The town had no name.

It had long since been stripped from the road signs, scrubbed from Crown ledgers, and cauterized from memory. It was a mere stain on the sole of the Dominion’s boot.

It clung to the edge of the Fold like a barnacle on the belly of a rotting hull. But unlike the border cities of the north, which were gilded in Dominion coin and fat with sanctioned vice, this place was starving. The streets were cracked and wind-scoured, the buildings eaten up by time and neglect. It wasn’t a town so much as a wound that would never be allowed to heal.

Kaela didn’t speak as they crossed its invisible threshold. She walked one step behind Talon, her charm clinging tightly to her chest. She kept her hands in her pockets, fingers tense. Her ears were alert, tuned to every sound. Her eyes, green with copper flecks, scanned everything with hushed suspicion.

She knew this place.

Not because she had been here. She hadn’t. Not physically, anyway. But it felt familiar, because it was the backdrop of too many dreams filled with horrors that had happened in places just like it. The air carried the impression of those memories, clogging her throat the way smoke does when you sit too close to a dying fire.

It was both memory and resonance. A place that had once screamed, until it learned how to whisper.

Her t-shirt and worn jeans were no finer than those of the villagers who moved past. But Kaela could feel the difference. She had escaped this life, if only for a few days. They would never escape.

As they passed the outer edge of the settlement, where rusted trailers and crumbling prefab shells cluttered the edges of the old road, Talon slowed his pace and glanced around.

“This is the last village until we reach the outpost,” he noted. “We’ll stay the night. With some luck, we’ll be through the Fold by tomorrow.”

Kaela nodded, though her eyes never stopped scanning the poverty around them. At the edge of a rusted chain-link fence, she saw movement. A girl, thin as wire and coated in dust, was licking the edge of an empty tin plate. No food. Just the memory of it.

Her belly, distended from hunger, rose and fell with each shallow breath. Her eyes, pale and fading, lifted and met Kaela’s for a heartbeat before falling away.

Then she vanished into shadow like a figment of the imagination.

Kaela slowed. “She’s starving.”

Talon said nothing.

The path ahead wound between homes pieced together from rusted metal and salvaged wire. The air was thick with the smell of iron and mildew, as everything decayed from the inside out.

Kaela’s eyes caught on a broken fencepost, swallowed by weeds. Just beyond it, a small circle of wildflowers littered the dry ground with some color. In the middle of the patch was a small, lavender flower with petals that shimmered faintly, as if dusted with frost. A skyblossom.

She paused, only for a moment. Then walked on.

They passed a boy crouched near an empty water trough, gnawing on a rind in his hand. It was chewed down to nothing, but he continued to work it in case there was still a hint of flavor. His cheeks were hollow. Eyes too large for his skull. He didn’t notice them.

Farther on, a girl no older than five dragged a rusted pot behind her. Her dress was more hole than cloth. There were dark purple circles around her eyes. Her ankles were wrapped in cardboard where shoes should have been. She didn’t carry the bowl expecting it to be filled, just to be heard. Maybe the sound would earn her a crumb.

Kaela offered a small smile. Just enough to not seem threatening. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the remaining few nuts from her breakfast ration. Generously, she extended her hand to toward the little girl.

The girl hesitated, eyes wide and unreadable. Slowly at first, and then all at once, she reached out like a frightened animal and snatched the ration. Kaela barely even felt the contact.

Instead of running, the girl backed away step by step, never taking her eyes off Kaela. Then she crouched in the shadows between two leaning homes and began to toss the nuts quickly into her mouth and chew them with her rotting teeth.

Kaela watched her, the pit of her stomach tightening.

“Did she think I was going to hurt her?”

Talon’s jaw shifted. His voice stayed flat.

“Trust is dangerous here.”

They walked on.

Once, this place was on the maps. It did have a name. But no one here remembered. Or cared. The Crown’s silence was louder than the screams.

