Page 87 of Devoured
“Isaac’s tongue can regrow. I’ll harvest it every night. Then cut it again. Sometimes with scissors. Sometimes with teeth. Sometimes I’ll let him grow it back halfway before taking it again. The anticipation is worse than the cutting.”
I looked at my friends. My family. The only people who’d ever loved me without conditions or expectations.
Marion was trying to shake her head, tears cutting tracks through the blood on her face. Her eyes begged me not to do this. Isaac just stared at nothing with the empty gaze of someone who’d seen too much. They’d suffer forever if I refused. And knowing the Judge, he’d make me watch every second.
“I’ll ask again.” The Judge’s voice dropped to something dangerous. The temperature in the chamber spiked, walls cracking from the heat.“And this time, think before you speak. Will you be my bride, or shall I start tormenting your friend now?”
The word lodged in my throat like broken glass. I looked at Marion’s ruined legs, at Isaac’s bloody mouth one more time and then at the monster waiting with dwindling patience.
My head moved once. The smallest nod that felt like signing my own death warrant.
"Bravo!" The Judge snapped his fingers, and the world remade itself around us.Walls ground against each other with the sound of molars chewing through stone. The bones in the floor rearranged themselves, rising and falling like waves made of death. What had been a throne room became a cathedral—but not one any god would recognize.
Spines curved upward to form gothic arches. Ribs spread out to create pews where no living thing would sit. Femurs stacked into pillars that wept marrow.
And the altar...
I recognized those bones. Smaller. More delicate. Female. Every woman Varner had killed. Every sacrifice his family had made for six hundred years.
The air sparkled, and the dead came back.
Father Gallows materialized in his robes made of stitched scripture. The Mirror Eater appeared in fragments. The Seamstress skittered forward on her thread-spool legs, and what she carried made bile rise in my throat—a dress that had once been women. Different shades of skin stitched together with veins for thread. Some patches were pale as winter, others dark as earth, all of them sewn into this mockery of bridal dress.
She held it up like a prize, and then it was on me.
No transition. No moment of changing. One second I was naked and bleeding, the next this thing clung to my body like it had grown there. Warm. Pulsing with remembered life. Someone’s belly skin stretched across my ribs. Someone’s back wrapped around my shoulders. I could feel the different textures—soft here where a young woman’s thigh had been, rough there where age had marked another.
Revulsion washed over me, but then something impossible happened. Despite the furnace heat of this place, goosebumps swept up my arms. Not the horror-chills I expected. This was different. Clean, somehow. Like stepping from a sickroom into snow.
“Can’t have a wedding without the groom’s rival.”The Judge’s laugh scraped against my bones. “Let me fix that oversight.”
The ashes that had been my Executioner, began to move. First just shifting, then swirling, then rising in a column that hurt to look at. The resurrection happened in reverse—bones assembling, meat wrapping around them, organs nestling into place with sounds that would haunt me forever. When skin finally stretched over it all, he gasped back to life naked and confused, still wearing that ancient helmet.
His red eyes found mine through the slits. Saw the dress. Understood.
He tried to stand but chains erupted from the stone itself, wrapping his limbs with a sound like breaking teeth. They yanked him spread-eagle, displaying him like a warning.
“Release her!”His shoulders dislocated with wet pops as he fought. “Take your revenge on me alone. Kill me a thousand times but I beg you, just let her go.”
His voice cracked behind the metal. “Please. I love her.”
The Judge’s roar made dust fall from the ceiling. My bones vibrated with it. “Insolent tool! You forget yourself. You are metal given form, nothing more. Love? From an instrument of execution? I’ll unmake you for this presumption.”
A blade appeared in his hand—not metal but something worse. It hummed with the memory of every scream that had ever echoed here.
The Executioner stopped fighting. His massive frame sagged in the chains, and his eyes found mine across the vast cathedral.
“Tell her why,”the Judge commanded, raising the blade. “Since you claim to love her, tell her what you see. Last words should matter—even from things that were never meant to feel.”
The Executioner never looked away from me. “I love your strength that you call weakness. Your survival that you call selfishness. Your scars that you call ugliness. I love the way you still try to save others when you can’t save yourself. I love you, Zahra. Not as a tool loves its purpose. As a man loves a woman.”
The blade went in slow between his ribs. The Judge watched my face while he did it, like my pain was the real show. The Executioner’s light dimmed but his gaze held steady, anchoring me to something human even as he died.
Something cracked open inside me. Not into despair, but into terrible clarity. The guilt I’d carried for years—thick as tar, acidic and suffocating—had fermented into something else. Something that might choke even a god.
Father Gallows began the ceremony, his voice like gravel being ground to dust. “Do you, Last Judge of the Realm Beneath, Our King, take this woman as your bride?”
“I do.”The words cracked the bone pillars.
