The manacles were not forged for gentle containment. Cold, brutal iron bit into the delicate bones of Frederick Newton's wrists, the weight a vulgar counterpoint to the ethereal burdens his mind had once carried. As the guards, their faces coarse maps of disdain, shoved him forward, the chains sang a dull, clanking rhythm against the cobblestones, a funeral dirge for a living man. With each step, his mind, that magnificent, cursed engine, whirred not with fear, but with a relentless, forensic recursion. What was the critical error? The question was a spike in his brain. Was it the moment of publication? The pride? Or was the seed of this wretched end planted thirty years prior, in the quiet hum of his first laboratory, with the corpse of a common frog?
"You devil-spawn! You shall be turned to ash at the stake for your witchcraft!" A guard, a man with breath reeking of cheap ale and simpler times, punctuated his shout by hawking a wad of phlegm onto Frederick's cheek.
The sensation was warm and shockingly vulgar. Frederick, with a dignity that seemed absurd given his circumstances, attempted to wipe it away with the back of his shackled, dirtied hand. The gesture only smeared the grime and spittle into a broader, more pathetic mask. He ceased his efforts, letting his hand fall. His thoughts, however, would not be stilled.
Why is it, he mused, the internal voice calm amidst the external storm, that humanity's first and only recourse for the inexplicable is to brand it 'evil'? We cloak our ignorance in the sanctimonious robes of righteousness, finding a perverse comfort in the shadows of our own understanding. We fear ghosts in the dark, yet sleep soundly beside the rotting foundations of our own morality. The true terror, the profound horror, lies not in the unknown, but in the terrible, evident truths we choose to ignore.
They turned a final corner, and the City Square opened before him like a great, hungry maw. The crowd was a single, seething organism of fabric and furious faces. The scent of roasting meats from earlier market stalls had been overpowered by the smell of unwashed bodies and a sharper, more primal scent: anticipation. In the center, standing against the bleak grey sky, was not a stake, but a guillotine. Its polished oak frame gleamed with a sinister care; its angled blade, raised high, caught the diffuse light and held it, a frozen sliver of finality. It was a machine of the Enlightenment, a supposedly humane killer, here to end the life of the man who had dared to enlighten too far.
The sight of it, so stark and efficient, triggered a cascade in his memory. His consciousness, refusing to anchor in the present horror, began a frantic, involuntary playback, seeking the origin point of the catastrophe.