"Climb."
Count Corvane’s body obeyed.
He watched his own hands drag him up the scabbed pillar. "STOP." He was screaming at them now, a lord commanding his last two vassals. "STOP. I COMMAND you. I COMMAND YOU..." They climbed. His knees climbed after them, up through heat that cooked the skin off his palms, all the way to the top.
"Impale yourself," said the Demon of Vengeance.
Along the walls, hardened soldiers grabbed for each other’s shoulders.
His body folded him onto the point, and his weight did the rest, one finger-width at a time.
The metal went through his guts straight up from the backside.
It was furnace-hot. It burned him from the inside out as it went, cauterizing nothing, cooking everything, and the blood that had nowhere left to run came up his throat between the screams.
His own muscles held him steady on it, and his own hands stayed flat against the pillar, pressing. That was the obedience.
The point rose through him and came out of his throat, red, then white-hot, then red again. Count Corvane hung on his own length of glowing metal, boots off the ground, and the hall’s view of him shimmered in the heat.
The sound he made then had no language left in it.
It came out of him around the metal, wet, doubled, enormous, a wail that climbed past what a throat should be able to survive, and the domain delivered every note of it up through the seam with perfect, loving fidelity.
Men who had stormed walls put their hands over their ears. It did not help. The sound came through their palms.
Then his flesh began to knit.
The oldest soldiers along the walls understood.
The domain rebuilt him around the metal, patient and thorough. It repaired his cooked organs so they could cook again.
It remade his ruined throat around the point so he could scream past it, and he did, instantly.
Then the demon spoke again, in the voice that never rose.
"Reach the bottom."
For one heartbeat, nothing in him understood.
Then his eyes rolled down the length of the pillar underneath him, down the taper, to where the glowing metal thickened toward its base, thick as his thigh, thick as his chest. Understanding arrived, and the wail broke into words.
"NO. NO, NO, NO, PLEASE, NOT..."
His hands turned over, pressed flat above his head, and pushed.
He slid one hand-span down the taper, and everything the point had torn on its way in, the width behind it tore wider.
The scream that came out of him then made the first one sound like practice.
The domain healed him snug around the metal between one movement and the next. That was the trap of it. The healing kept him sealed to the metal, kept his nerves new, kept his blood in.
Every push began from warm, healthy flesh, and healthy flesh feels everything.
He did it again.
His body gave him no choice about it.
The count hauled himself down his pillar hand over hand, and every pull drove the thickening glow deeper through the middle of him. He screamed without one pause for breath, because the domain breathed for him now and had freed his lungs for their real work.
A hand-span. Another. The metal under him went from wrist-thick to arm-thick, and what leaked down the taper hissed and smoked on the glow.
"MAKE IT STOP!" He found pieces of words in the middle of the descent and spent them on the watching hall. "GIRL. PLEASE. MAKE IT..." The scream took him back before the sentence could finish.
Along the walls of the record-house, men had begun to pray, quietly. The Mediator stood with his ledgers forgotten against his chest. Nobody managed to look away.
It went on. That was the thing the hall would carry home hardest, that it simply went on, past every point where mercy or death or madness should have ended it.
Down and down it went, arm-thick, leg-thick, the man stretched wider than a man goes, healed tight around every inch and made to feel the next one from nothing.
And then his boots touched the ground.
Everything stopped at once, the moving, the tearing, the worsening, all of it.
He hung there upright at the base, run through and standing on his own feet, and the stillness that flooded through him after that descent felt like cool water, felt, for one unforgivable heartbeat, good.
Some last ember of the man he had been dared to lift his head and think it. ’Over. It is over. It is finally over.’
"Up."
The word landed on his body, took his hands, and turned them over.
Count Corvane began to climb his own impalement in reverse, and the sound that rose from the bottom of Eternal Suffering was worse than everything the hall had heard yet, because there was comprehension in it now.
He knew the taper. He knew every inch of it by name. He was going to meet them all again from the other side, narrowing, and then...
"Repeat until the end of eternity."
"No... No... NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
That was all of him now, established in front of a royal commission and sealed under a crown sentence: a man on a pillar in a breathing country, climbing forever, descending forever, healed new around the glow between every push so nothing ever dulled, the moving centerpiece of a world built to hold him.
No mercy, no sleep, no death.
The demon had promised him in front of everyone, and she kept her promises.
[Domain Manifested: Eternal Suffering.]
[A world born of the Primordial Villain’s authority and the Demon of Vengeance’s vow, fueled by vengeance itself. Those the Demon judges vile, she may grant unending existence within its keeping. Their suffering is her strength.]
[So long as the Demon of Vengeance does not stray from her path, the domain shall endure. Should she fall, the domain shall endure.]
[Vengeance’s will does not die.]
Iris let them look until there was no man along those walls who would ever need the story secondhand.
Then she closed her hand.
The seam began to draw shut, and the last thing Count Corvane ever saw of the living world, up through the narrowing cut of it, was the Demon of Vengeance looking down at him.
The red of her eyes had stopped swirling. For the space of one heartbeat, both burned with the same shape her hell had stamped across his sight when he landed: 1.
Then the seam sealed, and the flagstones lay whole again, unmarked, with the screaming gone where no morning would ever reach.
Somewhere along the wall a veteran was quietly vomiting onto the stones, and nobody mocked him.
Stormlord had watched every second of it without moving.
Felicity Valorian, fourteen years old, had made herself watch too, because her seal had bought this and she would not flinch from its price.
The Soul Records had one more thing to say.
[The Primordial Villain has taken his justicar.]
[Iris Ravenclaw, the Demon of Vengeance. Shield of the Innocent. Scourge of the Vile. Keeper of Eternal Suffering.]
[The vile shall fear her name.]
Iris walked back across the silence to the villain’s side, and her eyes had banked down to their ordinary red by the time she reached him. When she spoke, it was to nobody in particular, flat and quiet, in her own voice again.
"One down."
She exhaled.
"Next."
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