A horrid day.

  Downpour like no other. No sign of relief had been seen from the heavens in days.

  In fact, it was so horrid it was hard not to admire it. It knew what it was. It had its purpose: to quench the soil, and dampen men’s spirits.

  And truly, it did.

  A soft thump on my side, slightly faltering my balance, jolted me back to the earth. A puff of smoke anchored me.

  “We are late, Adalbert. Is cloud-watching the surest use of your time?”

  Henrik’s soft, better-knowing voice brought me down.

  “Searching for higher purpose is never a wasted opportunity,” I responded. “No matter how high.”

  I studied him. His bearded demeanour had once hidden a warmth beneath that intellectual brow. No such trace lingered now—only a sternness worn raw by recent days, and the faint wreath of pipe smoke drifting around him like a tired halo.

  “Jonas is waiting at the market. If we linger here, he might think us apprehended. Lofty goals can wait.”

  His words were true. And my coat was soaked enough as it was.

  We were lonely souls in the soaked Marrow Street. No window open, no lone traveller, not even a stern guard brandishing sword or pike or any of the usual ornaments of menace. Most had been called to the market by Dreml’s mandate. Daily, sinners and traitors to his cause were dragged there to be handled under the city’s collective gaze.

  Three days was all it took for a new normal to root itself—brutal, but plain as day. Dreml’s creed had been etched into every stone: survival was the righteous path; all else, treachery.

  “I did review your work,” Henrik said at last, his voice carrying strangely in the wet hush. Water drummed against gutter and slate, and still his tone cut through.

  My mind stirred, half-numb, bracing itself for verdict.

  “It is strong. Potent, even. Yet I do not see your goal with this writing.”

  A hint of praise, yes—but wrapped in the same sober doubt the rain seemed to pour over us.

  “So what do you see, Henrik? Be plain, it hurts me not.”

  My eyes were on the slick stones ahead—my legs more concerned with not dying on the climb to the market hill than with any literary critique. Yet his silence pressed, so I forced the words out clean.

  “You speak of rights,” he said. “Communion. Unity. Strength.”

  He uttered each word like a tutor stripping varnish from a desk—steady, unavoidable, making plain what lay beneath. “It reads as a unifier. But a unity for what purpose? What are you suggesting?”

  So. It worked.

  “It is a unifier,” I admitted. “To collect the minds of the populace in one direction: upwards.”

  I halted him with a hand against his sleeve. The market could wait a heartbeat more; gallows would keep.

  “I will spread this work. Jonas’s press is at my disposal. I am not na?ve—of course it will be seized by the guard.”

  I leaned in, lowering my voice as if the rain itself were an eavesdropper.

  “And when they read it, they will not know whom I call the banners to.”

  “You hope they think of Dreml.”

  “I am his man. Am I not?”

  Even I could hear the bile under the words—thick, sour, impossible to mask.

  That traitorous turncoat.

  He had taken my ideals by the throat, wrung them dry, and poured whatever remained into his own goblet. My reckoning, my pleas, the dead themselves—bent to his use. He lured me into his chambers with praise and purpose, one hand warm on my shoulder while the other was already reaching for the sword at his belt.

  Three of the Council’s finest now hung from the bastion bridge. No trial, no witness. Their bodies swayed in the storm-winds like grotesque pendulums, each arc a quiet indictment of what Dreml called “order.”

  And the fourth—poor devil—Head of Roads and Bridgework.

  He had been executed the day before with a blade Dreml himself had sharpened.

  It took two strokes.

  The first merely scalped him.

  “He owns your writings, and in turn he owns you.”

  Henrik’s words hung there—flat, logical, the kind of truth that lands with the weight of a ledger stone. No passion. No judgment. Just fact.

  “He has cited you since the morning he seized office. Your pages are read before every tribunal. They are his scripture now.”

  He watched me, almost hopeful that I might conjure some argument to break his certainty.

  “How will anyone read this and not read a praise for Dreml?”

  I seized his shoulder and leaned in—too close, too sudden. A gesture that would have been comical in gentler days, but now felt like a necessary violence to make my point reach him.

  “One must read between the lines, dear friend,” I whispered.

  I released him so I could see the full confusion splayed across his features—perplexity, perhaps even a shade of admiration. It pleased me more than I wished to admit.

