The Duchess Cannot Sleep || ONC 2021

3 | The Witch

Trigger warning: gruesome/scary stuff :>

╒══════════════════╕
Adela Palace, Nasavte
Year 32 of the Diewelan Era
╘══════════════════╛

Blood stained the royal carpet in slow drips, the only sound in the shocked stillness of the throne room. After much too long with no movement, horror seeped into the quietude. The dripping ceased.

Andreya had shut her eyes, wincing from the deep slice in her cheek and cowering from the blade. When the guards released their grip, she crumpled to her knees.

"Witch!" the man who had cut her cried. "Who can heal their wounds in an instant? She is a sorceress!"

Andreya opened her eyes to the blood on the floor, registering the pain in her cheek now as only an ache, and the guards, having recovered from their stupor, wrenched her to her feet.

"Is this how you have retained youth?" the King growled, his face twisted in repulsion. The word monster was unsaid but undeniably present. "Take her to the dungeons. She is to be executed immediately for malicious witchcraft and an attempt on the crown."

"What?" Andreya found the will to struggle. "I mean you no harm, Majesty—"

"Take her away!" he bellowed, and she was yanked backward. "Ready the scaffold, restrain her magic!"

Then the majestic door closed and the prison door opened. Opulent high ceilings and gold trims to dank, slippery stone and half-lit prison bars. They strapped Andreya to the wall by her wrists and her ankles and left her there with nothing but her numbed limbs and a creeping air of prison fever. She spent what could have been hours or entire days staring at a single illegible carving on the floor from a previous prisoner.

Then the door opened once again and she was taken from the wall, called horrible names she didn't remember and marched through the prison to the place of her execution.

Andreya did not know what she was living for, but she did not want to die. She thought it as she stared at what should have been a scaffold and was instead a guillotine—at the blade, cleaned and glistening in contrast to the wine-stained sky of dawn, at the basket at its foot, at the bloodthirsty crowd gathered at the call of retribution. At the King, observing in disdain from his balcony.

The mighty clock tower rang seven mighty notes and the guards nudged her toward the wooden steps.

The strongest memory Andreya would have was of the smell of the guillotine, of iron and death and human excrement, the products of prisoners mad with fear in the final moment before death. She noticed the crusting of blood on the wood where even soap and scrubbing would not reach, crevices stained black and the basket hardly cleaned at all. Andreya pushed back against the arms forcing her forward, digging her feet and stumbling with no other choice up the three steps onto the raised platform on which she was to die.

Her struggle grew stronger when they buckled her knees beneath her and the executioner took his place, when they thrust her head in the slot so her throat hurt and closed her escape off with the loud scrape of a latch.

Andreya was granted no movement but to stare down in growing horror at the empty basket as they announced her crimes to the crowd. It came to her suddenly that they were cheering.