09:00 a.m. - At Cathedral Courtyard, Dawnspire
Snow fell slow and plain, a patient kind of cold that washed the square in white. It landed on banners and on the blackened stubs of the market's burned piles, on the shoulders of men who had come to see a shape burned in the name of order. Breath rose in white from mouths, and the sound in the courtyard had the brittle hush of a place where something had been decided and no one cared to argue it now.
The pyre had been rebuilt in fresh wood, trimmed with the charred scraps of invoices and the pieces of broken nibs that had once been tools in a small shop. It smoked like an accusation. A thin rope ringed the platform to keep the crowd at a distance, acolytes kept careful watch on the press of bodies. The Temple's flag—white and gold—blew a little in the wind and shed snow in little powdered drifts.
He was on the platform before the brazier, bound into the harness the priests used for those they meant to make into a lesson. The warded frame held him off the stones, the iron did not touch his skin. The harness hummed against the rune-carved ring in the floor. Close enough that the heat would seize him fast, far enough that ritual hands would not be stained with flesh. The priests had thought of propriety as well as spectacle.
Ryan's face still bore the ghost of dried blood from Cassian's fall—an unearned badge that refused to wash away. His hair was frost-matted. His coat, once bright with the odd colours of a man from another life, had been cut into something serviceable and plain. The child who had sung in the square—someone's brother—stood with his mother and watched. A sister clutched at a shawl nearby. Their eyes glistened in snow.
(You come back to the small things, always: the names of apprentices, the ledger you failed to make perfect, the smoke in a child's hair. Big choices melt away until the bits that keep people fed are all that's left.)
He had asked for few comforts. He had wanted to be clear. He had said he would speak. The city had wanted a shape and the Temple had given it to them: a man guilty in the eyes of a crowd and a public burn to close a wound. The robes moved like a current of silk and restraint. Pope Thaddeus, resplendent in polished crimson, stood just below the cathedral steps, his hands hidden in the folds that made him feel like a man with no exposed heart. Marcelline was at his side, white and gold and unerring. She had the look of someone whose private prayers had already cost her.
The crowd chattered in a low, clotted murmur. Merchants craned to see, guildsmen traded glances, mothers tried to keep children from staring too long. Someone had pinned pamphlets to a wall the night before—The Ashes of Mercer—pages that named him in short, neat accusations. He had seen them in the cell, the printing like a moth's single wing.
Aidan stood at the back of the platform, hands jammed into his coat pockets, ledger under his arm like a promise. Sariel had been stopped at the gate and left outside, jaw set in a way that only made him more certain she would keep his lists. Murdock had been turned away early, shoulders hunched like a weathered gate. Aemond, when he came, had the quiet weight of someone who reads the air for more than prayer, his staff was heavy with a crystal that pulsed faintly even in the cold.
Aidan (steps forward, measured): "Ryan. Say what you must. Say it plain. The men need it. The apprentices—my brother and my sister—need to hear you."
Ryan watched him and found the look of a man who had signed for things and who would keep that signature. It steadied something in Ryan that had been loose for days.
(When you are stripped to the last center, you do two things: you try to make the small people safe, and you speak plainly so that the story people tell will not be worse than what happened.)
He had prepared nothing flashy. He had no grand rhetoric for a crowd that wanted a god or a monster. He had a simple wish: that his last act might be one of forgiveness, not flourish. He had hoped to stop a chain of smaller cruelties—damaged shops, broken families, a witch-hunt of tradesmen—before it began.
The folk at the edge of the ring began the chant because they had been primed for it since morning.
!("Burn the tools of the corrupter! Burn the shadow!")
The cry rose and folded into the courtyard like a cold wave. It was not a cry for justice, it was the city's way of making itself honest when honesty was too hard. The priests let it go, spectacle had a way of calming markets and shifting fear into prints that could be signed.
Aemond came near then, moved with a kind of slow grace. His robes whispered against snow. He stopped a few paces back from the platform and met Ryan's eyes with that patient look that said he had another hand to offer, even if hands could not undo what had already been set.
Aemond (quiet, encouraging): "Master Ryan. There is time to speak. There is time to make a record. Use your voice."
Ryan lifted his chin. He saw, then, a little further in the crowd—a figure not meant to be here on the steps of the Temple: Lyscia. She had come with the cover of curiosity, her own cloak limiting the snow, but she had that soldier's carriage—eyes like cold struck steel. Beside her moved Seraphina Duskbloom—Sera—who watched with a measured intensity. Lyscia's face tightened when it found him. For a beat, recognition pulled at the line of her mouth.
