The air was a miasma, a solid, choking thing you didn't just breathe but drank with every gasp. It was a cocktail of charnel-house musk, the cloying sweetness of rendered tallow, and the sharp, acrid bite of burning timber. It coated the tongue and clung to the back of the throat, a poison meant to be savored. Above, the moon was a splinter of bone, its light stained a sickly red as it filtered through the greasy pall of smoke rising from a hundred funeral pyres.
This village, a place of wood and stone and simple lives just hours before, was now a canvas of black and crimson. But it was not silent. The roar of the flames was the dominant sound, a hungry god consuming its offering. Beneath it, however, was a symphony of suffering. On makeshift posts at the edge of the newly-cleared square, a half-dozen men had been flayed, their screams long since faded into hoarse, wet whimpers. My father's torturers worked with the casual air of butchers carving meat, their movements efficient and devoid of passion. This was their trade.
For me, it was art.
I stood at the epicenter of it all, a silhouette of serene calm against the inferno. My father, a few paces away, was a grotesque figure in the flickering light, his face a mask of pragmatic appraisal. He was counting heads, calculating profits. "A good haul," he'd grunted earlier. "The mines will pay well for this stock." To him, this was a simple operation. To me, it was a performance. I was the director, and this burning hell was my stage.
The low, sickening thump of a cleaver on the chopping block, followed by the wet, visceral splat as a man's head rolled into the dirt—that was my percussion. It kept the rhythm of the evening.
My father had a line of men kneeling before that block. The defiant ones. The fools.
"Last words," he grunted, the flicker of boredom in his own eyes a familiar sight. "Make it quick."
The first, an old baker with flour still clinging to his tattered tunic, lifted his head. His eyes, fixed on me, held a strange, weary defiance. "I've seen the likes of you before, boy," he rumbled, his voice like grinding stones. "You stand on the backs of the dead, but the wind will whisper their names long after your blood is dust. Remember our faces... for you will meet them again in a darker place."
I offered a slow, theatrical sigh. "The threat of a ghost story? How utterly pedestrian. You had one line left in you, and you chose a cliché. A disappointing performance." I gave a slight nod to the executioner. The axe fell. A dull thud, then a wet splatter.
The next, a young father with a face carved from pure grief, didn't look at me. His eyes were fixed on the column of smoke in the distance, a pyre that had once been his home. He spoke in a shaky whisper, not to us, but to the ashes. "To my son, Kael... I told you stories of heroes... may your mind be a fortress no one can ever breach."
"Sentiment," I murmured, my lips curling in distaste. "The weakness that ensures the walls of your precious fortress will always crumble." The blade fell, a perfect, clean strike.
The third was a priest, his cassock stained with the blood of his parishioners. He didn't beg. He trembled, but his voice was a chilling incantation that defied the burning air. "You have traded your soul for a fleeting throne. I curse you. May you live forever, haunted by every life you've stolen. May your immortality be your eternal hell."
For a fleeting moment, I was intrigued. "A curse? Now that has potential. But you assume I fear eternity, old man. I intend to fill it." The blade fell.
The last man was different. He was the village elder, a defiant leader who knelt as if it were a throne. He spat a gob of blood and phlegm that landed inches from my boots. His eyes held a pure, unadulterated hatred that was a perfect mirror to my own cold amusement. "I'm not a hero. I'm just a man. But I promise you this, little lordling: your reign will end in blood. It won't be me, and it won't be my son. But it will be someone. We'll be waiting for you."
My bored expression finally broke. A wide, genuine grin spread across my face. "Now that's what I'm talking about," I said, my voice filled with a giddy, almost manic pleasure. "See, Dad? That's substance. That's a true finale. He didn't offer me a threat; he gave me a promise." I waved a hand dismissively. "You've given me something to look forward to." The blade fell.
I turned from the spectacle, my eyes scanning the cages until they fell upon him. A lone man, a figure of pure, unadulterated rage. He wasn't scheming. He wasn't crying. He was just a raw, coiled spring of fury. The hero of his own story. I smiled, a chilling, expectant thing.