  “And if one cannot,” I went on, straightening my coat as though settling into a role, “someone else may do it for them. I still have friends.”

  Movement in the periphery caught me.

  A boy—seven, eight, it was hard to judge—sheltering beneath a rotted tarp at the base of a boarded stall. A girl, smaller still, clung to him. Their world was nothing but water, hunger, and the thin line of canvas above their heads.

  He looked up at me as if pulled by an unseen string.

  Our eyes met.

  There was fire in that child’s stare—pure, narrow, unwavering. A will that had not yet been starved out of him. A spark I recognized, because once, long ago, I had placed it there myself with a coin, a story, a gesture of trust.

  A seed I had planted was growing.

  “Your couriers,” Henrik murmured.

  “Dreml despises the children,” I said. “The weak. The ones who remind him there is more to a city than walls and guns. He sees them as naught but ballast on his march toward survival. So they have become my charge. And—my allies.”

  Henrik followed my glance to the alley. The boy still stared from beneath the rotten tarp, unblinking despite the rain that sought to drown him where he crouched. Henrik held the sight for a heartbeat longer than comfort allowed, then turned back to me.

  “What is your plan, Van Aarden?”

  “Strife,” I said plainly. “Union. A last hurrah, if the fates insist.” The words left my mouth bolder than intended—loud enough to carry, loud enough to be dangerous. So be it. If a guard overheard, let the powder spark and the lead fly. This thought deserved daylight or death.

  “Or rather,” I continued, breath steadying, “the hurrah that will bind this city for the true struggle—the struggle of a new world.”

  I let the phrase settle between us like a blade laid gently on the table.

  “New bonds,” I said. “New directions. New beginnings.”

  My eyes drifted once more to the alley, where the boy watched with that fierce, unblinking ember of intent.

  “A world claimed by all,” I finished. “In the aid of all.”

  I watched his eyes shift—slow, deliberate, as if the thought itself scraped against old foundations. He had to dig hard to make room for this principle in the world as he understood it.

  “Van Aarden,” he whispered, voice low enough to drown beneath the rain, “we fight for survival. You speak of an overturning of all we know, in times like these.” His brows knit. “Are you truly willing to foster insurgency now?”

  “When else,” I answered, “has insurgency been more needed? And for a purpose greater than spite—greater even than order—for the purpose of seeing us through the storm, together.”

  I leaned into the conviction, let it ride on the keenness of my voice, let it stand where my courage fell short.

  And from the narrowing of his eyes, that subtle tilt of his head, I saw it strike true.

  He pushed me back softly with a measured hand. His face settled once more into that composed, upper-class veneer he wore like a fitted coat. The eyes beneath his heavy brow studied me—cool, assessing, unreadable.

  Then the beard shifted. A subtle softening. A concession only a friend would notice.

  “And I heed you.”

  He lifted his arm in that gentleman’s gesture—an invitation to take the lead, to set the course up the gleaming, rain-slick street.

  And so I did.

  With pleasure. And pride.

  The market was a name only—a ghost of commerce haunting its old foundations. Goods, spices, merry chatter; these lingered solely in the delirium of memory. Reality was rations to the north and butchered cavalry to the east, a grim harvest of horseflesh carved from beasts ridden to death by desperate messengers. The rest? Spectacle and suffering.

  Cries rose through the rain-soaked air—cries for food, for news, for missing friends, sometimes all in the same breath. Crude charcoal portraits of the vanished clung to wall and post, each drawing dissolving slowly in the downpour, as if the city itself refused to remember.

  Veterans leaned against crumbling stalls—wooden legs, tattered coats, cheeks hollowed beyond pleading. They had abandoned the art of begging; death had become their final anticipated wage, and the look in their eyes suggested even that was a mercy.

  And at the center of this mire—cutting through despair like a struck bell—came a different sound entirely.

  A rising chorus.

  Anger.

  Spite.

  A fervor sharpening by the minute.

  All of it directed at the one structure that still commanded reverence in this shattered square:

  the gallows.

  Shouts from the scaffold and the shriveled cries of the masses clashed in the air above the square—two storms wrestling for dominion, neither willing to yield. No voice could be cleanly separated from the next. Rage bled into grief, grief into accusation, accusation into blind, directionless noise. The whole place quivered under it, as if the stones themselves were sickened by the sound.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Nothing of Dreml’s new order was hidden. The spectacle was crafted to be seen, to be known, to be feared. A line of poles ringed the square—each bearing a head lacquered by rain, hair plastered, eyes half-open in the final indignity of display. Officers who refused Dreml’s command. Soldiers marked as defectors. Thieves and beggars deemed “agitators” and preserved as warnings.