Lyscia (inquisitive, low): "He is the man from Eryndral. The one we chased through fog, the one who shouted for the village to stand and made a thing of roar... I remember the face."
Ryan's throat tight, he remembered Eryndral in fragments: fog, the roar he had made, the skin-searing presence of the Umbrathorax, the sudden catastrophic toll on the Drakensvale lines. He thought then of the way a single act can stretch out like a rope and pull many men down on both sides.
(If one meaning enters your life now it is this: choices you make in panic will be counted later. A shout in a fog can save a village and drown an army. The same moment will be a banner for enemies and a mercy for those you feared. The ledger of effect is never neat.)
Lyscia's eyes flickered like a blade being tried in light. She had lost many men at Eryndral, and she had not forgotten the shape of who saved a common village—even if it cost her host dearly. She looked at Ryan with a sharp and complicated expression: not the open hate of a man who sees a monster, but the concentrated interest of one who recognizes a hand in the world.
Lyscia (soft, remembering): "He shouted. He gave the wall orders. The fog gave him cover. Twenty thousand—my men—took a cost. That man put himself between us and something not of our war."
Sera's eyes picked up the name on the pamphlet and then flicked to Ryan's face as if to reconcile two reports. She had the air of someone who can both cut and forgive, not quite yet choosing.
Seraphina (curious): "Do you think he did it to save them? Or to make himself a story?"
Lyscia (resolute): "I do not know. But I know a face that stands between a village and a blade. I remember the weight of that choice. I remember how it tasted."
The priests took their positions for the final prayers. The acolyte with the torch, a small man with fingers stained in ink, stepped forward and read with a steady voice the charge for the crowd to hear. He spoke of law and of public good, and of the necessity of ritual. The words were wool and iron.
Priest (formal): "Under the Temple's edict, for the safety of the city, for the integrity of law, Master Ryan Mercer is held for sentence. The Temple will do what is necessary for order."
Aidan made his move then, the small man who had kept the shop in order moving with the desperate clarity of someone who will fight to the where the numbers end. He drew two steps up the platform, then three. Guards reached for him. He looked at Ryan, and the ledger under his arm made a soft, shame-faced sound like a final coin hitting stone.
Aidan (sharp): "You cannot do this. The books are clean. You have no proof—this is a show."
Two priests moved like knives, cutting the thread of his motion. A hand grabbed Aidan's lapels. The guards would not have him spill the script. Aidan did not stop, he pushed at the man's wrist, eyes like steel.
Aidan (pushed, loud): "I will not let them burn him for noise! We will have order, but not this."
A hand struck him across the cheek. It left a red line that rose like a punctuation against the skin. The crowd made a sound—part disgust, part hunger. Aemond stepped forward, staff lifted a fraction so that the crystal on its tip blazed a small blue light that turned snow to silver.
Aemond (steady): "Stop. There will be no blood spilled here by lawless hands."
The priests chanted once, the voice rising like breath in a grave. The harness on Ryan thinned its hum. Aemond murmured a line of old words, an incantation to raise a ward to protect. He had an old, careful magic—Elemental Ward that could hold like a bowl around those it loved. He wanted to create a shield that would let them take Ryan from the pyre and flee.
But the Temple had its own protections. The harness' runes absorbed the approach of casual magic. The framework for public penance was made more than ritual: it was law. The priests had added sanctified bindings to make it hard for a single mage to undo their work. The Elemental Ward pressed against that law like wind against iron.
Aemond (urgent): "Hold! The harness resists—give me two breaths."
Aidan, hand still in a guard's grip, twisted, trying to break free. He had not expected to be struck. He expected Clerical law to bend to facts, not to the crowd. He tugged, and for one sharp moment the ledger in his arms slipped and the pages showed like a wound.
(They thought they could press a life into a lesson and call that right. Small men do not deserve to be biscuits in a magistrate's jar.)
Aemond's fingers glowed on the staff. He shaped a ward, and for a second the air around Ryan hummed with a ring of cold light. The crowd drew breath. For an instant the flame of the torch on the brazier looked like it might die.
Then Pope Thaddeus set his hand at the fold of his collar and touched the hidden sigil there—small silver, like a coin that costs too much. He whispered something in a language that was older than the prayers being read. The sigil answered with a small thrum that ran across the priests like a touch. The Temple's ward strengthened. Aemond's bubble hit it and sizzled like frost on heated metal. The Elemental Ward shivered and thinned.
Pope Thaddeus (cold, low): "We will not let a private hand undo what the Temple has deemed necessary."