With a roar, he broke free, a stolen dagger in his hand. He charged, a low growl tearing from his lips, his face a mask of pure, glorious fury. He was everything I had been promised.
I didn't move. I simply stood there, a silhouette of calm, letting him get close. The dagger was a foot from my chest.
I raised my hand, palm open. On my wrist, an intricate, spiraling rune, tattooed in ink as black as a starless night, began to glow with a sickly violet light. The air thickened, shimmering with dark energy as I summoned a specter of raw pain—his mother, coalescing from smoke and sorrow. She was translucent and bleeding from wounds that were not there, her eyes vacant holes of despair. She used her last ounce of strength, not to fight, but to yell a single, broken, gut-wrenching word: "Live!"
I laughed, a cruel, mocking sound that echoed over the burning village. I pointed at the shattered hero, whose charge had faltered, his face a canvas of horror and disbelief. My voice dripped with contempt as I began to chant, a percussive mantra to his breaking mind. "Live... live... live... live... live!"
He dropped the dagger. It clattered on the blood-soaked ground. He looked at the phantom of his mother, then at me, and his soul visibly shattered. He didn't scream. He simply sank to his knees, his body trembling, his spirit consumed by pure terror as my men closed in, their clubs rising and falling.
The glowing rune on my wrist pulsed once, brightly. From it, ethereal tendrils of shadow-stuff, cold and wanting, snaked through the air. They wrapped around the broken man's form before sinking into his chest like needles of ice. I felt the connection snap into place, a faint flicker of another's soul, now broken and hollow, tethered to mine. A new puppet for my collection.
Just then, a flicker of movement. A small child, no older than five, with a shock of light-blue hair, scrambled out from beneath a pile of smoldering rubble. He ran towards the cages, his small voice a desperate cry. "Papa!"
A woman, his mother, chased after him, her face a mask of terror. "No, Kael, no!"
I stepped into the child's path. He looked up at me, his eyes—the same innocent, untainted blue as his father's—wide with a mixture of fear and confusion. A perfect canvas.
The mother scrambled to her feet, her voice a choked plea. "Please… mercy… he's just a boy."
I knelt down to the child's level, my smile a predator's gentle lie. "Your father was a very brave man," I said, my voice a soft, silken whisper. "He fought for you." I reached out and gently brushed a stray strand of blue hair from the boy's forehead.
Then, with a sickening crack that was lost in the roar of the flames, I snapped his neck.
The mother's scream was not human. It was a raw, primal sound that tore the night apart, a sound of a soul being ripped in two. She collapsed, a heap of shuddering grief, then looked up at me, her face a mess of tears and soot, her eyes burning with a hatred that almost rivaled the elder's. "You... monster..." she rasped. "Devil!"
I laughed, a hollow, empty sound. "Is that the best you can do? He's dead. Your husband is enslaved. Your home is ash. Yell! Scream for him! What is the point of living now?"
Her eyes darted to the side, catching the glint of a fallen slaver's sword. With a guttural cry that was part rage, part grief, she lunged for it. It was a pathetic, beautiful gesture. I let her fingers brush the hilt before my own blade, a rusted, jagged piece of scrap I carried for just such occasions, swung in a lazy arc.
Instinct, pure and foolish, made her raise her hands to block. The rusted metal didn't cut clean. It tore through flesh with a wet crunch of bone, mangling her hand into a grotesque ruin. She shrieked, a sharp, piercing sound of pure agony, clutching the bloody mess to her chest.
I leaned in close, my voice a venomous whisper against her ear, intimate and final. "You tried to block it. After all this, you still want to live. Big fool."
I stood up, my laughter booming now, a joyous, manic sound that rose above the crackling flames. "Big fool! Big fool! Big fool!"
I turned and walked away, leaving her there, broken and bleeding beside the body of her son. She would live. For now. Her hatred would fester and grow, a seed I had planted in the fertile ground of her sorrow. And one day, I would return to harvest it.