  And among them—some of the Council.

  The one I had seen shot fell into place easily, his neck a ragged ruin beneath the pale oval of his face. Two more hung in quiet testimony beside him. One I knew: The Deputy of the Interior, her characteristic brow still knitted in indignation even in death. The other I could not name—only his cap, soaked through but unmistakably of the Council’s cut, granted him identity enough.

  Their expressions had stiffened into something between outrage and disbelief. As though, even in death, they could not fathom the speed with which the world had tightened its fist around their throats.

  Dreml had arranged all of this with purpose.

  And it worked.

  Henrik let his gaze fall to the ground. Poor man was even more sheltered than I, even in this recent calamity .

  “Horrid. Barbarism to its core,” he murmured, voice thin beneath the rain.

  “It is clockwork, my friend,” I said. Even I could hear the mismatch between my tone and the spectacle before us. The gallows, the poles, the staring heads. “Deterrence and clearance both. Removal of enemies, and stopping new ones from forming. Pure statecraft.”

  I studied the nameless councilor as I spoke—his wet curls plastered to a brow that once commanded something, his jaw slack, his dignity stripped to sinew and pale wax.

  I am sorry for what I caused, my friend. And I am sorry your end has been reduced to a lesson for a man who has only now learned to stomach consequence.

  “I know damned statecraft, Van Aarden!” Henrik hissed, forcing his eyes from the row of heads. “I resent it being displayed all the same. Come—Jonas must be close.”

  I moved to follow, ready to seek out our co-conspirator, when a shift along my leggings halted me. A faint tug—a touch so light it might have been the rain at first. But no. That sensation had become instinct by now: the small, deliberate hands of a child seeking a tether in an age where even air felt uncertain.

  I turned, no longer heeding my dignified friend.

  I looked into the eyes of a young girl. I would guess her age if I did not know it already. Seven, she was. A birthday marked half a year ago—celebrated with stale pastries and a wooden doll someone had carved poorly but with heart.

  “Adalbert, please.”

  The girl’s voice trembled. Rain hid nothing—it only diluted her tears, carried them down her cheeks in cold ribbons. “The market is scary. They give me no food, and they shout all day long. I want to go.”

  I leaned in, set my hands on her thin shoulders—cloth soaked through, skin cold as tin. Anything to give warmth. Anything to remind her the world had not yet wholly turned to ash.

  “Then you must go, Ygrid. Linger not when your heart tells you to leave. I am sure you have seen enough for one day.”

  I dried her cheeks with my thumbs. A pointless gesture in this downpour, yet necessary. I pressed a coin or two into her hand—small fortunes in times such as these.

  “Your strong spirit is needed still,” I whispered “Your help is in dire need. You remember what the Lonely Giant said before he parted to the beyond?”

  Her breath hitched. I knew she remembered. How could she forget?

  “‘Fear not,’” she whispered, voice thin as parchment. “‘I do not leave you. I go only to where my strength is needed.’”

  “My strength is needed here now,” I told her. “But you—you must go and recover yours.”

  I leaned closer, so no guard, no passerby, no zealot of Dreml’s new order could overhear.

  “Oscar needs sustenance too. Find me if my meagre coin proves lacking.”

  When she lifted her face again, I saw it—the old fire rekindled behind the damp lashes. The thought of stale bread shared between two children who refused to surrender. A bond forming in the ruins, one I could never hope to match nor deserve.

  She nodded once, fierce despite her trembling, and slipped back into the fog.

  Content with seeing her leave for safety and the unsure promise of sustenance, I turned—and saw Henrik staring me up and down. He bore a frown.

  I could not tell if the circumstances around him, or my encounter, were the source of his countenance.

  “What have you made, Adalbert? What do you command here? Do every single damned soul heed your voice?”

  “No,” I said, with a shrug of my shoulders. I rose to meet his gaze—a heedful visage if ever I saw one. “But I command those who need it. And I need them. Do not think I don’t let them know it. Purpose—and the strength it gives—is a blessing to those who have lost all direction. Will you tell me their strength is not needed? Will you tell me their eyes are blind, and their words hollow?”

