executions

Anisa

She made it a point to hear the last words of any criminal that was set to be executed. Often, these had to be transcribed and read at a later date, to fit with her busy schedule. She tried to read them before the execution date. Not that reading ever changed anything.

She would occasionally have them put in a room, behind glass, insulated from thaums, and allow them to rant, or beg, or stare silently. This didn’t change anything, either.

It was irritating, how regardless of the punishment you would inflict on these people, there would always be others willing to break the law. There were those who believed they’d be rewarded in an afterlife; those who denied everything regardless of overwhelming evidence; those who thought it unjust to be executed for rape and subsequent murder; those who fled Blisbane law and ignorantly thought Felkner were more permissive; those completely disconnected from reality; those who thought themselves more clever than Anisa, and that their cleverness gave license to deny all realities but their own; those who were suicidal, who had stopped caring about anything; and those who simply didn’t think ahead.

They sometimes tried making it a conversation. Usually not. Usually it was just them asserting their worldview, thinking their words would somehow trump the reality of the gallows. As if Anisa would do anything different, upon being told his wife deserved it, or she was as oppressive as Casse, or that growing up poor justified repeatedly stealing from shoppers in the market, or that executing him was simply sending him down to hell, where a demon would pluck him from the lake of fire and set him back on her as revenge. Doubtless, there were those with specialized knowledge which would trump her own, but if they had a point they wanted to make to her, they should’ve done it without breaking the law.

The transcriptions were obnoxious. She had to impose a 2-page limit after a fledgling cultist tried espousing a treatise on the moral value of destroying the world. The scribe got a hand sprain from all the words. Those who resolved to write their own were often illiterate, and their writing was completely illegible. Sometimes she got drawings of herself being violated. Once, a visionary of unparalleled enlightenment elected to stab themselves in the neck with the pen and bleed out in the cell. Another tried shoving it up his ass, as if the guards wouldn’t realize where it had gone, and as if he could somehow use it to escape from the center of the Felkner Guard Barracks.

The violence was usually from ignorant people who didn’t know better, and had no hope of knowing better. Stupid, violent people, in unfortunate circumstances, and too stupid and violent to get themselves out of their circumstances. And they’d have children, and they’d do the same (not that she was old enough to witness that herself). She’d considered introducing castration as punishment for more minor crimes, like vandalism or petty theft. But, this wouldn’t deal with existing violent children. And, Felkner wasn’t a closed system, there was a shocking amount of travel around the country, in stark contrast to only a few decades ago. Guild members met different chapters around the country, pilgrims went on treks to see the supposed birthplaces of gods, farmers sent their children to seminars at Northpoint to learn whatever new theoretical farming techniques there were.

And, the guilds themselves effectively granted protection to criminals. If someone got arrested, their guild would protest, plead, and attempt to offer restitution themselves. This entailed many violent people being welcomed into guilds with the belief it offered them cover. To the guilds’ credit, it usually didn’t.

In an ideal world, she wouldn’t need to exist. The people would manage themselves, the unprovokedly violent wouldn’t exist. Perhaps, in that world, she could be someone else.

There was once a man, a former Vanguardist, who had killed 6 people with his sword, burned down a city block, and in doing so injured 27 others. He’d claimed they were a cult attempting to introduce a strain of lycanthropy to the city, via rats, but investigation failed to find substantial evidence to support it. Upon being sentenced to death, he resigned from the guild, and upon seeing Anisa sternly, but sleepily floating on the other side of the glass, he smiled, and he said,