It had once been called Nireth’s Hollow, a threshold settlement wedged between the unstable zones of the Fold and the scorched ridgelines that bled into Emberdeep. In better days, traders passed through hauling grain, sugar and sometimes filtered water, bartering for cotton, pecans and dates. It was never wealthy. But it had been alive.

Then came the Compliance Purge.

Tyrillon had ordered it after a refugee caravan made of Velari women and children had been caught escaping during the height of the Skyguard resistance. One act of defiance. That was all it took.

The Crown didn’t send soldiers.

It sent the Purity Guard.

No battalions. No armor. Just machines. Compact enforcement drones rolled in ahead of the main unit, their lenses sweeping for movement while speakers crackled with Crown decrees. Then came the executioner. Not a warrior, but a symbol. Cloaked in Dominion black, face hidden beneath a polished visor, flanked by two servo-walkers with restraint gear and a portable gallows rig.

Homes were burned in sequence, not from malice but protocol. Children died without sound, to the hum of calibrated fire. One body, that of a little girl, was stripped and left hanging over the well. They said she knew about the caravan and didn’t report it.

The bones are long gone, but the stench remains.

By all logic, Nireth’s Hollow should have vanished, but it didn’t. Like dirt beneath fingernails, it clung on. And the Crown, for the most part, let it.

Every few cycles, a patrol would pass through. Not to enforce anything, but just to remind them what it would feel like if they let a trickle of hope into their lives.

The settlement square was paved, but cracks spiderwebbed through the concrete. Old street lamps leaned, bulbs long-since burned out. Storefronts flanked the square on either side, their windows shattered, their signage faded to ghosts of language. Metal shutters were rusted shut or hung loose, creaking in the dry wind.

There were no churches any more. The schools had closed. Theaters and restaurants abandoned. Graffiti marked the brick and blood stains painted the sidewalks. The old life had been extinguished.

But piercing this landscape of neglect stood the platform.

Matte black steel. Seamless. Stark. Intimidating.

It rose from the dirt like a monument from an advanced world, standing four feet off the ground, lifted above everything else on four metal stilts. It looked precise and surgical, untouched by the decay around it. As out of place in this ruin as a pile of gold bricks.

A machine was built into the raised steel, pulsing faintly with bands of violet light. Its surface was smooth and still. A low hum lingered in the air, almost inaudible, just loud enough to irritate the eardrum.

Kaela didn’t know what the machine was, or what it was for. But one thing was certain, she had never seen technology like this before. No seams, no switches, no visible source of power. Just smooth metal and silent light, built with a precision that felt inhuman.

Her teeth ached just looking at it. A cold pressure began to coil in her gut, slow and sharp, like her tendons were loosening and her bones were trying to pull apart.

Without thinking, her fingers found Talon’s hand, and she gripped it hard. Her brow furrowed, and she whispered, “What is that?”

Talon’s eyes were locked on the structure, as well. He leaned down to speak into her ear, quietly enough for only her to hear.

“It’s an eraser.”

The Crown didn’t call it that, of course. They called it justice. In reality, it was a tool for keeping the peace through fear. It existed not for the condemned who would stand on it, but for everyone else.

The ones left behind. The ones who had to watch. To remind them what happened when there was anything short of full obedience.

The machine didn’t just kill. It unmade. It reduced a body to vapor, scrubbed bone to dust, and left nothing behind. No name. No corpse. No closure. Just silence.

This was the preferred method now, as opposed to hangings and firing squads. While those left a body that could be hung on display as a reminder, this was worse. This left nothing behind. No remains. No grave. Nothing for families to bury, nothing to say goodbye to. Nothing to remember.

Kaela could feel the tension in the air tighten, as if the village was collectively bracing for what came next. Then, right on cue, a bell tolled. One long note that echoed across the square like a verdict passed without trial.

The crowd emerged in silence. They weren’t startled or confused, because this had obviously happened before. Their movements were orderly and obedient, shaped by repetition and fear. Families filed in from between the trailers and shacks, each taking their place in organized rings around the platform.

