The magistrate's chambers reeked of mildew and sternness. Oak-paneled walls, heavy with portraits of forgotten men, leaned inward like watchers, as if waiting for one more soul to vanish into their varnished silence. Angus was pushed forward, dripping rain onto the creaking floorboards, his wrists bound tight by coarse rope. The butcher followed close behind, self-righteous and puffed, the purse now clutched like a trophy in his fat hand.
The magistrate, a stooped figure with a wig too white to be clean, raised his eyes from a ledger and looked at Angus with a stare both weary and cruel. The silence stretched like wire, tightening around Angus's throat. Every cough, every shuffle in the gallery of onlookers behind him pressed down until he could hardly breathe. This was no trial; it was an erasure. The ledger already carried his fate.
"Name," the magistrate muttered.
The word stung. Not a question. Not a plea. A command.
The crowd leaned in as Angus hesitated, his tongue leaden. A name felt fragile now, a thing that might be twisted, cracked, turned against him. He said it anyway, with a voice softer than he wished: "Angus MacLeod."
The magistrate dipped his quill, scratching something into the book. "MacLeod," he repeated, not with recognition, but with indifference, as though the name were nothing but sound to be filed and forgotten. He did not see Angus. He saw only a placeholder for a crime.
The butcher snorted. "A thief is what he is."
And in that word — *thief* — Angus felt the walls closing in. His name, his family, his story — all pressed into one syllable of contempt. The magistrate wrote again, and the quill hissed like a snake across the page. Angus's pulse roared in his ears. The crowd's gaze burned his skin.
The sentence was brief, as if rehearsed long before he had even entered the room. "One year's labor, in service of the Crown."
The words dropped like stones, sinking into the pit of his stomach. The rope at his wrists tightened as the constable pulled him back. The butcher muttered something that made the gallery chuckle. The magistrate was already looking at another page, already erasing Angus from the ledger of humanity.
---
They marched him through the wynds of Edinburgh, past taverns spilling laughter and homes where firelight flickered against shutters. To Angus, the city looked different now. No longer streets he had walked since boyhood, but corridors of judgment, stones that had conspired against him. His boots splashed through puddles, and every splash felt like another nail driven into his being.
Somewhere between the magistrate's office and the barracks, something shifted. He was walking still, yet it was as though his body moved apart from him, an object led by ropes and commands, while another part of him retreated inward. His gaze dimmed, not in sight, but in weight, as though he were watching himself from a balcony above, detached, a spectator to his own undoing.
The voices around him blurred. The constable muttering. The butcher boasting. The jeers of children throwing pebbles at his feet. All of it faded, distant, until only one voice remained clear — his own, inside his skull, whispering bitterly: *I steal… I still.*
The thought grew heavier, more insistent. He heard it like a chant, like a pulse. *I steal… I still. I steal… I still.* At first, he tried to shake it off, to resist, but the words became a rhythm, matching his footsteps, binding themselves into the very marrow of his bones.
And then, slowly, the world's voice began to dissolve entirely. The rain no longer sounded like rain but like a soft hiss, urging him onward. The stones beneath his boots no longer felt like earth, but like the turning of some vast machine grinding him down. His vision dimmed at the edges, sharpened at the center. He realized with a shudder: the perspective had turned. No longer was he observing Angus from the outside. No longer a third-person ghost of himself.
I walk now, and I feel the rope cutting into my wrists. I hear the butcher's laughter behind me — swollen, triumphant, as though my ruin were his feast. I taste the rain on my lips, sharp as rust. My name — MacLeod — still echoes faintly, but it feels brittle, like glass that has already cracked. Soon it will be gone. Perhaps it is already gone.
They call me thief. A word easier to spit than a name. And I wonder: is that all I am? A thief. A man whose hunger pulled one purse from another's pocket. No one will care for the hunger. No one will care for the frostbitten nights, for the days when work vanished like mist, for the way the city turns its eyes when I stand at its gates. No. They will only chant the word, carving it into my skin: thief, thief, thief.
I begin to think — perhaps they are right. Perhaps I am not Angus. Perhaps Angus was an illusion, a mask worn for a time. If they strip me of my name, what am I? Only this word, this wound. And yet… something in me resists. A part of me does not vanish. It mutters still: *I still. I still. I still.*
I lift my head against the rain, and I see faces peering from windows. They look at me as though I am already sentenced, already buried, though my heart beats still in my chest. And I want to scream into their faces: *You do not see me. You see only what you want — a shadow, a danger, a blot upon your city. But I still. I am still here.*
By the time we reach the barracks, I am no longer walking as Angus. Angus has been filed away in the magistrate's ledger, buried beneath the ink. I walk as something else now — something nameless, stripped, reduced. Yet within me, the voice does not quiet. It grows louder, fiercer. I feel it tremble in my chest, and I know it will not be silenced.
I still.