  “Quiet, man!” Henrik interjected with a whisper—arms reaching as though to smother the very spirit that had risen in me. “Treasonous words are treason all the same, no matter the ethos they are uttered with.”

  As soon as his sour countenance had arrived, it dissipated; his eyes fixed on something beyond my shoulder.

  “There he is. Jonas awaits.”

  I turned—and sure as rain, that rotund oaf stood in the crowd, waving us in as if we were dockhands unloading crates.

  No words were parted; Jonas’s desperate visage told us action was needed first and foremost. We pushed past shrill wives, soldiers on leave decked in the red armband of the new order, men and women famished yet gathered at the gallows for the promise of bread and circus.

  As we closed in, Jonas’s eyes gleamed with the urgent desire to speak—to be heard.

  He drew close, gripped us by the shoulders, and leaned in with that conspiratorial bend of his:

  “Henkel is here. They dragged him here, gentlemen. Him, and the other writers who refused to bow to Dreml and his ways. Knut, Erlend— they even took Sigrid, the brutes!”

  He attempted a whisper, but failed; the words came out cracked and loud, landing nowhere with purpose.

  “Dreml said his case would be looked at,” I muttered—flat, emotionless. Too many sufferings already endured, too many disappointments served to grant the words any life.

  “To burning hell with Dreml—his words reek of piss as much as his actions,” Jonas hissed, voice a shade too high, yet uncaring of who heard him.

  “Lessen your tone, Jonas,” Henrik whispered back. “Is this what you brought us here to see? Our friend condemned?!”

  “What else would you want to see, Henrik? Your cause has been pallid from the beginning—here, here is something to lighten your flame! Come and watch our friend die by the hand of the new era!” Jonas’s words were hard with emotion, softened only by necessity, and drowned in sorrow.

  Even my drained heart could not help but ache, seeing my cheerful friend grieve one not yet dead—yet lost all the same.

  The next minutes would shape my soul. I could feel it.

  Drums.

  Those horrid drums.

  They had been present since the new dawn, and they promised naught but death every time. My body went cold—my fingers lost their feeling, and my heart fled me.

  This was it, was it not?

  Was this not the moment when I would lose friends, once more?

  “HEAR, HEAR!” a hoarse voice barked. Glee and command clung to every syllable. A uniformed yet unkempt man—sporting the red of Dreml—stood in proclamation, holding aloft a parchment he scarcely glanced at as he screeched:

  “Judgement comes to all—but the enemies of peace and state shall see it sooner than others, in a manner befitting their ilk! Dreml seeks to end, disperse, and judge all harbingers of ill content and strife—and so he does with these condemned souls!”

  A sharp shift of his arm—and three poor souls were brought to the boards.

  One I did not know. Foreign to me, and to my memory.

  The other two—I knew too well.

  Henkel. Poor, poor Henkel. Thinner than ever, bruises dark upon his face, stripped of what meagre finery he had once owned. And yet—there it was. A fire that could ignite any soul still roared in his eyes. His will—his pure will—shone through even in this moment of sanctioned evil.

  The other was Brenda.

  Stripped as well to bare necessity, washed of all paint and ornament—she still carried the weight of command in nothing but her posture.

  The crowd booed, hissed, and otherwise made their intentions known—they had come here with the same purpose as the rest of us: to see someone die.

  Pebbles, splinters of wood, and other refuse were thrown. An old crone close to me hurled a clump of filth with a strength and vigour her frail body did not seem to possess.

  Yes. Dreml had indeed found his scapegoats.

  Our other friends were pushed onto the stage of death.

  Knut—his fierce pen now useless.

  Erlend—the finest caricaturist in the city, whose lines once flayed tyrants to the bone.

  Sigrid—and her travel pamphlets, sparing no shadow, naming rot wherever she found it.

  All of them stripped.

  All of them laid bare, readied to die.

  And yet Henkel burned, as if he still had eons left to live.

  “Here you have it!” the crier shouted. “A councillor who left you—the people—to rot! And writers and agitators, spreading lies and deceit! What should one do with such rabble?”

  “DEATH!” came the answer—a ragged cry, voices hoarse, hungry, angry, and already half-broken.

  “And they shall have it!” he answered with glee, raising his arm in triumph as the crowd fed his ego.