Even the children stood as still as corpses. They kept their eyes down and their hands idle. Their expressions were far from stoic, they demonstrated an engaged terror that had been methodically engrained in them.

There were no cries. No questions. Just the hush of people who had learned that grief would be punished and memory was treason.

At the base of the platform stood two VROC-7 Reapers, motionless, forged from midnight steel and menace. They flanked the structure like pillars, one on either side of the stairs, eyes glowing a faint red. Their presence alone was enough to ensure calm and civility.

Above them, positioned on the platform itself, stood a VROC-16 Sable Vire and a VROC-8 Palisade, one to the left, the other to the right. They bracketed the dais like sanctum guardians. The Palisade was massive, its armor paneled with segmented onyx and lined with faint orange inlays that pulsed in a slow, artificial rhythm. The Sable Vire beside it was leaner, lithe and elegant, almost sculptural in her precision. Her metallic form shimmered with cruel grace, eyes glowing amber, every angle suggesting devastation held in perfect check.

Then motion stirred at the back side of the platform, and the crowd turned to look. Even the smallest child stared with held breath and frozen limbs. Finally, a figure rounded the corner and began walking around the platform with slow, predatory grace.

Her uniform was immaculate. Deep green, sharply pressed, adorned with Dominion brass and blood-red insignia. Every seam aligned with military precision. White gloves. Black boots polished to a mirror sheen. Not a thread out of place.

She wore no armor. She didn’t need it. Her presence did the work of ten soldiers.

She moved without flourish or performance, her steps controlled and measured as she circled the dais with the calm confidence of someone who had never once been disobeyed. The crowd didn’t breathe until she stopped.

Her face was striking in the way a blade is striking. A kind of cold beauty that could only be chiseled by an artist. Her eyes scanned the gathering like targeting lenses, not searching for trouble, but confirming its absence.

She was Dominion order made flesh, and even the robots stood straighter when she passed. Slowly, she ascended the stairs like a ghost in full command of gravity, her movements carrying no haste or strain, only silent, sovereign presence that was terrifying in its restraint.

Talon exhaled, barely audible.

“That’s Severra Draneth,” he whispered. “She’s the High Inquisitor for the Crown.”

Talon was surprised to see her here. As the highest authority over the Purity Guard, Draneth typically orchestrated her dirty work from afar. She preferred distance. Detachment. Her presence this far away from Verilion meant a larger plan was in motion.

Before his mind could even register the danger, his body moved. One hand reached for Kaela’s shoulder, pulling her close as he wrapped an arm around her protectively. His heart pounded against his ribs, steady but faster.

There was no hiding now. The two of them stood out too sharply. Armored and winged, he was impossible to mistake for anything but what he was. Blending into the crowd was no longer an option. All he could do was keep his wings tucked tight and his hands near his blades.

He watched Draneth’s eyes carefully. She wasn’t scanning the crowd or studying anyone in particular. Her gaze moved without urgency, detached and uninterested. Whatever her purpose here, she wasn’t searching for a victim. She had already found one.

The tension in his muscles eased, just slightly. Kaela reached up with her small hands and gripped his arm tightly. He could feel her fear seeping into his skin through her fingertips, and wished he could shield her from what was coming. But he knew it was only going to get worse.

That’s when Severra Draneth spoke, and the air seemed to collapse around her voice. It was as if time had stopped. Nobody dared move.

“Bring the accused forward!” she commanded, her voice an ice pick that split the silence cleanly.

Two more Reapers appeared, emerging from the far edge of the square. One dragged a man by the arms, his feet barely lifting off the ground. The other drove a woman and two children ahead of it, corralling them like cargo.

The man had been beaten badly. Blood had dried in crusted layers across his face, his shirt torn open and stained dark by old wounds. He stumbled with every step, his legs buckling beneath him. It was a miracle he was still upright.

