind abandoned carts and scattered belongings.
A meat pie vendor’s wares have spilled across the cobblestones, the food already rotting from proximity to so much ending magic.
The spirits in the gallery seating don’t notice me. Their attention is fixed on the trial, on the man who ended their lives, on the spectacle of watching their executioner face execution.
“The charges are these.” The Judge’s robes rustle as it rises from its throne. Rope-wound hands spread wide in a mockery of judicial pronouncement. “Complicity in systemic terror. Execution of dozens of confirmed innocents. Participation in a system designed to feed fear rather than serve justice.”
Focus. Move. He’s buying you time.
I slip around the edge of another stall.
The foundations of the gallows are buried beneath the square’s center—Era’s words described a carved stone etched with the original death wards, sunk deep into blood-soaked earth.
If I can reach it, if I can turn those wards against the entity they were meant to contain…
“How do you plead?”
Brannok’s words carry clear across the transformed space. No tremor. No hesitation.
“Guilty.”
The word hits me like a physical blow. I stumble, catch myself against an overturned cart, force myself to keep moving.
“Guilty of all of it.” His chin lifts. “Every charge. Every crime. Every compromise I made in the name of order.”
The Judge seems surprised. Its rotating visages pause, stolen eyes narrowing.
“You… admit your guilt?”
“I accept responsibility.” Brannok’s hands flex against the bindings that hold them. “For everything I’ve done. Every death, deserved or not. Every time I chose obedience over conscience, efficiency over mercy, fear over hope.”
I’m halfway across the square now. The concealment costs more with every step—the Judge’s power saturating this space makes my magic work harder to stay hidden. My scars throb with amethyst light beneath my sleeves, and I pray the entity is too focused on its trial to notice the radiance.
“But responsibility isn’t surrender.” Brannok hardens. “I can be guilty and still fight you. I can acknowledge what I’ve done and still refuse to let you do worse.”
The Judge laughs. The sound echoes from countless mouths—bitter, mocking, ancient.
“Fight me? You stand in the heart of my power, bound by the weight of your own crimes. What possible resistance could you offer?”
“Enough to buy time.”
My heart stops.
He knows I’m here. He senses me the same way I sense him.
The Judge’s faces contort with sudden suspicion. It sweeps its gaze across the transformed square, searching for whatever its accused prisoner thinks might save him.
I freeze behind a collapsed awning. Hold my breath. Draw the concealment tighter until my vision grays at the edges from the power drain.
The dead eyes pass over my hiding spot without stopping.
“Time.” The entity lowers itself back onto its throne.
“Time for what? Your mate to rescue you? The death witch who feeds on the same magic that sustains me?” The stolen features arrange themselves into mockery.
“She’s hiding at the edge of the square, thinking I can’t sense her.
Thinking her pitiful concealment can fool a being born from centuries of death. ”
Ice floods my veins.
It knows. It knows I’m here.
“Let her hide.” The Judge waves a rope-wound hand in dismissal.
“She cannot reach the anchor before I pronounce sentence. She cannot twist the wards while I hold court. And when your execution is complete—when the Gallows Warden dies on the very platform that gave him power—her grief will make her careless.”
The terror clawing at my stomach transforms into cold fury.
It’s toying with us. Playing with its food before the feast.
Fine. Let it play. I’ll use every second it wastes.
I abandon stealth and run.
The concealment shatters around me as I sprint toward the gallows’ base. The Judge’s laughter follows, echoing across the transformed square, but it doesn’t move to stop me. Why would it? In its arrogance, it believes I can’t reach the anchor in time.
Maybe it’s right.
The spirits in the gallery seating turn toward me as I pass—translucent faces warped with hatred for the living, for anyone who still breathes when they cannot. A few reach for me, spectral hands passing through my flesh with touches of freezing cold.
I ignore them. Focus on the platform. On the base of the transformed structure where the anchor stone waits buried beneath centuries of blood-soaked earth.
The entity doesn’t pursue. It watches from its throne of warped wood and coiled rope, cycling faces arranged in expressions of amused contempt. It thinks it’s already won. Thinks the trial is a formality, a bit of theater before the inevitable execution.
I reach the gallows’ base and drop to my knees.
The earth here is wrong. Saturated with centuries of ending magic, thick with the accumulated endings of thousands. My hands sink into soil that feels more like congealed blood than dirt, and the power hits me immediately—a flood of death energy so intense my vision whites out for a moment.
The anchor stone throbs beneath my palms. The wards carved into its surface push back, the old protections that were meant to contain the magic pooling beneath the gallows. They’re corrupted now—twisted by the Judge’s influence into conduits that feed the entity rather than imprison it.
I start to work.
Above me, the trial continues. The Judge pronounces charges in its chorus of dead voices. Brannok accepts them with the same stoic dignity he brings to everything. The spirits watch, waiting for the execution they’ve been promised.
The wards resist me. They’ve been feeding the Judge for so long that they’ve forgotten their original purpose—containment rather than amplification.
I pour my power into the stone, trying to remind them what they were built to do, trying to turn their magic against the monster they’ve been sustaining.
It’s not enough.
The Judge has centuries of accumulated power behind it. I have decades of passive feeding, of taking only enough to survive, of always holding back from what I could become. The mathematics are brutal: I can’t overpower wards that have been strengthening for three hundred years.
Then the sigil blazes.
Not with warmth, not with the familiar pulse of his presence—this is different.
Cold fire spreading from my collarbone through my chest, and with it: knowledge.
The bond translating what my ears can’t hear across the distance between us.
A trapdoor opening. A body dropping. A rope catching, too short, the wrong knot—
He’s in the noose. Alive, barely. Dying.
I have seconds.
Maybe less.
Above me, Brannok’s life gutters like a candle in a draft.
Not enough. Every scrap of power I can push into the anchor stone fractures against wards that have been feeding a god for three centuries. I need more.
The thought terrifies me.
He’s going to die because you’re afraid of what you might become.
Brannok didn’t make that choice. He walked into this courtroom knowing he might die, knowing the Judge wanted his blood, knowing the only thing standing between him and oblivion was a death witch who’d been too scared to reach for her full potential.
He chose me anyway.
Then choose him back. Choose what you could become. Choose to stop being afraid.
I open myself to the ending magic.
Not the careful trickle I’ve survived on for years.
Not the measured sips that kept me alive without overwhelming my senses.
Everything. All of it. The full flood of accumulated ending that pools beneath the Grand Gallows, centuries of executions condensed into a reservoir of power that no death witch has ever dared to claim.
It hits me like a tidal wave.
The magic crashes through my defenses, through the careful barriers I’ve built around my soul, through every wall and ward and protection I’ve ever constructed to keep myself safe from my own nature.
It fills me until there’s no room for anything else—no fear, no guilt, no carefully maintained humanity.
Only death. Only ending. Only the vast, cold certainty of what I truly am.
My scars blaze with light.