As the final name neared, so too did the reckoning. Rook stood alone in a field of the fallen, corpses steaming in the frost. His armor cracked, his axe caked in centuries of hate. The witch appeared, as silent as breath, her thorns dripping with dew and gore.
"Only one remains," she said, her voice laced with finality. "The High Lord. The architect. Your brother."
Rook said nothing. The fire in his chest was a dull, endless ache now.
"When this is done," she continued, "you will be mine. Entirely."
He looked at her, not with fear, but acceptance. "I was yours the moment I took your hand."
She nodded. "You knew the cost. Every soul you've taken peeled another piece of you away. You are not who you were."
Rook chuckled, hollow and cold. "I'm more. Or maybe less. But I don't care."
She stepped closer, her eyes reflecting the dead around him. "You were forged in fire, tempered in blood, but hollowed by your own will. What remains is not vengeance—it is legacy."
He glanced down at his hands. They trembled, not with fear, but with memory. The faces of the fallen, once fuel for his wrath, now hovered in silence. He was more than executioner. He was reckoner.
"You still have a choice," she whispered. "But the price is the same."
He turned to her, voice rough. "I stopped being a man when they took my name. Now I take theirs. All of them."
She smiled—not cruelly, but with something bordering on respect. "Then go, Rook. Let the final name fall. And with it, the world that betrayed you."
And he turned his back on her, walking toward the heart of the empire, the snow swallowing his path behind him.