IRIS
The Council chamber, once a stage for our radical reformation, now felt like a courtroom. The air was thick, not with tension, but with a cold, solemn finality. The great table where the Triumvirate had just been born was now the bench from which justice would be delivered. The representatives had not dispersed; they had rearranged themselves, forming a grim, silent audience. Seraphina, Cassian, and Lianora sat together, a united front of the old order witnessing the judgment of the new. Eva Rostova was there, her face a mask of grim satisfaction. This was for the humans, too. For all the lives Marius had treated as expendable.
Kaelen and I stood before them, our hands still clasped, our shared power a quiet, humming testament to our authority. We were not just the King and Queen anymore; we were the living embodiment of the new law. The sentence we passed would not just be punishment; it would be a foundation. A statement about what the Triumvirate would and would not tolerate.
“Bring him forth,” Kaelen’s voice commanded, a low, even rumble that held no anger, only the cold, hard weight of judgment.
The heavy doors of the chamber opened, and four Lycan enforcers entered. Between them, they dragged a figure that was barely recognizable as the proud, arrogant Lord Marius. He was not in chains of silver or iron. He was bound by glowing, ethereal ropes of pure, golden Lycan energy that hummed with a low, dangerous thrum. They were not physical restraints; they were psychic ones, suppressing his magic, his will, his very essence. He was a shell, his once-immaculate robes now stained and tattered, his aristocratic face pale and slack, his eyes clouded with a permanent, hazy confusion. The psychic feedback of our ritual, the sheer, mind-shattering power of what he had witnessed, had not just broken him; it had hollowed him out.
They forced him to his knees in the center of the chamber, before us. He didn’t struggle. He didn’t even seem to fully register where he was. His gaze was vacant, his mouth slightly agape. The monster who had planned the genocide of a species was reduced to a confused, broken man.
A grim satisfaction settled in my heart, but it was a cold, distant thing. There was no triumph here. Only the somber, necessary business of closing a chapter.
“Lord Marius,” I began, my voice a clear, cool sound that echoed in the silent chamber. “You stand accused of high treason against the Accords, of conspiracy to commit mass murder, and of unleashing a magical weapon upon the citizens of Aeridor. How do you plead?”
It was a formality, a piece of the old ritual we were honoring before we introduced the new. He blinked slowly, his cloudy eyes trying to focus on me. A flicker of something—recognition, perhaps, or just a random neural firing—crossed his face.
“I… was… going to… remake it…” he mumbled, his voice a dry, slurred whisper. “A better… order…”
The words were the ramblings of a shattered mind, but they were enough. A confession of intent.
“The evidence against you is absolute,” Kaelen continued, his voice a low, dangerous growl. “The testimony of your own commander, the recovered core of the Sanguine Chalice, and the living memories of every soul in this city who felt your poison. Your guilt is not in question.”
He paused, letting the weight of his words settle. “The only question is the nature of your punishment.”
Murmurs rose from the audience, a low, speculative hum. Most expected execution. A quick, clean death for a traitor. It was the old way. The simple way.
“Death is too simple for you, Marius,” I said, my voice cutting through the murmurs, sharp and clear as ice. “Death is a release. An escape from the consequences of your actions. You sought to rob an entire world of its life, to plunge it into an eternal despair of your making. You will not receive the mercy of an end.”
I looked at Kaelen, a silent, shared thought passing between us. This was it. The moment we demonstrated what our justice truly meant.
“You prized your power,” Kaelen said, his voice a low, contemptuous rumble as he looked down at the broken vampire. “You prized your immortality. You saw them as tools to rule lesser beings. So we will not kill you. We will unmake you.”
He raised our clasped hands. A soft, brilliant light began to glow from between our palms, a fusion of his golden Lycan energy and my silver moonlight. It was not a light of destruction, but of profound, intricate magic.
“By the authority of the Triumvirate,” I declared, my voice ringing with the power of our fused soul, “we strip you of your magic.”