The woman clutched the children close, her eyes wide and hollow. The older child tried to stay between his mother and the Reaper, one small arm raised like a shield. The girl wept without sound.

The Reapers marched them to the base of the stairs and stopped. One turned, locking its stance in a formal hold.

The accused had been presented.

Draneth did not speak. She just looked down at them, as if judging the value of insects.

Talon didn’t recognize the man. He certainly didn’t look like a rebel. He wasn’t muscle bound, or battle scarred, or war weathered. He was just a father. Maybe a farmer, or a blacksmith. Or local merchant.

Had he made a joke at the Crown’s expense that was overheard by the wrong ears? Had he donated clothing that was too small for his children to a neighbor in need? Or, had he done nothing at all? Was he another body offered up to remind the settlement that anyone could be taken, at any time, with or without cause? And always without mercy?

Draneth stepped forward, her boots clicking against the steel platform with perfect rhythm. She reached out her hand to the Palisade, who produced from its forearm a small device about the size of a slice of bread. She took it, and glanced down at its backlit screen, before tapping her fingers against it for a few moments. The screen flickered a couple times, and then displayed the man’s indictment.

“You stand accused under Dominion law,” she announced, her voice cold and exact. “Willful indoctrination of minors through the dissemination of prohibited historical content.”

She paused, letting the charges settle like ash.

“These offenses fall under Article Nine of the Crown’s Educational Integrity Act, and carry the full penalty of treason.”

A ripple moved through the crowd, not of shock, but of restraint. No one believed it. No one had to. Belief wasn’t required, only compliance.

Draneth let the silence stretch just a moment longer, then flicked her eyes towards the accused.

“Do you wish to submit a plea?”

The man raised his head slowly. Blood had dried in a split beneath his lip. His voice, when it came, was hoarse but steady.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “I was teaching. That’s all.”

Draneth tilted her head, almost like she hadn’t heard him properly.

“Teaching,” she repeated. The word dripped with disdain.

She stepped forward, the crowd flinching as her shadow moved.

“Let the record show,” she said, tone still flat, “that the accused admits to operating an unauthorized educational space within a Dominion border region. A school held in secret, in which students were taught falsified accounts of the so-called Fracture, rebel iconography, and other historical distortions intended to undermine Crown authority.”

The man shook his head, but she didn’t give him a chance to speak again.

“These are not just crimes against policy,” she continued. “They are crimes against order. Against knowledge. Against the integrity of this nation.”

Once again, she let her words settle over the crowd, giving the silence room to work. Then, without comment, she turned her attention back to the tablet in her hands. Her gloved fingers tapped the surface a few times, each motion exact.

When she looked up again, her stare settled on the woman beside the accused.

“You are his wife?”

The woman nodded, her face tight with fear, eyes already wet with tears.

“And these are your children?”

Another nod. A trembling breath. She clutched them closer.

Draneth’s voice didn’t change.

“Were you aware of your husband’s unauthorized educational activities?”

The water in the woman’s eyes finally spilled over, carving lines through the dirt on her cheeks like rivers through a canyon. She looked to her husband, frantic and pleading.

He continued staring at the ground, jaw clenched. He knew better than to make eye contact with her. He didn’t want to give the High Inquisitor any reason at all to judge his wife guilty by association. But, it didn’t matter.

“Then I hereby charge you with failure to report treasonous activities,” Draneth declared.

The man screamed, finally breaking. He turned toward his wife and reached out, desperate to close the space between them.

The nearest Reaper moved fast, grabbing his arm and yanking it back with brutal force. His shoulder twisted at a sickening angle, drawing a cry of pain from deep in his chest. He collapsed to his knees, trembling.

“She didn’t know,” he cried out. “I swear to you, she didn’t know anything. Please… please spare her. I beg you. She’s all the children have.”

His voice cracked as he pleaded for mercy, his face turned toward the polished boots of the High Inquisitor.

