Role

Chapter 1

From a distance, death must look like the end of a storybook. But, as a
hangman, I have seen death a hundred times. When you're up close, when you
can hear the heaving breaths of the condemned, see the terror in their eyes
as the hood slips over their head, listen to the wooden squeal of a trapdoor
opening, and hear the final, dull snapping of the neck, you know death for
what it is. A simple thing. No glory. No glamour. Just gone.

Death doesn't come at the end of a tale. It comes at the end of my rope.

Urdrurn Drol, the leader of a no-account gang of Hamsah Mu'tazzian thugs
called the "Crows," found himself at the end of my rope. Like all my
'customers,' it wasn't personal. I just did my job. But Drol's associates
didn't see it that way. They saw it as an affront worth avenging in the most
severe way they could imagine.

That's how I find myself naked, beaten, near death, and desperately clawing
my way through the Sands of Sorrow trying to get to my captured family.

My life has disintegrated into fragmented moments of extreme fear and
suffering. New and unfamiliar sensations define it. A dull throb somehow
produces sharp pain in my head from where a thug blackjacked me. The burn of
the sand under my palms and knees. The dryness of my mouth. The cracking of
my lips. The ever-present terror that a benign mound of sand will suddenly
burst alive with angry chaos runners wielding deadly blades.

Then there is the heart-stopping fear for my little brother, sister, and
mother. I don't know what Urdurn Drol's men will do to them in the name of
vengeance.

The sun sets on me for the second time, and the adrenaline that once gave
determination to my steps has long faded. I am alone in the night, afraid and
defeated. The cooling sand is as welcoming to my burned body as the Abyss is
to my broken soul.

Then I think of the faces of Drol's men.

In the encroaching fog of death, I see their smug expressions. I hear their
self-congratulatory insults and the echoes of their laughter. I look into
their eyes and see the look of men who have won and who know it. Men who
think themselves better than Umeruguu Uu'Gen the hangman. Men who dumped me
in the Sands of Sorrow without hope for survival. Men who are torturing my
family right now.

And I cannot abide it