  A crowd is a deadly thing. It is just as likely to devour you as it is to applaud you. Here, he held it in his grasp.

  “Skarpretter, heed the call of the people!” he cried. “End the agitators!”

  A man in simple clothes stepped forward, a black cloth drawn across his face, barely concealing a dark, unkempt beard. He raised his rounded sword high, steel catching the dull light.

  Soldiers shoved my friends to their knees. It happened swiftly—too swiftly for thought to find purchase.

  As the skarpretter moved toward them with his grim purpose, I chose to look away. I did not dare witness my colleagues, my friends, ended so.

  “WITNESS, ADALBERT!”

  A hoarse, furious voice tore through the din.

  Henkel.

  “I am ending now! I die for truth—I die so the truth might stand where none could bear it! Will you not witness me as I meet my end?”

  The crowd’s chant faltered. Sound drained from the square, as if the air itself recoiled. An uncertainty they did not intend. My soul turned cold.

  My friend—already half beyond this world—called me by name.

  He never knew my new goal. Never knew the frail, desperate hope I had nursed—that I might yet set something right.

  “Here we are!” Henkel cried. “Our souls depart to who knows where, lives ended by a tyranny you helped shape! You will watch me, Adalbert!”

  Eyes turned. All of them.

  Henrik and Jonas were as pale as I felt. An old hag near the front raked me with her gaze, weighing me as one weighs kindling.

  Straw, madam. That is my make.

  The skarpretter sensed the shift. He always would. Men like him lived by the wind of moments, by the lean of crowds. He adjusted his stance, his purpose narrowing.

  Henkel would go first.

  The executioner’s steps came quick now, splashing through mud and spilled refuse, sword lowering from ceremony to intent.

  “WITNESS WHAT YOU MADE!” Henkel shouted, his voice raw but unbroken. “THE NEW ORDER WILL FIND ALL! RISE, OR—”

  Steel cut the air.

  The sentence did not finish.

  And so, my friend was ended.

  The others followed in short order. Once the first stroke had fallen, the rest came swiftly—his trained hands finding their rhythm, iron rising and falling with practiced indifference. Some of the best, the brightest of our kin, were erased with only a handful of swings. No ceremony. No pause long enough for mercy to intrude.

  A roar—reluctant at first—rose again as the bodies fell. The uncertainty that had rippled through the crowd moments earlier was smothered by motion, by finality. The sharp-judge’s swings restored order to their world, if only for now. Harsh words were swallowed whole. Doubt followed them into silence.

  Death and justice took their places, indistinguishable.

  I had grown used to death by then. I had seen it rotting, screaming, burning, drowning in fog. But this—this struck me differently. This found purchase.

  Had I not killed him?

  My words had carried him here. My trust had drawn him into the open, into the periphery where eyes could settle and fingers could point. The crowd did not cheer the blade alone—they applauded my prose.

  The uniformed crier took the square once more and raised a single hand. The sound died at once, as if the space itself had been trained to obey him. He stood as though he owned the stones beneath his boots.

  “The traitors of the day have been silenced!” he proclaimed. “More shall follow—for in two days’ time, the monsters lurking in our mists will be dealt with, handily and without mercy!”

  What is he saying?

  “The Blemmye,” he continued, voice swelling with rehearsed disgust, “those walking brutes who have grown voices fit only for sowing doubt and spewing ungodly lies! Some have already taken to violence—have already turned with the devils on the fateful day that upended our fair city!”

  My hand closed around Jonas’s arm. Too tight—I felt it in his sharp grunt—but I could not loosen it. Command over my body had abandoned me.

  “We will begin with Lotte!” the crier shouted. “The butcher’s assistant, who single-handedly slaughtered three of our finest cavalrymen on Devils’ Day! Others shall follow—preachers of false testimony, enemies of order, liars before our Lord!”

  My breath came shallow now.

  “You must print,” I said, low and urgent, leaning close to Jonas’s ear. “Go home. Print my words. I will send people to spread them at once.”

  I looked at him then. His face was swollen, slick with rain and tears alike. He was mourning an old friend. God help me—I wished I could join him. But shame had chained me upright, and time was already gnawing at the edges of the world. So instead, I drew him closer and held him there.

  “There is no more time,” I said, the words tasting of iron. “Our new world must begin now.”