Aemond tried again, pressing the working of the ward harder, drawing his crystal to cut more power from the breath of air. The staff flared with a pulse that had saved men in other clashes, had held a village wall closed through a night of wolf and sword. He moved as if he could do it—if he could only wedge his will into the silver sigil.
(There are rules between men and gods. Sometimes the rule that men make into law is stronger than the law that guards hearts.)
Aidan broke one guard's grip with a chunked clasp to the temple man's jaw. Surprised, the soldier stepped back. Aiden lunged to the front edge of the platform near Ryan and dropped to his knees, trying to work the shackles. He shoved his hands under the irons, fingers fumbling for the key.
Aidan (breathless): "Take the keys! Take them—anyone—there's a bolt on the inner ring!"
A guard struck his shoulder with the flat of a baton. Sariel cried out from beyond the rope. The crowd surged in a ghastly rhythm, some cheered the priests, some cursed the guard. There was a moment where the square felt like an animal choosing a scent.
Aemond's face had the set of a man who knows how to trade endurance for brief miracles. He pushed another chant into the air, and the staff carved a wider, steadier glow. He aimed the ward as a ring around Ryan and tried, with all his skill, to remove the small threads the Temple sewn into the harness. His effort shimmered against the harness like sun on a thin glass.
But the harness was not only metal and rune. It held a law. And the Temple's secret was that it had the power to call the city's authority into the fray. The acolytes, trained and quick, moved in to sing a counter-psalm that smelled of cedar and cold oil. The counter-chant tightened like a noose on Aemond's effort.
Aemond (straining): "By the elements that hold us—open. Let him breathe."
The magic shivered and broke with a sound like ice cracking. Aemond faltered. His shoulders sagged the tiniest degree. Where the ward had washed, there was only the faintest bruise of glow left, swallowed by the Temple's more ancient binding. Snow fell into the glow and steamed.
Aidan tried the keys and could not find the right one. His hand found the wrong bolt, the clatter of metal was a small, clumsy percussion. The guards took advantage and hauled at his arms. Two priests pushed forward and formed a wall so the acolytes could set a hand to the brazier.
Aidan (pained): "For God's sake—read the books! Look at the pages!"
Aemond stepped back, breath caught. He met Ryan's gaze and saw not fear but the quiet acceptance of someone who had made his last choices and stood by them.
Ryan (thinking, steady): (This is the end. My voice is small in a square of snow. I wanted to save more. I could have taken a different bet in the House. I didn't. I did not die to be a banner. I die because they chose a shape. If I can make their choice less cruel to the living, then I have done what I could.)
He lifted his chin to speak, to make his last thing a simple balm or a question. He had one wish that mattered more than being spared: that the apprentices, Aidan's brother and sister, Murdock's hands, Sariel's care—they not be the next items thrown on some other fire. He had no time to beg the gods. He had time to talk straight.
Ryan (loud enough): "Listen—if you want truth, I kept the books. If you want mercy, keep the people who work—feed them, pay them, don't make them the next scapegoat."
The crowd's noise folded in something like a collective cough. A promise had to be made and kept beyond the brazier.
Marcelline watched him, face gone thin and pale in a way that reminded him of the time she had prayed until her hands bled. Her voice when it came was less a decree than a cracked attempt at mercy.
Marcelline (soft): "We will watch the records. We will keep watch on the poor. The Temple will not let the wrong suffer."
He had no way to test whether she meant it for herself, for the Temple, or as comfort to his startling rue. He held to the hope that the woman who kept ritual could be made into one who kept a quieter oath.
Lyscia stood a little beyond the priests, her breath clouding. Her soldier's crown did not welcome the spectacle. She had a soldier's memory for faces that had saved villages and cost men, and something like pity, or respect, and a strategic curiosity tempered the blade of her mind.
Lyscia (low): "I remember the command that kept a wall. I remember that man shouting for people to be still. I remember losing the men who walked from the field. If he is done then—then let the record show he did what he did, and we will answer for what followed."
Sera's eyes met Lyscia's for a second, there was an understanding between warriors—sometimes mercy is a calculation, sometimes a quiet pivot.
Seraphina (quiet): "Then we will have a record that remembers both kinds of loss."
Snow gathered at the lip of the brazier. The acolyte raised the torch, the light a quiet, defiant bead in the fall of white. The priest's voice rose in a chant that sent a prickle under the skin like an old fear.
Priest (chanting): "By the Staglord's eye we burn what stains the city. Let the city be clean."
!("Burn! Burn to cleanse!")
