Beneath clear skies with storm clouds at the horizon, a seething mass of people gathered in front of an elevated platform.

At the forefront of the crowd were several figures chained together by their wrists and ankles, with the chains affixed to the ground by wooden stakes driven through rings attached to them. Their exalted statuses could be inferred from their expensive clothing, but their current dishevelled state spoke of a fall from grace. All the chained men and women shared a striking resemblance to each other, making it easy to recognize them as members of the same family. Their ages varied widely; from a dignified old man with pure white hair and deep wrinkles crinkling the corners of his eyes to a scared young girl, barely over ten summers old, desperately clutching the hem of her mother’s skirt.

A bare-chested man sat upon a wooden stool above an elevated platform overlooking the crowd. His bronzed skin gleamed under the sunlight and the corded muscles of his arms rippled as he repeatedly ran a whetstone along the edge of the massive executioner’s blade laid across his knees. His unruly mop of hair was the colour of blood; and his eyes, above the scarlet silk scarf that covered the lower half of his face, were a dark crimson. If one focused on them for too long, they would start noticing the shifting images at their depths demonstrating scenes from his inner world – his Embryonic Dungeon.

A petite, dark-eyed, pale-skinned woman with impressive curves stood beside him dressed in the black and white uniform of the Sangre palace maids. An iridescent blue streak ran down one side of her jet-black hair that she kept cropped to the base of her neck. Coupled with her expressionless face, her fine features and porcelain skin made her look like a doll. Holding a scroll unfurled in front of her, she read aloud from it without any emotion colouring her voice.

“Count Revos, Green Mage: -

"Apprehended on suspicion of colluding with cross-border shard smuggling rings, after a thorough investigation, he was found guilty of doctoring the accounts of the shard ranches under his purview and skimming a percentage of the produce. His associates in the smuggling ring transported the shards across the border to the neighbouring nations. Most notably, the Enzeal Kingdom.

“Due to crimes including but not restricted to official graft, fraud, and treason, he and his entire family have been sentenced to death by beheading. To be administered by his highness, the Crown Prince himself.”

The crowd grew agitated at the recounting of the crimes of the head of the Revos clan, hissing and booing at him as they clamoured for justice. The family huddled closer together and a grimace of regret flashed across the old man’s face. Regret for the actions of his son that had implicated the whole family. The young girl turned away from the rowdy crowd in fear, burying her face into her mother’s skirt.

A handsome middle-aged man who looked like the younger version of the old man and shared many features in common with the little girl, dropped onto his knees and shuffled forward as far as his chains would allow. Leaning forward, he kowtowed, knocking his forehead repeatedly against the rough gravelly ground until he drew blood.

“Your highness! Please have mercy,” he cried out. “I am guilty of the most heinous crime, I know. But my family is innocent. They knew nothing. Not my father, nor my wife and definitely not my baby girl… Spare them, please!”

His wife too dropped to her knees and hugged their daughter tightly. “Spare her, your highness,” pleaded the woman desperately. “She is but a child. She knew nothing of her father’s crimes. His life, mine… they are yours to take. But please…” she sobbed, “I beg of you. Take her in as your Thrall if you must. Just let her live!”

The hysteria in her voice calmed the blood thirst of the crowd as they realized what exactly they were asking for. Their clamour died down as they waited for the response of the man on the executioner’s stage.

Under the focus of a thousand eyes, Vincent Sangre continued sharpening his weapon with utter dedication. The executioner’s blade looked like an oversized cleaver with a leather wrapped handle long enough for a comfortable two-handed grip. Its blade was a rectangular piece of dark metal with a single honed edge that shone silver under the sunlight. The rhythmic rasp of the whetstone against the metal was the only sound audible in the square as the crowd waited for his response with bated breath.

Finally satisfied with the edge of the blade, he set the whetstone aside and got to his feet. Turning his rust-red eyes towards the chained convicts, focusing on the man and the woman, he spoke in a voice reminiscent of clashing swords.

“Leave those two for last. Start from the youngest.”

Then he turned away, closing his eyes and standing as still as a statue as he focused all his attention on the blade in his hand. Another maid with an icy countenance, a twin of the one on the stage except for the colour of the streak in her hair – a shockingly bright red – stepped forward from behind the family at his words.

Seeing Vincent’s second Thrall approaching them and realizing that the only mercy for her child would be an early death, the woman let out a keening wail that made the hearts of all present tremble. Blood began to trickle down her nose, ears and the corners of her eyes like tears as she fought desperately against the Restrictions that had sealed her shards and cut access to her mana.

The maid’s figure blurred as she appeared behind the woman and chopped down sharply on the scruff of her neck, knocking her out. As the woman sank to the ground, the maid stepped forward and tore the terrified child out of her desperate grasp, unloosened even by her loss of consciousness. The other members of the family strained against their bonds, trying to reach out and stop her. Especially the child’s father whose face, dyed red from his bleeding forehead and the backlash from resisting the Restrictions placed upon him, had taken on a demonic cast with bloodshot eyes, clenched jaws and popping veins.

The maid ignored their curses and pleas as she unclasped the shackles of the little girl, shouldered her in a fireman’s carry and moved towards the dais where her master waited with blade in hand.

