The night sky is dark and cloudy, with a thin layer of clouds dampening the moon and starlight. Under this night sky, a small town of about 5,000 residents bustles with people on the main street. The air is slightly warm, and visibility is clear under the illumination of the pebble road. The sides of the road are lined with shop stands. The smell of various warm snacks fills the air, and young teenagers have brought their money pouches for a shopping spree, buying everything from accessories to hot sweets.
Amidst the crowded road, a young gentleman in his mid-twenties is walking around to kill some time. He walks alone, his eyes scanning the different products the street has to offer.
He wears straight trousers, low leather boots, a shirt, and a sleeveless coat over it. His facial features are sharp, though his looks are only average. His eyes are droopy and sleepy, almost as if he has been going without sleep for nights on end.
Taking a casual stroll through this town is a refreshing experience. The mind is loosened from the tension of daily life, the body is free from stress, and the laughter and chatter of the people liven up the environment. It is truly a great experience to walk amidst the crowd, almost as if one becomes part of it.
While on his stroll, the man passes by an alleyway. The alleyway is strangely dark, despite being connected to the main road. The man's gaze falls into the alley for just a split second.
What he sees is a homeless-looking middle-aged man in a white shirt and brown trousers. The man is skinny, sickly, and pale, bent over, picking up a small money pouch from the ground.
The information is received and processed in an instant by the young man. Time seems to have stopped.
What is this guy doing? Picking up a money pouch off the ground? Is it his own, or is it someone else's? He looks homeless, and I don't think a homeless-looking guy would be so reckless with his money pouch for it to fall on the ground, so it's probably not his. What should I do? He's practically stealing money, but I don't know the owner of that money. Is he going to find the owner and return it? No, again, a guy looking like that wouldn't do such an honorable and selfless thing. Why? Because when you don't have much in life, you must cling to what you can get. But there are some homeless who are selfless and intuitively kind to others, for they know what it feels like to be at rock bottom, so they stop looking at others in an envious way; they don't want to drag others down to their own level. Well, maybe a little. Okay, maybe not everyone is this way. Who am I to judge? The bigger question is, what should I do about it now that I have seen this?
Hmm, I have two options: ignore or confront the man. I also have the third option to call someone else to handle this matter, for example, the guards. But I am a guard myself, though that is beside the point because I am off-duty and don't want to spend my evening turning in a guy. That would waste my off-duty time. If I were to confront the man, there would be three outcomes: one where the man denies stealing, another where he denies and tries to fight me for the money, and the last where he accepts the fact that the money is not his and goes up to the guardhouse to return a lost money pouch to the finder if they were to meet up at the guardhouse for help. None of them is good for me; all of them would be a hassle. What a pain. Then the best option would be to ignore him. If I were never here, he would steal the money, and nothing would change. Since I'm here, I can change that, but that would mean spending my time on something I'm not obliged to do, although somewhere in the guard rules and terms, it probably says that I have to act in the interest of the citizens at all times, but I don't remember such a rule. That's it; I will ignore him.
So the man did as he decided. He turned away his gaze and walked away swiftly, as if this encounter never happened.
Later that night, in a wooden house the size of a family home, there lived a mother and a pair of twins. The mother had an overweight yet elegantly shaped body, and her face shone with motherly gentleness and warmth. The kids were blond and cute 10-year-old twins, a girl and a boy.
In the bedroom of the twins, in separate beds placed closely together, the twins lay. The mother gave them both a kiss on the forehead, while the kids gently pulled on her skirt, requesting a bedtime story.
"Not tonight, sweeties. I'm sleepy and tired from today's work and everything. Mommy is going to sleep early tonight, but tomorrow night I will tell you the tale of the courageous southern hero."
"Aww, promise?"
"Promise. Good night," she said, giving them another kiss on their foreheads.
"Good night," they said simultaneously.
The mother closed the door, and as the door's gap narrowed, so did the light level in the room. Eventually, the room became absent of light.
The mother walked to the living room, then the kitchen. She brought out a red wine bottle and headed back to the living room, sitting down on the couch.
The mother, now drunk, was tearing up in the silence of the room. The candle flickered, and the shadow of her figure swayed in the light.
BANG.
The front door was opened by a man. He had a knife in his hand—a steak knife.
The woman, surprised, screamed as she stood up. The speed of this transition from stationary to standing caught her off-guard, and her vision became fuzzy and black, caused by the low iron level in her blood. This moment was crucial to her survival, for she saw the knife in the man's hand. She frantically reached for the bottle and held it as a weapon.
"You fucking bitch, I know you slept with that man, that fucking guy. You ruined me!"
"You're fucking drunk. Get out, you piece of shit!"