The crowd answered with the same chant as if it had been rehearsed. The brother in the square chanted too, his voice small and thick with childish conviction. The sound of that chant pulled at Ryan's chest with the ugly, honest weight of consequence.
Aidan twisted at the guard's hold and gave one last move toward the platform. He clutched at the iron and cried like a man who will not allow his math to be lost to a story. His hands were knocked back, his ledger flung to the snow. Pages fanned in the cold.
Aemond's shoulders slumped. He had shaped his wards for other days and other fields, the Temple's law had eaten his hour. He breathed like a man who had tried to pull water uphill. He bowed his head, the form of a final benediction not unlike the one he had offered the city in private.
Aemond (solemn): "May the truth be written where it can be found."
Ryan looked at them—Aemond, Aidan, Sariel near the edge—and tried to lock every face into the small shelter of memory. He wanted them to know the values he'd tried to give with a messy life. He wanted them to keep the lists he could not finish. He wanted, in the last act, a leaning toward mercy for the living.
Ryan (soft, measured): "Forgive us—forgive them. Keep the books honest. Don't let this be the start of more fires."
His voice did not rise to make them saints. It was not a cry to be used in pamphlets. It was dry and plain. It had the directness of a man who had once written code and who still liked systems that behaved clearly.
The acolyte set the torch to the kindling. The flame took, small at first, curious, then greedy. Heat rose. The smoke curled in a dark column against the white, and the smell hit Ryan's nose with the immediate clarity of resin and wet wood.
Snow fell into the blaze and hissed. Snow on the hands of the crowd eased their edges, the cold made faces harder, sharper. The brazier's light made the snow look gold for a tangled breath. Ryan felt the heat come.
He closed his eyes.
(There is an odd clarity in the last seconds. All the small things line up. The sound of Aidan's voice is a rope you hold to avoid falling. The face of Aemond in the small, breaking light is a place you try to remember. The child—someone's brother—sings on and the voice lands like an accusation and a hope. You realize you had little to offer but forgiveness and that you try to throw it where it will not be wasted.)
He thought of the village at Eryndral—the fog, the roar, the way the beasts moved like weather. He thought of Lyscia's soldiers who had bled in numbers his life could not tally. He thought of Murdock's laugh and the apprentices' bad handwriting. He thought of Sariel's folders, small and neat, where the future of the shop sat like a pile of uncooked bread.
Then the heat overtook him in a way that was less violent than he had imagined and more like a river taking its bank. The world narrowed to the smoke and the smell and the odd, quick memory of snowflakes melting on his coat like medicine.
Someone reached him—Aemond, perhaps, laid a hand as the harness trembled. Aidan, with a desperate bruise on his cheek, had one knee on the platform, pleading for something that laws could not give. They tried to wrench the harness, to unbind the metal. They pulled. The priests tightened the ritual clamps. A guard hit Aidan hard and he fell back into the snow, face gone pale.
Aemond (shouting, one last attempt): "Stand back! He is my ward!"
The priest's reply was a prayer within his own mouth. The temple's rule held.
Pope Thaddeus (softly, without hate): "Order must be enforced."
The flame climbed higher and took the pages that had been flung into the snow. The paper shrieked in the heat, the sound was a small, cruel voice swallowed. The brazier swallowed the last of the ink. Aidan crawled forward on his hands and knees, hands bloodied where he had been struck, and howled like a man who had been reduced to the sound of someone mocking a measure he had kept.
Then the light took Ryan. It did not show his chest split or make a spectacle of flesh. That kind of detail would not be useful here. The Temple did not want messy horror to be its lesson, it wanted the image of a burning man, an icon by which others could sharpen their fear.
Ryan's face turned up to the falling snow and the white that had made the square so plain. He held, in that last sliver of sight, the faces that mattered: Aidan, Aemond, Sariel, Murdock somewhere in the crowd, the little mother and her brother child. He thought of Lyscia there, a soldier among citizens, eyes like flint. Her gaze had the strange mix of sorrow and calculation.
Lyscia (soft, to herself): "A face at a wall—one man in front of twenty thousand dying. He did what he could."
Sera's eyes met Lyscia's, the understanding between them had no public place in the Temple's ritual, but it held.
Seraphina (quiet): "We will remember both sides."
The flame took the coat and then the hair. It made an image that would be printed in pamphlets and sold and used and debated, because images are easier to sell than lists. The smoke rose in a column that the snow turned to lace. The crowd shivered and watched. The child, the brother, looked as if he had swallowed a winter.
