13. Brannok
THIRTEEN
brANNOK
The moment I reach the platform’s center, the Judge moves.
Its strike catches me across the ribs before I can set my stance.
I fly backward, armor crumpling under the force of centuries of accumulated rage. My body hits the transformed platform with enough impact to splinter the warped oak, and before I can rise, spectral chains wrap around my wrists. My ankles. My neck.
The guilt-forged links bite cold against my skin—not the heat of the claiming sigil, but its opposite. The frozen weight of every wrongful death I’ve ever performed, every innocent I’ve hanged, every time I pulled the lever knowing the condemned didn’t deserve to die.
Ismerie screams my name from somewhere across the ruined courtroom.
I can’t see her. The spirits have risen between us—hundreds of translucent forms flooding from the gallery seating, from the witness stands, from every shadow in this nightmare space. They press against me in waves, their empty gazes finding mine with recognition that cuts deeper than any blade.
My victims.
Not all of them. Even the Judge’s power has limits. But the ones that matter most have found me. The ones whose faces I remember. The ones whose deaths still live in the corners of my memory, surfacing in quiet moments when discipline fails.
The young witch floats before me first.
She was twenty years old when she climbed my gallows stairs.
Accused of cursing a merchant’s crops. I knew the charges were false—the real curse-worker had paid off the council to frame her, and I’d seen the evidence buried in the case files.
I hanged her anyway. The council demanded it. Order required it.
Her neck is still broken. The angle wrong beneath spectral skin, the same angle I’ve seen a thousand times when the drop goes clean. She doesn’t speak. Doesn’t need to. Her presence is accusation enough.
A merchant materializes beside her. Aldric Voss.
I remember his name because he was the first innocent I knowingly executed.
The council wanted him silenced—he’d discovered their embezzlement scheme, threatened to expose them to the city.
They signed his death warrant, and I carried it out without question.
He screamed his innocence as the trapdoor opened. The crowd cheered anyway.
An old man joins them. Garrett the Scribe. Seventy-three years old when he stood on my platform, white hair wild around a face carved with defiance. His crime was writing pamphlets questioning whether execution was truly justice or merely terror wearing judicial robes.
His dying words still echo in my ears: “May you sense the rope around your own neck someday, Gallows Warden. May you know what it is to die for another man’s sins.”
He was right. I understand that now.
The Judge descends from its dissolving throne, robes trailing through the chaos of its collapsing courtroom. Its rotating visages have slowed—cycling through expressions of vindicated triumph as it surveys its captive prey.
“At last.” The voices harmonize into a satisfied chord. “The Gallows Warden in chains. The executioner awaiting execution.” The stolen features arrange themselves into cruel amusement. “I’ve waited centuries for this moment.”
Spectral hands seize me, lifting me from the splintered platform. The spirits of my victims carry me toward the center of the transformed space, toward the trapdoor that once served as the Judge’s throne, toward the noose that dangles in cold white light.
The sigil on my neck heats—Ismerie, still alive, still fighting. Her position thrums in my awareness at the edge of the square, determination radiating from where she works at the foundation. She’s trying to reach me, trying to break through the wall of spirits that separates us.
She won’t make it in time.
The noose drops around my neck with terrible familiarity.
I know this rope—witch-hair braided fibers, the same weave I’ve used a thousand times, now oiled and set with a short drop the Judge has measured to strangle rather than snap.
The rough fibers scratch against my skin. The knot presses into the soft tissue behind my ear—the exact placement I’ve trained my assistants to achieve. A proper hangman’s knot. The kind that kills cleanly when the drop is right.
“Not a clean drop, Gallows Warden.” The Judge’s voices settle into soft satisfaction. “You don’t deserve a clean drop.”
But the Judge doesn’t want me to die cleanly.
“Do you know how long I’ve contemplated this moment?
” The entity circles me, its form flickering between stability and dissolution as Ismerie’s assault on the wards continues to drain its power.
“Three hundred years of watching wardens dispense death from my platform. Three hundred years of sensing every innocent soul feed my becoming while you walked away unbothered.”
The spirits press closer. The young witch’s vacant stare never leaves mine. Neither do the merchant’s lifeless eyes, or the scribe’s, or the dozens of others I can’t name but whose faces I recognize from the endless parade of condemned.
