16. Ismerie
SIXTEEN
ISMERIE
The execution square has become a memorial.
I stand at its edge, watching families lay flowers at the base of stone markers that didn’t exist three months ago.
Children chase each other through pathways lined with names—hundreds of names, recovered from council records, carved into granite by artisans who understood that remembrance requires permanence.
The Grand Gallows are gone. Where three stories of iron and oak once loomed, a garden grows.
Not a manicured garden—the soil here is too saturated with old blood for that—but a wild tangle of black roses and thornbush that the city’s groundskeepers have learned to leave alone.
Life reclaiming death in its own stubborn way.
The smell has changed too. Three centuries of execution left this square reeking of iron and terror—the metallic tang of spilled blood, the sour stench of fear, the underlying rot of a system that had forgotten how to be anything but hungry.
Now there’s growing things beneath the old horror.
Flowers and earth and the tentative green smell of renewal.
It’s not peace. Blackhook City is too damaged for peace.
But it’s different. And different, I’ve learned, is enough to build on the ashes of what came before.
A hand finds the small of my back—large and scarred and known to me now as well as my own. The sigil on my collarbone answers, a flicker of awareness. I lean into the touch without looking, my body recognizing his presence before my mind catches up.
“You’re thinking too loud.” Brannok’s words rumble against my hair as he steps closer, his front pressing against my back. “I can practically hear the gears turning.”
“That’s not how the bond works and you know it.”
“No.” His arms wrap around me, pulling me against his bulk. “But I know you. And you’ve been staring at that memorial for twenty minutes without moving.”
He’s right. I have been standing here, watching the flowers pile up at the base of markers bearing names I recognize. The young witch who died—the one whose execution birthed a revenant. The merchant Brannok knew was innocent. The old scribe who cursed the Gallows Warden with his dying breath.
Their spirits are free now. Released when we destroyed the Judge. But their names remain, carved in stone that will outlast everyone who remembers why they died.
“I’m thinking about the other cities.”
Brannok doesn’t respond immediately. His arms tighten around me—not in question, but in understanding. Three months of sharing his bed has taught me to read his silences, and this one speaks volumes.
“Blackhook wasn’t the only place with gallows.” I continue, watching a little girl place a black rose at the base of a marker. “Wasn’t the only place where ending magic accumulated for centuries. If the Judge could form here…”
“Others could form elsewhere.” His chin rests on top of my head. “Already have, maybe.”
“The Veillands are full of places built on terror. Cities that maintain order through blood. Every one of them is a potential breeding ground for entities like the Judge.” I turn in his arms, face him in the golden light of late afternoon. “We stopped one. There could be dozens more.”
“Then we deal with them.” His words carry the same certainty that once pronounced death sentences—but the edge has changed. Less terror, more purpose. “When they arise. If they arise.”
“We?”
“You’re stuck with me, death witch.” He pulls me closer, presses his lips against my temple.
The gesture is casual, practiced—the easy affection of two people who have stopped pretending they don’t belong to each other.
“That’s how it works. You’re mine and I’m yours, and neither of us gets a say in that anymore. ”
I lean into him.
“The memorial ceremony starts in an hour.” I don’t pull away from his embrace. Don’t want to. “The new council expects you to speak.”
“The new council can wait.”
I tilt my head back, study his face. Three months have changed him in subtle ways—the hard lines around his mouth have softened, the constant tension in his shoulders has eased.
He still looks like a man who could kill you without breaking a sweat, but there’s less ice behind his gaze. Less emptiness.
“You’re staring.”
“You’re worth staring at.”
His lips twitch—the closest thing to a smile I’ve managed to coax from him in public. “Flatterer.”
“Truth-teller.” I rise on my toes, brush my lips against his. Quick. Easy. The kind of kiss that doesn’t need to prove anything because everything has already been proven. “You’re nervous about the speech.”
“I’m not—” He stops. Takes a breath. “I spent two decades speaking from the platform. Pronouncing sentences. Formal words that ended lives.” His gaze drifts toward the memorial, toward the names carved in stone. “I don’t know how to speak words that heal instead of harm.”