Draneth pursed her lips slightly, eyes narrowing as if she were giving the man’s plea genuine consideration. After a long moment, she nodded once, turned back to her tablet, and tapped a few more times with measured deliberation.

“Very well,” she said, almost gently. “The Crown recognizes that the execution of justice should not, in principle, result in orphanhood.”

The man exhaled hard, tears falling to the ground like spent breath. His shoulders collapsed with sudden, overwhelming relief.

But it did not last.

“Therefore,” Draneth continued, her voice returning to its cold precision, “the charge of Complicity by Silence shall be levied against the children.”

She did not pause. She did not blink.

“By order of the Dominion Charter on Internal Purity, Title 9 Section 113A, corrective removal has been authorized. Mercy petitions have been denied.”

Gasps broke through the crowd like cracks in a dam. A woman’s hand flew to her mouth. Children pressed closer to their parents. The horror of it took a moment to settle, and then it came in a wave of held breath and widening eyes.

Talon’s grip on Kaela tightened instinctively, pulling her against his side as if he could shield her from what was coming. She gripped his arm tighter, mouth open in shock at what was transpiring before her.

And that’s when the man lunged.

Without warning, he launched himself forward, his scream primal with desperation and fury. For a second, it looked as if he might reach the High Inquisitor and actually get his hands on her throat. But she took a single step back, as the Reapers caught him mid-air.

One locked his arms. The other drove him face-first into the metal stairs with a wet crunch of bone against steel. The Reaper’s metal hand closed around the back of his skull and hammered his face into the step’s edge. Once. Twice. Three times. Blood streamed from his nose, lips and eye sockets, pooling dark against the platform.

He didn’t fight after that. He couldn’t.

Draneth regarded the crumpled man without emotion.

“When ideology takes root, it must be cut out from the source,” she said, her voice calm.

She turned to face the crowd.

“Let this punishment serve as a reminder. What we witness today is the cost of contamination. The price of rebellion.”

She looked to her right, and gave a commanding nod. The Sable Vire stepped forward.

Sleek and inhuman, the machine moved with clockwork efficiency. Two Reapers seized the man’s wife by her arms, yanking her from her children and dragging her up the steps to the center of the platform. She tried to struggle, but they held her still with unyielding force.

The Sable Vire reached forward. Its hand retracted with a soft hiss, and from the empty socket, a whip uncoiled. Thin, segmented, and glinting with dozens of fine metal hooks. It flexed once, humming with energy.

In a single, mechanical motion, the Vire tore the woman’s dress from her back, exposing her bare, unblemished body.

Gasps rippled again. A few people turned away. Others stared, frozen.

Then the first strike landed.

The whip sang through the air and bit into flesh. The woman screamed. The hooks tore free, ripping strips of skin from her back.

The second lash came harder. Blood sprayed across the platform.

The man screamed from where he lay pinned, voice breaking apart as he begged for mercy that would not come.

When the third lash landed, the woman’s scream became primal. Raw and animal, torn from a place deeper than pain. Her back was a mess of torn muscle and dangling flesh, deep gashes crossing each other in a lattice of agony. Blood streamed down her legs in thick rivulets, and her knees began to buckle.

Kaela’s arms wrapped tightly around Talon, her face pressed hard against him. She sobbed without restraint, each breath ragged with horror. He rested his hand gently against the back of her head, as if that small gesture could shield her from the world unraveling around them.

Unable to bear watching the woman’s back flayed open with each brutal strike, Talon closed his eyes. But that didn’t stop him from hearing the crack of the whip. The sound echoed inside his skull, each lash a reminder of how useless he felt. Of how far justice had fallen.

His hand hovered near his blade. Every instinct screamed at him to move. To strike. To do anything.

He had taken an oath to protect people like this woman. This family. And now he stood frozen, watching it happen.

to let it happen.

Because he knew how this ended. If he rushed the platform, the Reapers would cut him down in seconds. The woman would still die. Her children too. And Kaela would be left with no one.

That was the cost.