“Your predecessors were easier to hate.” The Judge takes on a contemplative tone.
“They were cruel men, most of them. They enjoyed the killing, savored the power, used the gallows to settle personal grudges. But you…” The rotating visages pause on an expression of genuine puzzlement.
“You were efficient. Professional. You killed without passion, without hatred, without satisfaction.”
“That’s supposed to make it better?”
“It makes it worse.” The Judge leans close, close enough that I can smell the decay beneath its robes—the rotting-sweet stench of preserved corpses, of ending magic concentrated into flesh that should have returned to earth centuries ago.
“A cruel executioner can be understood. Hated. But you? You turned killing into administrative procedure. You made death routine.”
The bond on my neck blazes hot. Ismerie. Closer now. Moving through the chaos of spirits toward the gallows’ foundations, toward the anchor she couldn’t reach before.
Keep fighting. Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.
“Any last words, Gallows Warden?” The Judge’s formal pronouncement returns, carrying weight that presses against my eardrums. “Any defense? Any justification for the lives you’ve taken?”
I could beg.
The thought surfaces unbidden, dragging with it decades of professional observation.
I’ve watched hundreds of condemned prisoners stand where I stand now, sensed the noose where I sense it now, faced death where I face it now.
Most of them begged. Pleaded for mercy, for understanding, for one more chance to make things right.
They promised to change, to atone, to spend the rest of their lives doing good if only they could have a few more years to prove it.
The words never saved anyone. I pulled the lever regardless. The trapdoor opened, the rope snapped taut, and their promises died with them.
I don’t beg.
“I did what I thought was necessary.” My words come out unwavering—the same tone I’ve used to pronounce sentences for two decades.
“I believed fear was the only force holding this city from chaos. That without the gallows, without the noose, without public executions to remind people of the cost of disobedience, Blackhook would tear itself apart.”
The spirits shift around me. The young witch’s expression doesn’t change, but the merchant’s head tilts slightly. Listening.
“I was wrong.”
The admission costs more than I expected. Years of certainty collapsing in three words—the foundation of my identity crumbling into rubble.
“Often. Maybe always.” I meet the eyes of the spirits surrounding me. “I told myself I was maintaining order. Protecting the innocent by punishing the guilty. But I stopped asking who was truly guilty a long time ago. Stopped caring whether the warrants I executed had any basis in justice.”
Garrett the Scribe drifts closer. His empty gaze holds no forgiveness—I don’t expect any—but there’s recognition there.
“I can’t undo what I’ve done.” My gaze moves from face to spectral face. “Can’t bring you back. Can’t make it right.”
The young witch’s form flickers. Her broken neck is still wrong, will always be wrong, because of me.
“But I can make sure no one else dies the way you did.” The words seem inadequate against the weight of accumulated grief surrounding me. “I can tear down the system that killed you. Destroy the gallows. End the executions. Build a city that doesn’t trade death for peace.”
The Judge laughs.
The sound echoes across the transformed courtroom—countless voices harmonized in bitter mockery, the accumulated rage of centuries given form.
“Noble words from a man about to die.” Rope-wound hands reach for the mechanism that controls the trapdoor beneath my feet.
“Do you think your deathbed promises mean anything to them? To me? You’re offering to demolish a system you profited from for twenty years.
The courage of a man who discovers ethics when the noose is around his own neck. ”
The sigil blazes suddenly hotter—Ismerie, reaching the anchor stone, beginning her work. Ending magic surges through the foundations of the gallows, the wards beginning to destabilize as she pours her power into unmaking them.
“Not words.” I keep my tone level, keep my eyes on the entity that wants me dead. “A promise.”
The Judge’s visages cycle through expressions of contempt, amusement, anticipation.
“Let me show you what promises are worth.”
The trapdoor opens.
I drop.
The fall lasts forever.
The fall lasts less than a heartbeat.
Time stretches and compresses, impossibility overlapping impossibility as my body plummets through the gap where the gallows’ heart used to be.
The rope snaps taut.
The impact drives the breath from my lungs. The noose bites into my neck—not the clean break of a proper execution, but the slow crushing pressure of strangulation. The knot is wrong. The drop was too short. The Judge has arranged my death to be as prolonged and agonizing as possible.
I can’t breathe.