“You’ll learn.” I take his hand, thread my fingers through his. “We both will.”
The memorial ceremony draws a larger crowd than I expected.
Three months ago, these same citizens would have gathered to watch executions—vendors selling meat pies, families claiming balcony seats with premium views, children playing hanging games in the shadows of the gallows.
Now they stand in quiet rows, holding candles that flicker in the evening breeze, their faces solemn with an emotion I’m not sure they know how to name.
Grief, maybe. Or guilt. Or the uncomfortable awareness that they were complicit in the system they’ve come to mourn.
Brannok stands at the front of the crowd, where the platform’s base used to be.
He’s wearing his old black armor—the execution black he wore for two decades—but the crimson sash is gone.
In its place, a simple gray band circles his arm.
The color of ash. The color of new beginnings rising from destruction.
He’s not the Gallows Warden anymore. The title died when the gallows fell.
Now he serves a different role—a peacekeeper, a protector, a man who uses the fear he cultivated for decades to maintain order without executions.
It’s not comfortable. I watch him struggle with it every day, watch him reach for habits that no longer serve, watch him learn new ways to be powerful that don’t require nooses.
But he’s trying. That’s more than most would manage.
“Citizens of Blackhook.” His words carry across the silent crowd without effort.
Two decades of pronouncing sentences have trained him to project, to command attention, to make people listen whether they want to or not.
“We gather to remember those who died on this ground. The guilty and the innocent alike. The criminals who earned their sentences and those who were condemned by convenience, by politics, by a system that valued fear over truth.”
The crowd shifts uneasily. This isn’t the speech they expected—not the sanitized remembrance that politicians typically deliver. This is a reckoning.
“I was part of that system.” Brannok doesn’t waver. “For two decades, I served the gallows. I pulled levers. I tied nooses. I told myself that terror was necessary, that fear was the price of order, that the deaths I dealt kept worse violence at bay.” His gaze sweeps the assembly. “I was wrong.”
Murmurs ripple through the crowd. Some faces show surprise, others discomfort, a few show the dawning recognition of complicity acknowledged.
“The gallows are gone.” Brannok gestures toward the memorial garden, toward the names carved in stone.
“The platform that stood here for three centuries has been reduced to rubble. But the system that built it—the belief that enough death can purchase peace—that lives in all of us. In the citizens who cheered at hangings. In the merchants who paid bribes to ensure their enemies faced the noose. In every person who watched innocent people die and told themselves it was necessary.”
He pauses. The silence is absolute.
“We cannot undo what was done. Cannot bring back those whose names are carved in this stone. Cannot erase the centuries of blood that soaked this ground.” His tone softens—not weakness, but intention.
“But we can choose differently. We can build a city where justice doesn’t require gallows.
Where order doesn’t depend on terror. Where the guilty are punished and the innocent are protected, and we never again confuse the two because it’s easier than finding the truth. ”
I watch him from the edge of the crowd, pride swelling through me. Three months ago, this man would have laughed at the idea of a city without gallows. Would have called it naive, dangerous, impossible. Now he stands before thousands of citizens and asks them to imagine it with him.
People can change. Killers can choose to be different. I’m living proof of that—and so is he.
“Light your candles.” Brannok’s final words carry the weight of ritual without the poison of execution ceremony. “Remember the dead. All of them. And let their names remind us what happens when fear becomes policy and death becomes entertainment.”
One by one, candles flicker to life across the memorial square. Thousands of tiny flames, each one held by a citizen who came to mourn the system they helped create. The light is golden, gentle—nothing like the harsh torchlight that once illuminated public executions.
A single bell begins to toll.
Not the execution bells—those have been silenced, their enchantments broken, their towers converted to other purposes.
This is the memorial bell, newly forged and hung in the last surviving tower.
It rings for remembrance rather than sentencing.
Its tone is deeper, softer, stripped of the death wards that once sent throbs of fear through the streets.
Across the city, people pause to honor the dead. Not with fear. Not with entertainment. Not with the hungry anticipation of watching someone die. With acknowledgment. With grief. With the uncomfortable awareness that the past cannot be erased, only learned from.