---
The storm had passed, but the town still dripped.
Not with rain—with guilt.
Candles in windows had been snuffed. Shops closed early. No one spoke Calla's name, but they all looked at the square differently now. Like it might bite back.
They were beginning to feel it.Not just the weight of what had been done—But the shame of what they had watched.
In the cellar beneath the apothecary ruins, Elia pressed a damp cloth to her temples and stared at the battered table where they kept the ledger.
Calla's name had already been updated.
"Survived public punishment.Multiple fractures. Eye trauma. Severe blood loss."
Elia looked down at her own hand. She'd written it without shaking.
That scared her more than anything else.
Thorne leaned against the far wall, a gash on his knuckle still weeping where he'd punched a stone column after the trial.
"We can't just write about it anymore," he said. "We need to hit back."
Elia didn't argue.
Not this time.
Edith Corven arrived late, wearing black and carrying two maps.
One of Dunlowe.
One of Sanctos.
"The Tribunal isn't just Halden," she said, placing the maps down. "He's their flame. Their mouth. But he answers to a higher order."
"You're saying this isn't just one execution," Thorne said. "It's a chain."
"No," Edith replied. "It's a system."
They lit a single candle and circled around it.
Calla was alive. Barely. But she'd given them something Halden hadn't accounted for:
Time.
He wanted her dead on that stage. He wanted silence.
Instead, she'd bled truth into the square.
And now? Now they had to make it echo.
Elia pulled out a torn page from Isolde Thornbrook's old journal. A protection glyph—hand-drawn, rarely used.
"We seal the safehouse with these. Carve them into the beams. Anyone betrays us again, we'll know."
Thorne added a folded paper beneath it.
"We strike the eastern post station next. That's where Halden sends reports to the Tribunal."
Edith unfolded the Sanctos map.
"If we leak what he's done—what he's really done—we risk exposure. But we also invite eyes that might care."
"Or burn us faster," Elia said.
"Either way," Edith murmured, "they'll see us."
They planned through the night.
Burn paths.Escape routes.How to split the resistance into cells—so if one was captured, the rest could move.
At one point, Elia whispered, almost too quietly:
"He didn't hang her because he wanted the town to watch itself break."
Thorne looked up.
"So we give them something else to watch."
By dawn, the three of them stood in the square.
The blood had been scrubbed. The platform repainted.
But the wood still creaked.
Elia took a piece of charcoal and wrote at the base of the gallows:
"Not a witch. A witness."
Then she looked at Thorne.At Edith.At the sun rising behind smoke.
"Let the fire see us coming."
---
The post station burned before sunrise.
No ceremony.No warning.Just smoke.
It poured from the eastern side of Dunlowe like a secret finally losing patience.
By the time the guards arrived, the roof had caved in and the message vault—Halden's private store of tribunal letters, orders, blacklists—was a bed of glowing ash.
And scrawled on the charred doorframe, in soot:
"Not a witch. A witness."
Six Hours Earlier
Elia stood in the storm cellar beneath the butcher's shop, staring at the crude map Edith had drawn across the floorboards in chalk.
"The riders leave at third bell," Edith said. "They send reports to Sanctos every five days. Today's the fourth."
"So if we take the vault tonight," Thorne said, "we burn what they haven't sent."
"And buy time before the Tribunal sends reinforcements," Elia added.
"We'll be fugitives."
"We already are."
They moved in pairs.
Elia and Thorne slipped through the alley shadows like phantoms. Edith stayed behind to redirect the next safehouse shift.
The lock on the station door was crude. Thorne picked it with a bone pin and a breath held tight in his throat.
Inside: stacks of parchment, half-sealed scrolls, orders signed in wax.
Halden's seal everywhere.
So much paper.
"We can't carry it all," Elia whispered.
"Then we turn it to memory."
They scanned what they could—names, village orders, upcoming trial lists for three more towns.
Elia burned the worst one first: an order for "preventative cleansing" in the next village. No names. Just numbers. Thirteen suspects. All women. All unnamed.
Then the rest.
They lit the blaze with one of Calla's crushed healing poultices, pressed into oilcloth.
Smoke took quickly.
Fire doesn't need justice to burn.
When they returned to the safehouse, covered in soot, Elia didn't speak. She collapsed onto the floor, panting, trembling.
Thorne sat beside her, blood on his sleeve from breaking a window.
"They'll know it was us," he said.
"Good," she whispered.
In the square, Halden stood at dawn, watching the pillar of smoke from the east.
His jaw didn't tighten. His expression didn't crack.
But inside, something shifted.
For the first time since Eldhollow, someone had taken his fire away from him.
And they used it against him.
Back in the cellar, Edith spread out a salvaged scrap of burned parchment.
Only one phrase remained legible at the bottom:
"If the people remember, fear dies."
The first strike was done.
And the next time Halden turned his eyes to Elia Thornbrook, he didn't see a girl trying to survive.
He saw a threat sharpening her teeth.
---
The parchment crumbled in his hand like brittle bone.
Halden stood alone in his chamber, soot still staining his cuffs from where he knelt at the edge of the burned post station.
He had read what they left behind—the smudged words, the empty file drawers, the symbol scrawled in soot.
A rebellion wasn't what he feared.
He had planned for rebellion.
It was righteousness unraveling that unsettled him.
The people were no longer whispering for salvation.
They were whispering each other's names.
As if memory could protect them. As if remembering made them innocent.
Fools.
He walked slowly through the chapel's west wing, into the locked records room.
He opened a cabinet that hadn't been touched in over a year.
Inside: parchment stamped not with his seal, but with the mark of Sanctos—black sun over white flame. Orders he'd requested but hoped he wouldn't need.
"If local resistance threatens purification cycles," it read,"Initiate phase two: deterrence through public devastation."
He rolled the parchment and placed it in his coat.
At sunrise, he summoned the mayor, three guards, and the new priestess from Sanctos.
He delivered four words:
"Prepare the purge list."
Later that evening, the bell rang six times.
Not three for summons.Not four for judgment.
Six.
The villagers didn't know what it meant. But they came.
They always came.
Halden stood in the square with fire already lit behind him, torches along the platform.
He raised one hand, and the silence was instant.
"The fire at the post was not resistance," he said. "It was desecration.A strike not against law—but against order itself. Against heaven."
He stepped forward.
"And so, for every act of rebellion, a sacrifice shall follow."
The guards brought out the first family.
A father.A mother.Two children.None accused.None resisting.
Their only crime?
Proximity.
The father had once sold flour to Calla.
The mother once smiled at Elia in the market.
"For mercy to return," Halden declared, "the town must remember fear."
They didn't hang them.
They burned their home while the people were forced to watch.
The family stood outside in the cold, barefoot, their possessions thrown into the flames.
No one helped.
No one moved.
Not even when the youngest child whispered, "Where will we sleep?"
That night, Halden wrote in his ledger:
"Rebellion must be starved.Empathy must be isolated.Memory must burn before it spreads."
In the morning, he posted a single line on every door:
"For every flame you light, we will burn ten more."
He didn't expect to be loved.
Only obeyed.
And if love is the root of memory—Then Halden had decided to become the blade that cuts it clean.
---
To Be Continued...