12. Ismerie #3
The Judge watches our exchange with what appears to be amusement. Its cycling faces arrange themselves into expressions of patronizing indulgence, like a parent watching children play at being warriors.
“How touching. The executioner and his pet death witch, reunited for their final moments.” The entity spreads rope-wound arms in a mockery of welcome. “Come, then. Let me show you what true justice looks like.”
I meet Brannok’s eyes. Amber finding dark brown, the executioner and the death witch, two killers who chose something different and are about to prove it.
“Ready.”
And we move to meet our enemy.
The battle for Blackhook City begins in the ruins of the Grand Gallows.
The Judge strikes first—a wave of ending magic that crashes against my defenses like a siege weapon against castle walls.
The power I’ve absorbed takes the brunt of the impact, but I still stagger, still sense the entity’s centuries of accumulated rage pressing against my consciousness with crushing weight.
Brannok moves while I’m reeling. His blade flashes in the pre-dawn light, enchanted iron biting into the Judge’s composite form. The entity screams with a dozen voices as it recoils, claimed flesh parting under the force of a blow delivered by hands that have ended hundreds of lives.
He can hurt it. The Gallows Warden’s blade, etched with death wards designed to destroy the risen dead, can hurt it.
But not enough. Not fast enough.
The Judge’s robes lash out, rope-woven fabric coiling around Brannok’s blade arm and yanking him off balance.
He hits the rubble hard, the impact driving a grunt from between clenched teeth.
Before he can rise, spectral chains surge from the entity’s form—guilt-forged links reaching for his wrists, his ankles, his neck.
The same chains that held him before. The same weight of accumulated wrongful death.
No.
I throw myself between Brannok and the Judge, ending magic blazing from my hands in waves that shatter the chains before they can bind him. The entity snarls—voices raised in fury—and redirects its attack toward me.
Pain. Searing, scorching pain as the Judge’s power collides with mine. We’re too evenly matched, I realize with a flash of desperate clarity. It has centuries of accumulated death; I have the raw power of the gallows’ anchor. Neither of us can overpower the other through strength alone.
“Ismerie.” Brannok’s hand closes around my ankle—the only part of me he can reach from where he’s fallen. “The rope. In my belt.”
I don’t understand. Don’t have time to understand. The Judge’s next attack is building, ending magic swirling around its form like a storm preparing to unleash destruction.
“Get the rope.” His fingers tighten around my ankle. “And hold it while I work.”
The certainty in his words cuts through the chaos of battle—the same authority he uses when pronouncing sentences, the same command he wields when standing on the platform.
I reach for his belt. Find the coiled rope he carries there—witch-hair braided fibers, the same kind used in execution nooses. The kind that suppresses magical resistance.
The kind that might be able to bind an entity made of pure ending magic.
Understanding floods through me.
The Judge has to be executed. Not defeated—executed. Hanged by the same rope that killed its victims, judged by the same system that created it. An eye for an eye, a death for a death, justice finally delivered to the thing that twisted justice into vengeance.
And Brannok is the only executioner capable of delivering that sentence.
“I’ll hold it.” I grip the rope with hands that blaze with light. “I’ll hold it as long as you need.”
He rises from the rubble, armor battered but eyes bright with the same fierce determination that made me love him in the first place. The Gallows Warden, preparing for his final execution.
“Then let’s finish this.”
The Judge realizes what we’re planning a moment too late.
Its multitude of faces contort with sudden fear—not the theatrical alarm of an entity toying with its prey, but genuine terror of the ending it senses approaching. It gathers its power for a final devastating assault, ending magic swirling around its form in a maelstrom of accumulated rage.
But I’m faster.
I pour everything I have into the rope in my hands.
The ending magic of the gallows’ anchor, the power of centuries of execution, the fury of every spirit I absorbed when I destroyed the platform.
The witch-hair fibers ignite with blazing light, the suppression wards activating with force that makes the Judge stagger.
And Brannok moves.
The rope leaves my hands, arcing through the air toward the entity’s composite neck. Brannok catches the other end, years of professional experience guiding his hands as he fashions a noose from the blazing fibers.
The Judge screams.
“You cannot—this is not—I AM JUSTICE—”
“No.” Brannok’s words carry across the ruined square with the weight of formal pronouncement. “You’re a vengeance that convinced itself it was virtue.”
The noose closes around the Judge’s neck.
And for the first time in three hundred years, the thing that fed on executions faces execution itself.