The iron collar felt colder than the winter outside.
Silas didn't struggle. His hands, once stained with the finest sepia ink of the Empire, were now blackened by dried blood and soot. He looked up at the man standing before him—Grand Duke Valerius—the same man whose heroic rise to power Silas had spent twenty years fabricating in the Royal Chronicles.
"You knew too much, Silas," Valerius whispered, his golden armor reflecting the dim torchlight of the dungeon. "A scribe's job is to record the truth, not to own it."
Silas tried to speak, but his throat was a desert of scarred tissue. They had already taken his tongue. They wanted him to die in silence, a hollow vessel for the secrets of a thousand murders.
As the executioner's blade rose, Silas didn't feel fear. He felt a cold, crystalline spite. He closed his eyes, thinking of the hidden ledger—the real one—buried beneath the roots of the Weeping Willow in the North Garden.
If there is a God of Justice, Silas thought, his last heartbeat thundering in his ears, let me be the ink that stains their white capes forever.
The world didn't fade to black. It dissolved into a sea of parchment.
A heavy silence followed, then the sound of a thousand quills scratching against paper echoed in his mind. The record of his life was being rewritten.
Ten years.
The command felt like a physical weight on his soul. He wasn't dead. He was being pulled back through the ink of time.