A single, focused beam of our combined energy shot from our hands, striking Marius in the chest. He didn’t scream. He convulsed, a violent, shuddering spasm that arched his back. A dark, viscous, shadowy energy, the very essence of his vampire power, was violently torn from him. It poured from his eyes, his mouth, his pores, a coalesced cloud of pure malevolence that our energy then contained and dissipated into nothingness. The room grew cold, the air crackling with the violent void of his unmaking. When the light faded, he was still on his knees, panting, but the predatory, ancient aura that had always clung to him was gone. He was just a man. A pale, weak-looking man.
A collective, horrified gasp echoed through the chamber. This was a punishment more terrifying than death to an immortal being.
“By the same authority,” Kaelen continued, his voice a flat, hard sound of finality, “we strip you of your immortality.”
Our joined hands glowed again, this time with a different light. A softer, but no less profound, golden light that spoke of life’s natural cycles. It washed over Marius. For a moment, he seemed to age before our very eyes. His skin, already pale, took on the frail, translucent quality of parchment. His hair, dark and lustrous, thinned, gaining streaks of grey. The timeless, ancient stillness of his form was replaced by the subtle, but unmistakable, signs of a mortal body in decline. He was now subject to time. To disease. To decay.
He looked down at his hands, at the fragile, blue-veined skin, and a slow, dawning horror entered his clouded eyes. It was the first true emotion he had shown. The understanding of his fate.
“You will not be executed,” I said, my voice a cold, final sentence. “You will be exiled. You will live out the rest of your natural days—a span that will be measured in decades, not millennia—as a powerless, mortal human, in the very world you sought to poison and rule.”
“You will be given no money, no resources, no name,” Kaelen added. “You will be left to fend for yourself among the humans you held in such contempt. You will experience their fears, their frailties, their struggles, firsthand. You will be a ghost in the world you tried to own, until your body finally fails and you are returned to the dust you so scorned.”
It was a fate worse than death. It was the ultimate poetic justice. To take the creature who saw humanity as cattle and force him to live and die as one of them.
Marius finally looked up, his eyes wide with a terror so pure and absolute it was almost a tangible thing. He opened his mouth, a wet, choking sound emerging. A plea. A bargain. But he had no power left. No magic, no immortality, no name. He had nothing. He was just a man, facing a long, slow, and utterly terrifying end.
“Take him away,” Kaelen commanded the enforcers.
They hauled the broken, sobbing mortal to his feet and dragged him from the chamber. His pathetic, broken whimpers were the only sound, a stark contrast to the grim, satisfied silence that had fallen over the Council. Justice had been served. Not with a swift, clean blow, but with a long, deliberate, and deeply personal unmaking.
As the doors closed behind the wretch, a new sound filled the chamber. It started with Eva Rostova, a single, sharp clap of her hands. It was quickly taken up by Seraphina, then Cassian, and then, surprisingly, by the ancient Fae, Lianora. Soon, the entire chamber was filled with the slow, deliberate, respectful sound of applause. It was not the cheering of a victory rally, but the solemn, appreciative applause of witnesses to a masterful, terrifying, and utterly appropriate judgment. They had seen what the new Triumvirate was capable of. They had seen the shape of their justice. And they approved.
Kaelen’s arm tightened around my waist, a silent, possessive gesture of shared victory. I leaned into him, my head resting against his shoulder. Through our shared mind, a single, clear thought passed between us, a wave of profound, weary satisfaction. *It’s over.*
*It’s over,* I agreed, a deep, peaceful calm settling over my soul. The main architect of our nightmare was gone, not by death, but by a transformation so complete it was an erasure. The threat was neutralized. The message was sent.
We stood together as the applause slowly died down, the representatives of the new world order looking at us with a new, deeper respect. We were not just their saviors or their rulers. We were their judges, their arbiters, their unmakers. We were the balance. And as we stood there, bathed in the light of a new dawn, our hands clasped and our souls fused, I knew that this was just the beginning. The beginning of a reign built not on fear or power, but on a justice as creative, as absolute, and as enduring as our love.