Chapter 1007: Taking Up The Blade

For a handful of heartbeats, Cossot couldn’t move. She couldn’t speak. All she could see was the hilt of the strangely glittering dagger in Dame Sybyll’s hands while her mind raced with the speed of a galloping horse.

Never in her life had she thought that someone should die. No, that wasn’t true. She’d been raised from a young age to believe that demons should be purged from the land, and she’d never once questioned it. As a young child, she’d even cheered for some of the young boys in her class when they picked up sticks and acted like knights, fighting off ’demons’ to rescue Cossot and Roseen from certain doom.

She’d never once considered that the ’demons’ were people too, and after meeting Lady Heila and Dame Sybyll, she was both embarrassed and ashamed that she’d ever cursed them without even knowing them. But she had never in her life wished for the death of a person that she knew, much less thought of taking up a blade to do the deed herself.

She knew Ian Hanrahan. She didn’t just know of him the way most common folk did. Her father brought her to banquets for years before this one. She could remember the fallen baron’s smiling face when she was barely ten years old and he pinched her cheeks saying ’she’ll be a beauty some day.’

She remembered the feast where he’d made a solemn announcement that Bastian had fallen from his horse at a tournament and his fate was uncertain. More recently, she remembered how excited she was that he’d selected her father to join his entourage in Lothian City where she watched the wedding between Lord Owain Lothian and Lady Ashlynn Blackwell. It had been the most beautiful, magical thing she’d ever seen, and she’d been filled with gratitude for the man who invited her family to witness it.

But tonight she’d learned about the cruelty, greed and viciousness that lay beneath Ian Hanrahan’s convivial exterior... She’d learned why he was a man who deserved to die, a man who needed to die for what he had done. It was just that, even in her wildest dreams tonight when Dame Sybyll scooped her up like a prize catch from the lake, she’d never imagined that she would be the one to kill Ian Hanrahan.

"Cossot, you don’t have to," Roseen said when she saw the hesitation on her friend’s face. "Even if he has to die, it, it doesn’t have to be you."

"Yer friend isn’a wrong, lass," Sybyll said. "Dawn is almost upon us. I’ll sleep soon, an I can’a delay it. So ye need ta’ decide if..."

"I’ll do it," Cossot said, squeezing her hands into fists as if to crush the hesitation that gripped her. "T-tell me how, and, and I’ll do it," she said, reaching out with an unsteady hand to take the hilt of the glittering blade.

The dagger felt strange in her hands and she realized after she gripped it that it had been designed for a hand that was different from human hands. A demon, no, an Eldritch hand with shorter fingers, tipped by claws that left notched grooves in the polished wooden hilt of the blade.

It was also much, much lighter than any dagger of its size should be, and for a moment, she wondered if it had been cast from a weak metal like the tin her father often worked with, yet it felt strong and sturdy in her hand in a way that a dagger cast from tin never would.

"There’s a crease, here," Sybyll said, tilting her head to the side to elongate her elegant neck, revealing two faint scars that lingered on her skin long after the night that Lady Nyrielle had made her a vampire. "It’s here that ye need ta’ cut," Sybyll said, tracing her finger in a line across the crease of her neck, just beneath the jaw.

"The blade is sharp enough ta’ do tha’ work fer ye," she said as she gently set a hand on Cossot’s shoulder and guided her to the side of the captive baron where he lay chained to a crude wood and leather cot. "When I give ye tha’ word, just set tha blade along tha’ line, press, and pull, just like yer carvin’ a roast."

Cossot’s stomach clenched into a knot at the thought of slicing a man like a roast and a hot wave of bile surged up her throat, but she forced herself to swallow it back down and steady herself as she approached Ian Hanrahan. She held the blade out in front of herself at waist height, letting the point lead the way as she took one unsteady step after another.

"One last thing, b’fore tha’ end," Sybyll said, using the lightest of touches on Cossot’s shoulder to still the young woman before she accidentally stabbed Ian with the knife held out in front of her.

Suddenly, the entire room grew darker, gloomier, and much, much colder as Sybyll’s crimson eyes filled with an inky blackness that seemed to drink in the light of the room. Her hair drifted and danced in a wind that came from nowhere, and touched only her. Her fangs grew longer, shining and perfectly white next to the deep crimson of her lips as she drew a deep breath.

When she finally spoke, her words echoed from somewhere impossibly far away, as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well or the depths of darkness itself.

"Kiss of the Void," she breathed, allowing her words to fall on Ian Hanrahan like the blade of her axe. "Deathbed’s Confession."

Ian Hanrahan’s eyes bulged wide as he stared deep into the void of Sybyll’s eyes, confronted at last by the reality of death, the afterlife, and the endless emptiness that awaited him on the other side of the razor thin line that separated this life from what lay beyond.

There was nothing for him in that inky blackness. No hope, no salvation, no rebirth and certainly no Heavenly Shores. Only the endless Void, calling out to claim his soul. And somewhere, swirling among the thousands of mournful voices that cried out for him to join them at long last, a whisper reached his ears, one that burrowed past every rational thought in his mind, worming its way between years of religious scripture that he’d only ever paid attention to when it was useful.

’These words will be your last,’ the whisper seemed to say. ’Do not waste them!’