The Revos family had been a distinguished family and their blood ran true. Most of them were mages of one level or another. Yet they all had to watch helplessly as their youngest was bound to the scaffold by her delicate wrists, her tear-stained, terrified face held in place by wooden restraints, so her neck was extended, waiting for the heartless knife to fall.

Vincent Sangre, his eyes still closed, raised his blade in a two-handed grip above his head. The pleas of Revos family tapered off as they stared stubbornly at the gleaming edge. Their silence much louder than their screams.

“Mercy, Prince.” Suddenly a voice rang out in the square from the midst of the crowd, extremely conspicuous in the sombre stillness. Then another. “Mercy for the girl.” More voices joined them from all sides until the crowd that had been baying for blood mere moments ago, now prayed for absolution.

The volume of the crowd rose until their voices merged into one rising crescendo. Hope returned to the eyes of the girl’s father as he watched the stage unblinking, waiting for the Crown Prince to put his blade aside.

A flash of silver. A beautiful arc of light sketched by the descending blade. The sound of a tiny head bouncing against the ground – oh so loud in the choked silence of the crowd. The twitches of the headless body. The final struggles of a young heart as it pumped blood out in desperate spurts from the neck. Blood that dyed the wooden floor of the stage red and pooled around the disembodied head, frozen in a rictus of fear. Those lifeless eyes speaking of the years of life they could have witnessed, the things they would never see.

Her father sank back on his haunches, his face slack. All the fight had gone out of him. His ambition that had driven him to flout kingdom law, the fire that had burnt in his eyes, extinguished, leaving nothing but cold, grey ash.

“Next,” said the Prince, drawing glares of pure hatred from the remaining members of the Revos clan. Hatred mixed with fear. With the death of the girl, they knew that their time was nigh. They could feel the blade upon their neck.

The old man closed his eyes and took a deep breath… wishing that he hadn’t lived long enough to suffer the indignity of being clapped in chains and paraded publicly. Wishing, that the execution of his granddaughter, that delightful ray of sunshine, wasn’t among the last things he would see.

An inhuman scream forced his eyes open and he snapped his head to the side. The girl’s mother had awoken, just in time to see her daughter die.

The air around the woman’s body warped and twisted as her mana, fuelled by her rage, burst through the Restrictions placed upon her by her jailor with a Tier 5 Sealing shard. Cracks proliferated across her skin as her body was destroyed along with the magic binding her. A dark blue mist spurted from the cracks, surrounding her in a corrosive haze. The ground, her clothes, the shackles binding her… they all melted away under the effect of her only Tier 3 shard as she broke free and rushed onto the stage.

She had only managed to unbind her Corrosion shard at the cost of deep fissures across the blue crystal and lacking the protection of her Aura shard, the mists had already eaten through her skin by the time she was within reach of the motionless Prince. She had only managed to reluctantly protect her eyes with her mana. After this attack, she wasn’t long for this world.

Life, death, it mattered not. All that mattered was the man on the stage holding a knife stained with the blood of her child. As she stretched her hand out to claw at his face, Vincent finally opened his eyes.

Rust red calm met hate-filled azure and then the woman’s line of sight spun. The sky and the earth exchanged places again and again and the last thing she saw was the corroded husk of her body tumbling to the ground without a head.

Then there was darkness.

Vincent retracted his hand after beheading the woman, stepping sideways to avoid the blood spurting from the headless neck. Ignoring the shock of the onlooking crowd and the burgeoning whispered discussions, he closed his eyes and focused on his Domain that covered every inch of the execution stage, including the two corpses.

He breathed in deeply and his Dungeon breathed with him. The scent of blood mingled with the copious amounts of mana released by the death of a Green Mage. Twisted by her resentment and unwillingness at the point of death the mana had taken on a transient life of its own. In his mind’s eye, he could sense it transforming into the special kind of Death Aura that was the basis of his Dungeon. Which the members of his Lineage, the Soldier Lineage, had named Murderous Aura. With surveillance shards kept off outside by his Domain, no one could see the reddish-black Aura that floated up from the woman’s corpse and lunged at him, as though trying to fulfil its previous owner’s will, only to be absorbed cleanly by him and converted into a tonic for his Dungeon.

Pale crimson flames ignited across his body, burning silently, smokeless and invisible to anyone without the appropriate shard. Instead of generating heat, they exuded a sense of cold. Not the cold of winter, but the chill that ran up one’s spine when looking into the eyes of a venomous snake. The chilling threat of an impending death.

Opening his eyes, “Next,” he called out in that same emotionless tone, like it wasn’t two living persons he had cut down, but two trees.

The sun crossed the zenith as the hours rolled by and with one last swing of the blade, Count Revos, the chief criminal, joined the rest of his family in death. But the man had been dead even before the blade fell. Watching his loved ones pay the ultimate price one after the other for his mistakes had killed him as surely as the separation of his head from his body.

Most of the crowd had dispersed by then, unable to stomach the bloody scene, but those that had remained made way for the Prince as he stepped through the pooled blood on the dais and got down from the stage. Followed by his twin Thralls, he passed through the clear passage formed by the parting crowd. The people he passed by, whatever their opinion of him, lowered their eyes and bowed... shivering as the fine hairs across their body stood upright affected by the Murderous Aura overflowing off him.

They only relaxed after he had gone far away, leaving bright red footprints, stark against the white flagstones of the square.