Her eyes track to my face. Something like gratitude moves through them.
“This is going to hurt. Just for a moment. Then it won’t hurt anymore.”
I find the place where human tissue meets flowering transformation. Find the pulse point that still beats despite everything the Bloom has done to her.
“Rest now.”
The knife does its work. Quick. Clean. Merciful.
The flowers keep blooming for several seconds after her heart stops. Then they wilt. Then they’re just dead flesh, no longer sustained by whatever unholy symbiosis the Abbot had created.
I close her eyes.
Move to the next cell.
There are seven cells in this corridor.
Six of them I can reach.
The seventh sits at the corridor’s far end, its door submerged to the sill in dark water from a ruptured cistern—decades of seepage pooled against the lowest point of the foundation. Whatever is inside, it cannot be reached. It will have to be left to the fire.
I do not look through its window.
Six people, then. Six minds trapped in bodies that have become gardens. Six voices mouthing the same words through glass that was designed to contain their screaming.
I give them what Arwen gave Sera—the same words, the same waiting, the same knife when they are ready.
Not because I want to. Not because it’s easy. Because no one else should have to carry the burden of what happens in these cells—not Arwen, who has already carried enough, not Cael or Circe or any of the survivors we’ve freed.
This is work I was made for. Work I chose. The executioner’s duty: to deliver death when death is the only mercy left.
Each one takes something from me. Each stroke of the knife carves away another piece of whatever remains of the man I was before I walked into this monastery. By the time I finish the sixth—a young man, barely twenty, his body so thoroughly transformed that only his eyes remained human—I am hollowed out. Empty.
The work is done.
I leave the last cell. Close the door behind me. Walk three steps down the corridor.
Then I fall to my knees and vomit.
Arwen waits outside.
She doesn’t enter the corridor. Doesn’t offer to help. Just leans against the wall at the top of the stairs, arms wrapped around herself, tears tracking silently down her cheeks.
I emerge from the basement with the taste of bile in my mouth and the smell of flowering death clinging to my clothes. My hands shake. My vision swims. The Bloom in my blood pulses with something that might be satisfaction or might be horror—I can no longer tell the difference.
She holds out a waterskin without speaking.
I take it. Rinse my mouth. Spit into the dust.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice is raw. “I should have warned you. Should have told you what you’d find.”
“No.” The word comes out rough. Broken. “I needed to see. I needed to understand what we’re fighting. What we’re burning.”
“You didn’t have to do it alone.”
“Yes. I did.” I meet her gaze. Let her see the devastation that I’m barely containing. “You’ve carried horrors you never should have witnessed. This one’s mine. Let me carry it for you.”
She moves toward me. Wraps her arms around my waist. Presses her face against my chest and holds on like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s turned to ash.
