Page 99 of Devoured
The Executioner moved closer, boots heavy on the bone floor. “The damned souls, my Queen?”
“Not just the damned.”I pressed both hands against the wall this time, bracing for what would come. “Everyone. Six hundred years of sacrifice mixed together like ingredients in a pot.”
They flooded through me. A girl who’d been sacrificed for talking to herself. A mother who’d killed her baby during postpartum psychosis. A woman who’d stabbed her uncle after years of abuse. The guilty tangled with the innocent, all conscious inside the architecture.
“Can you hear them too?”I asked the Executioner.
“I’ve always heard them,”he admitted. “The Judge commanded me not to listen.”
The power inside me thrummed—not just the Judge’s authority, but something cleaner. That presence from the wedding had left its mark.
I knelt in the center of the cathedral. “If you were sacrificed, tortured for no crime but existing—wake up. Remember who you were.”
The walls began to glow. Soft white light seeping through the bones as souls stirred from their imprisonment. A young girl broke free first, hovering there, translucent and confused.
“Where do I go?”she whispered.
I found I knew the answer. Could see the path opening above us. “There. To whatever comes after.”
She rose like smoke. Then another. Then dozens. The virgin sacrifices. The falsely accused. The ones whose only crime was being different. Each departure cracked the structure further.
“The realm requires souls,”the Executioner warned as the ceiling began to rain dust.
“Then we’ll find new ones,”I said. “The right ones.”
Soon only the guilty remained. Father Gallows writhed against his pillar, burning eternally in scripture robes. The Seamstress twitched in her web of nerve-threads. The Mirror Eater’s thousand reflections showed only terror.
I stopped at Father Gallows first. “You’ve served since the 1600s, haven’t you? When Varnar’s family first gave you to the Judge.”
His eyes found mine through the scripture that bound him. Begging.
“Enough,”I said simply, touching his shoulder. The scripture robes unraveled, the words writhing as they released their hold. His hollow chest collapsed, coins and scales clattering to the floor. “Face whatever waits beyond.”And then he vanished.
Then I turned to the Seamstress who instantly gaped. “You can’t release us. We’re the worst ones.”
“And you’ve been tortured by your own methods ever since,”I observed, dissolving her threads with a touch. “If centuries of feeling your victims’ pain hasn’t taught you empathy, nothing will.”
She sobbed as she faded—relief or terror, I couldn’t tell.
The Mirror Eater was last, shattered beyond recognition. “I don’t even remember who I was before.”
“Then go find out,”I said, and released her too.
The cathedral emptied. The walls went dark. The realm shuddered, foundations cracking without souls to support them. That’s when I noticed Varnar crawling away, trying to hide.
“Not you,”I said, and he froze at my voice. “Everyone else paid for centuries. You just got here.”
I dragged him to the center as chunks of the cathedral ceiling crashed down around us. “Your victims are still breathing. Still remember your hands. You don’t get to leave.”
“Please—”He begged.
“Besides,”I cut him off, “I need you. This place is dying, but something new has to replace it.”
That clean presence touched me one last time—approval without words—then faded completely.
“A new hell,”I said as reality began to dissolve. “But selective. Only for those who sleep soundly after destroying lives.”
The Executioner stepped beside me. “What would you have me do?”