The man walked forward, swaying.
She swung the wine bottle at him. The man, luckily, as a result of being heavily drunk, ducked down and dodged as the bottle swished over his head in a horizontal arc.
"You bitch!"
In an upward slash, the man penetrated her throat with the knife and drew a cut across it. She moved to hold her throat in a reflex but instantly fell to the ground, losing control over her entire body.
She was dead.
As he panted heavily, looking at her dead body, he looked around, and in his vision, two small circles of shadow were peeking from the corner of the hall.
The twins had witnessed their mother's death and the murderer in action.
Scared and frozen in place, the boy shouted with a frail voice at the man.
"You monster!"
"Monster? Me? I'm not a monster."
"Monster, monster, monster!" he shouted, crying and scared. This was a sort of defense mechanism for the child.
Rational thoughts and a clear mind were not something the man possessed right now, for he was easily agitated, like a child who had his favorite toy taken away.
In the next moment, the man attacked and stabbed the twins in their throats, slashing and cutting them open.
The man was denying his actions in his mind, justifying the murders.
Then he ended up outside the house, wandering around the road. Before long, someone spotted the man and called for help. Eventually, a horde of people gathered, as well as the guards. The man was restrained by the guards, though he resisted. But in the end, a drunk man's resistance can only do so much harm, and in actuality, no one was harmed.
The next morning, the news spread throughout the town, with information about the murder suspect posted on the town information board.
"Having reviewed all evidence presented... this court has reached a final verdict. The defendant, Markil Fyr, is found guilty of murder... By the laws of this land, justice must be swift. Therefore, I hereby sentence you to death by public execution, to be carried out this very afternoon in the town square. May the sight of your fate serve as a warning to those who dare to defy the law and bring bloodshed upon innocent people."
The judge gave his call, and soon the court was disbanded. The sentence was to be carried out in the afternoon.
And so it came.
"Thorkell, today you are assigned to the subject."
"Ehhh, what a pain."
"Go and bring the subject to the execution platform."
So, Thorkell went to the jailhouse, taking one step at a time with confidence yet unmotivated to fulfill his task.
Can't be helped. I signed up for this job myself. There's no one to blame but myself for it.
He reached the cell, and in the shadow of the cell sat a familiar-looking figure. Thorkell, being an executioner and a guard at the same time, would habitually analyze people's physiques and evaluate himself compared to them. It was in case he thought a person was a more capable fighter than he was; he would flee in such a situation and avoid risking his life. He knew better than anyone just how fragile the human body is. There was no chance of him risking his life when in danger, for that would be a true pain in the ass.
"You!"
The guy from last night? It can't be, right?
"Get out."
The cuffed, skinny man got out. Indeed, it was him. They walked down the hallway, up the stairs, and toward the wagon.
No way, man. No way. What have I done? Was it my fault? It wasn't my fault, right? But the guys said he was drunk when he murdered his own family, but he wasn't drunk at the time I saw him. So he got drunk using that money? So it really was my fault. But it wasn't. I was off-duty at the time. Any other person would have done the same in that situation; no one would bother confronting the man when it would obviously just brew trouble. But it really is my fault for this happening. I chose to ignore him, and that led to this. But my action didn't directly cause the murder; in fact, he was the person who murdered them. It wasn't me; it was him. Even if I did confront him, it would have just delayed his action. Yes, that's right. No. Stop lying to yourself, you idiot. I should have confronted him at the time; that was the right choice to make, and I did not make that decision, and as such, it led to this outcome. Calm down, calm down. No one knows about that interaction. Even if they knew, it's not like I did something horrible. Maybe I would get fined at worst, or at best, I would get a scolding.
"Hey, Thorkell, you look terrible. What's wrong?"
"Oh, it's nothing. Just feel bad about the victims."
"Yeah, how awful. Hey, how can you go and kill your own family? You have no shame or dignity, you piece of shit."
"..."
They boarded the wagon, sitting in silence for a short while.
"Hey, erm, Markuv?"
"It's Markil."
"Yeah, Markil. You don't seem that crazy. Tell me, did you have fun killing your family?"
"Pfft, fun? You're mocking me. Of course, I didn't. I don't even remember half of it."
"I see."
"Damn it, I know it now, now that I'm thinking clearly. I have a theory. Someone set me up. Someone definitely set me up."
"Interesting. Tell me your theory about this setup you're talking about."
"My wife was a nurse. She worked in this medical house as one of the nurses there, along with two others. She had been working there for five years, and it all started from back then, from four years ago. I was a butcher. I had my own butcher shop, but four years ago, randomly, another butchery opened up right across the street. Up until then, I was profiting well from the sales, but then the sales slowly started to fall. The profit decreased, and eventually, after a year and a half, I was in the negatives. I was losing money rather than gaining. I thought I could rebrand and remodel the shop to make it look more aesthetic and pleasing to the eye, but all the money I spent on such remodeling was wasted, for the sales never went into the positives again.
