It’s interesting how, if you peel back the veneer of honor and dignity and righteousness, every fucking person here is guided by their darkest urges and base desires, and they merely seem to mask them for self-preservation, pretending at civility until it’s no longer necessary. Once the mentality of the mob infests and infects, and they show they can be who they reallywishto be because everyone else is doing it, then those masks are tossed aside “for the greater good.”
Becauseeveryonewatching these misguided executions can’tallbe wrong or wicked, right?
I also find it fascinating how these thoughts come to me so seamlessly, as if on a cloud streaming through my mind, waxing philosophical in a way I never experienced when my mind was held prisoner by Skartovius Ashfen.
In short: I think, overnight, I’ve becomesmarter. The concept makes me giggle as I watch the end of the burning with my hood pulled low, standing in the shadow of an alcove off to the side of the audience.
The wind is strong and stiff this dreary twilight, blowing the smoke around and making sure everyone in attendance gets a heady noseful of the burning ladies’ remnants. Overhead, the sun sinks behind the mountain’s jagged teeth, painting the sky orange and bloody.
I have to squint, even though there’s no sunlight currently present, and my skin is starting to itch. It probably wasn’t wise of me to step out from the shadows to attend this late-afternoon ceremony, but I was bored. Plus, the sun doesn’t torch me as swiftly as it does a fullblood vampire.
Wouldn’t that be comical? A threesome burning up front, only for a solo incineration to burst into crackling existence behind the audience a few minutes later? Talk about stealing the archpriest’s thunder.
I’m just ready to turn around and leave, feeling my lungs are sufficiently doused in witch particles, when the next stage of the event begins. Two hooded executioners with mean axes on their backs bring up a stumbling, also-hooded man from the ground level, propping him up on the stage. They tear the hood off and I see it’s none other than Vanison Shirin, staring blankly at the crowd.
“Oh, that was fast,” I mutter, curiosity piqued. I’m surprised his trial was concluded so quickly—he was only snatched from our meeting with the other power players a few short nights ago. Then again, I’m sure Silversmith Vanison got about as much of a trial as the three women before him onstage got.
Some of the audience members recognize Vanison. Others look around and shrug to their friends, not sure what this man’s crime has been. He doesn’tlooklike a greasy vampire. Doesn’tseemlike he has long fangs or bags of girls he’s trading to other people. To most, his criminal enterprise of silver weapon-making, production, and exportation, is a complete mystery.
Ohh, maybe they’ll claim he stuck his cock in the grandmother from before, so he’ll have to be killed, obviously, because he’s guilty of witchcraft by association!I start to make silly little wagers in my head about what they’re going to tell the audience Vanison is dying for.
In the end, it’s the boring truth: silver manufacturing and selling while it was an illicit operation.
I notice the audience getting a bit squeamish at this explanation from the Bronzeman reading the scroll. They don’t like it, because they support the Silverknights. How could Vanison’s activities be illegal withoutthe citizens’activities and support being illegal also?
In a breathtaking moment, I see the mask of civility, honor, and dignity fall over the faces of the thousand-throng like it had never gone away. It’s marvelous, the about-face.
It’s not Archpriest Cullard reading off the tale with fiery exhortation like he did for the witches. It’s an armored Bronzeman, as if he’ll be getting the flak for this execution if it goes awry in the public’s eyes. Archpriest Cullard is gone from the stage.Probably to go sell some silver.
The execution has all the usual rhythms, and I tilt and sigh as one of the beefy hooded executioners draws his hooded axe. The other shoves Vanison forward—whose arms are tied behind his back—and bends him over the beheading block. They say some small words to him I can’t hear. He spits on the ground at one of the executioner’s boots, which makes me smile.
The beheader lifts his axe high and dramatic, and the other one takes a position so he won’t get his fingers chopped off along with Vanison’s head.
Blood spurts before it’s meant to, I think, from the executioner’s neck. “Wrong neck,” I mumble, standing a bit straighter and crossing my arms.
The executioner wobbles in place, axe heavy in his raised arms, and his hooded comrade looks up from his crouched position—
Only to get the head of the axe accidentally buried in his skull, splitting it wide open. Brains and bone spill out, the audience gasps in horror, and the executioner drops his axe and grabs at his throat, eager not to die like his friend just has.
Another arrow punches into his chest, more blood splashes, and then another in his shoulder, spinning him around. He collapses with a heavy thud on the stage.
The gasps from the audience turn to screams.
I raise my eyebrows, pouting.
Bronzemen rush for the stage via the two staircases on either side of it, leading up from the ground level.
A shadowy figure stands at the roof to my right, high up where most people in the audience can’t see him. He raises his bow straight ahead, to the building at the other side of the town square, and plunks a Bronze archer there with a nicely timed shot.
The Bronze archer stumbles, trips, and falls about thirty feet from the building he was guarding, directly into the center of the audience.
The shadowed figure jumps from an incredible height and length—one might call it a supernatural height and length—from the roof to the stage where Vanison is darting his head back and forth, still on his knees at the beheading block.
The crowd circles around the dead archer in their midst. Bronzemen plunge into the audience and fists are thrown at the unruliness of it all. The shadow bowman, with his hood low likemine, draws swords and meets the Bronzemen on the stage with his blades valiantly singing.
Now the audience is attacking theBronzes, who they were attacking just last week before the truce was called. It seems things are right where they left off. I wonder if some of them are Silverknights incognito, but all I know is there’s blood in the audience, shrieking and shouting, people being cut down at the stage, and that powerful shadow-fighter protecting Vanison ‘til the end.
Protecting his brother.