Aidan's voice broke into a single raw note as he crawled back and lurched to his feet, the ledger clutched to his chest though its pages were raw and wet with snow. He stumbled away, not allowed to touch the place where his friend had been. Aemond stood just outside the circle of warmth and cold, hands clenched, staff pressed to his chest like a last prayer.
Aemond (barely heard): "May the record keep its truth—even if men choose to forget."
Marcelline leaned forward and touched her lips with a silent breath. Whether she had meant to do right or to save her standing, the act of watching weighed on her like a coin with a rough edge. Pope Thaddeus watched, and in his eyes there was no triumph—only the hard, long business of a leader who had chosen to bend law to a market of fear.
The pyre died down in minutes. Snow covered the embers with a false tenderness. People left with their pamphlets and their stories, ready to sell a new certainty in the market. Some would say the city had been saved. Some would say an innocent had been burned. Some would remember a roar in a fog and twenty thousand lost men and think on what had been done with their hands.
Lyscia lingered after the crowd dispersed. She had that soldier's arrogance but with a knot of doubt near her throat. She stood where the ashes cooled and looked at them with a memory of distant fires at Eryndral. She had known this man, not as a rumor but as a voice that once spoke with the threat of a strange, wild safety. Her face was clean of the temple's flourish. She had come to see the man who had saved a village because she had to know—did he save the village for love, for fear, for calculation?
Lyscia (quiet to herself): "We fought a thing of night. This man put himself into the path of a beast. He paid a price."
Seraphina stayed near her, her hand on the haft of a spear she no longer needed to have in the crowd. She had a look that both mourned and considered a new plan. War shaped people harshly, and the city had shown its shape today.
Seraphina (soft): "He died forgiving. That may make his death heavier for the living who have to carry it."
Aemond walked out to meet them, the cold walking with him. He bowed to Lyscia with a scholar's courtesy and to Seraphina with the respect due a commander. He had failed to save Ryan, if saving is measured by flesh. But he had not failed to keep a record and an oath.
Aemond (reflective): "You knew this man?"
Lyscia (nods): "I watched him save a village once—gave orders, stood on a wall, made people stay. I paid in men to take that choice away. I remember his face in the fog. I remember the taste of loss. There may be more to learn."
Aidan stumbled up from the snow, ledger clutched like a relic. He had no victory in his posture. He had a man's ruin in his hands and the fractal work he must do now. He looked at them—at Lyscia and Seraphina, at Aemond, his eyes dark with grief and fury. Words would be needed: lists must be made and given to the courts and the markets, the living must eat.
Aidan (flat): "Keep the names. We will have to feed them. If the Temple tries to take more than an excuse, I will drag the books to the king if I must."
Lyscia (half-sad, half-resolute): "Then do it. If the city can be healed, let those who fix it have the chance."
Snow settled on the paper of the pamphlets that had accused him. The printing bled a little with the melt. People walked away with the sharpness of their decisions intact. A child's cry faded down an alley. The city took its breath and moved on toward markets and repairs and the slow work of laundry.
(For Ryan, the last thing he had done was forgive. The last thing he had asked was that the work go on. He had not won a history book. He bought a small, blunt chance for the living to do better when the noise settled.)
As the crowd thinned and the Temple's men put away their knives and their prayers, Lyscia turned her head back once and let her eyes catch the cold line of the cathedral steps. She would carry his face into a field where decisions are timed by the fall of men. She had the soldier's habit of remembering who had stood between wound and village, and she would place his name where soldiers keep names: in a ledger of things to answer for.
The day went on. The snow would melt and the market would clean its scars. The apprentices would come back to shop or be scattered to wood and other masters. The names Aidan had scribbled in his hasty lists would be the map to keep roofs from being lost. Whether the city's mercy would hold was another matter.
Somewhere in that slow list of consequences, a soldier would read the name "Ryan Mercer" in a different light. A commander would watch for where the Temple used law to shape fear. A woman at a bakery would keep an apprentice in the job because a ledger promised wages. A boy, a brother, would remember the face on the pyre and learn fear or mercy depending on who later told him the story.
In the cold ash, the last flame went out. The snow filled the place with a pale and patient calm. The city would measure its cost in coin and in the small bills of grief. The small, practical hands—Aidan, Sariel, Murdock—would gather the lists and move the truth into a ledger. Lyscia and Seraphina would walk back into a war that would look kinder for a memory of a face among snow and flames.
(And in the little clean pocket where truth sits, Ryan's forgiveness lies like a small coin that the living can give to each other. It is not a grand thing, but it may be the only tool that keeps more hands warm in the months to come.)