I was at my lowest at that time, but my wife wasn't even encouraging me. I thought maybe it wasn't such a big deal in her eyes, so I bottled up the frustration. Eventually, I don't know how it started, but I got more into gambling. I was gambling on horse racing, toad fights, mouse wrestling. I became addicted to alcohol. I didn't realize how slowly and surely it found its way into my life, but that's the thorn of it. Alcohol is like a snake's venom; you won't realize you've been poisoned until it's too late. I started gambling family savings to make back what I lost, but of course, I was never lucky enough for such a thing. Then, before I knew it, my family fell apart. My children didn't look me in the eye anymore; my wife became more silent. Our life had come to a stop. Eventually, yesterday, they had enough and kicked me out. I didn't resist physically; I just walked out in search of a way to make sense of myself. I wouldn't want to hurt my family either. Well, in any case, it all started when she became a nurse there. She said the saint mage was never married, and any move the other nurse had made on him was rejected, so I felt reassured that there wouldn't be much of a threat to our family on that front.
But after pondering last night, I realized it was all the saint's cunning plan. It was all random. Why would a butcher shop open right in front of me, taking over all my customers, and for some reason, even the local slaughterhouse had become cold to me? The saint had bought them off. He sponsored the butchery and bought off the slaughterhouse. If he never married and is single, then he definitely had all the money in the world to do such a thing. And not only that, he had been playing a long game of manipulating my wife into divorcing me, using the time spent together as coworkers to manifest romantic emotions in my wife towards him. Then, after my wife kicked me out, he paid some youngsters to beat me up last night, stealing my money. Then he placed a money pouch in the path I was going to take, slowly planting corruptive desires in my head.
He had been doing so for a long time. Then last night, I don't even remember buying and drinking wine. He must have thought if I got drunk, I would pick a fight with someone in the tavern or on the crowded roads leading to my forever downfall. But I was an even weaker man than he expected. I went straight home to my family, at the tavern picked up the steak knife, and killed my family. I don't think even he predicted that.
But using this in court was pointless; it's just baseless accusations. Such a thing wouldn't work against the judge. I was framed, but it led to the death of my family by my own hands. I am nothing but a criminal in the end."
Damn, I didn't ask for your whole life story.
"It does sound definitely interesting. You were framed; that's a good theory."
But one thing I have learned on this job is that people deceive others and even themselves in the brink of death. Whatever theory he has is pointless at this time, so he might just be deceiving himself to ease his guilt for murdering his family. That is usually the case with these murderers.
"But it doesn't change the fact that you killed your family. You were judged based on the murders, and that is a fact."
"Yeah, I deserve death for that. I know that; I'm not denying it. Sir Thorkell, please give me a painful death, one that resembles the murders I have done."
"Huh? Are you sure? It's pretty hard to convince the public of an executioner's mistake. I guess when you think about it, they enjoy gruesome deaths more than swift ones."
"Yeah, I'm sure. I want to experience the horrors I caused my family before their death. Anything less is injustice towards them. I deserve hell. Hopefully, the saint who framed me shall meet me there, for then and only then can I ease some of my guilt."
The wagon arrived at the town square. The crowd was murmuring, and guards were stationed in front of the platform. They walked up the platform, for the method of execution was beheading by axe.
"Is it true? They say he slaughtered an entire family in their sleep!"
"Yeah, and he showed no remorse! A monster, that one!"
"What if he was framed? Nobles get away with worse, and we never see them on the scaffold."
"Hush! Don't let the guards hear you say that!"
A bell rang, followed by the Herald's proclamation.
"In accordance with the laws of this land, let it be known that Markil Fyr, condemned for the heinous crime of murder most foul, is hereby sentenced to death. For the unjust slaying of three innocent souls, justice shall be swift and final.
...Let all who stand witness remember: the law is absolute, and those who defy it shall meet the fate of the guilty. May this serve as a warning to any who dare walk the path of bloodshed and sin!"
Was there really no other way? If his theory is true, and if I had confronted him last night, I would've prevented this outcome. Damn it, I can't change the past, I can't change the future, I can't change the laws, and when I had the chance to change the present that was in the past, last evening, I decided to choose the easy way out. I chose the laziest option out of all I had. And look where it brought this guy. I practically killed this man already; I killed him last evening.
Thorkell swung his axe, purposefully slowing the pace at the very end. He fulfilled the man's dying request; he gave him a gruesome and painful end.