Every scream from the platform drove deeper into his chest like shrapnel. He had faced armies, held lines while brothers fell around him. But this was different. This was standing paralyzed while evil wore a uniform and called itself order.

His jaw clenched until it ached. But he stayed where he was. And the guilt hollowed out a place inside him that might never fill again.

By then, the woman couldn’t hold herself upright anymore. Her body had gone limp, her voice stolen by pain and shock. She had collapsed against the Reapers holding her, unconscious before she even hit the ground.

Severra Draneth did not pause. She didn’t look at the woman. She didn’t acknowledge the unconscious body bleeding at the feet of her enforcers. Her attention had already moved on.

“To ensure the purity of thought,” she said calmly, “corruption must be uprooted at its origin.”

She turned, letting her cold stare fall onto the children.

The younger girl trembled, her arms wrapped around her brother’s waist. The boy stood stiffly, too still, as if motion might draw more pain.

Draneth gave a subtle hand signal.

One of the Reapers stepped forward. Its cold metal hand reached down and took the girl first. The crowd shifted. People turned away. Some fell to their knees. Others held one another in silent grief.

The Reaper carried the girl to the machine just as the violet light began to pulse.

There was no sound. No cry. Just the low thrum of power, and then she was gone.

Erased.

The boy followed. He didn’t resist. Didn’t cry. He walked on his own, with a strange, numb defiance. The machine opened, swallowed him whole, and silenced him forever.

Only then did Draneth return her attention to the woman, still unconscious, a heap of blood and torn flesh crumpled on the steel floor.

The Reapers lifted her by the arms like the carcass of an animal dragged from a killing floor. Her head lolled to one side, her legs dragging across the platform.

The machine pulsed again, and she vanished without waking. A long silence followed. No one moved.

Then Draneth turned her full attention on the man still pinned to the stairs. His face was slick with blood, sweat, and tears. He had watched it all. His wife flayed before a crowd. His children turned to ash in the blink of an eye.

Whatever remained of his mind had shattered. He was no longer a man, not in any way that mattered. What knelt before them now was a hollowed thing, stripped of reason, grief-maddened and feral. A creature made of pain.

She descended the steps with ceremony. As she passed him, she nodded one final command.

The Reapers dragged him upright, but he didn’t resist. His eyes, empty and glassed over, stared forward as they led him to the machine.

When it was over, there was nothing left but the gore from the lashing, blood and torn flesh painting the platform in testament to the woman’s suffering, and the terrified silence of a town with no name.

Draneth flicked a switch on her tablet, then passed it to the Palisade without a word. The entire performance had taken less than five minutes.

Without looking back at the machine or the blood now dripping off the stairs, she turned her attention to the crowd. Her expression didn’t change.

Almost as an afterthought, she spoke once more. Her voice was steady, her words sharp as shattered glass.

“No empire survives chaos. No future survives dissonance. That is why our truth must be preserved, so that you, the people, may recognize your path in the darkness.”

Then with a slight tilt of her head: “And those who speak out of turn will not be forgiven…”

She paused, for just a moment.

“They will be forgotten.”

She looked over the square one last time, then turned and descended the platform with regal grace. The crisp lines of her Dominion uniform remained untouched by wind, unstained by blood, and unshaken by the terror she left in her wake.

The Sable Vire and the Palisade followed in perfect synchrony, silent shadows tasked with safeguarding the Dominion’s High Inquisitor.

Three Reapers stayed behind as a final reminder. The Crown was still watching, even as the crowd began to drift away, slow and afraid to speak.

With a gentle but urgent hand on Kaela’s shoulder, Talon guided her toward the edge of the square. They moved in tense silence, slipping between rusted trailers and boarded-up storefronts, past children with hollow eyes that no longer reacted to the horror they saw.

Talon had hoped this place might offer shelter. A place to rest up for the final leg of their journey. But after what they had just witnessed, there was only one thing left to do.

Get out. Before the Fold claimed them, too.