The Scribe’s Judgment

The clock on my desk began ticking backward the moment I agreed to write the king's eulogy. Its brass hands moved with unnatural precision, counting down the hours until midnight when my words would seal a tyrant's fate. I stared at the parchment before me, pristine and hungry, waiting to be filled with judgments that would become truth.

As Royal Scribe of Karvenfall, I'd written thousands of documents—birth certificates that blessed newborns with talents, marriage contracts that physically bound souls together, death notices that determined where spirits would wander. Every word I'd ever penned with sanctioned ink had reshaped reality itself. But never had I faced such a terrible responsibility as this. Never had the weight of another's soul pressed so heavily on my conscience.

"You have until midnight, Soren," Lord Drace had whispered, placing the king's childhood quill in my trembling hand. "Choose your words with care. His Majesty's soul hangs in the balance."

The quill felt alive against my skin—warm and pulsing with forgotten innocence. It had been fashioned from a strand of the king's own hair, taken when he was just a boy, before power corrupted him. Before he'd ordered my brother exiled for speaking truth to power. Before he'd become the monster who now lay dying in the royal chamber. A voice whispered in my mind, so faint I almost missed it: Remember what you are.

Outside my window, the city bells tolled strangely, their sound distorted as if underwater. Nine hours until midnight. Nine hours to decide: write the glowing lies that would elevate a tyrant to the celestial realm, or pen the harsh truths that would condemn him—and likely me along with him.

I dipped the quill in midnight-black ink, distilled from rain collected during the year's darkest night. My hand hovered over the binding paper, harvested from the oldest tree in the royal gardens. The first drop fell, spreading like a bruise across the parchment.

"King Solgrath IV, sovereign of Karvenfall, master of the seven provinces..." I began, my script flowing in elegant arcs across the page. But as I tried to continue with the traditional platitudes—beloved ruler, merciful judge—the ink rebelled, pooling and twisting into grotesque patterns. The binding paper rejected my lies with a heat that made my fingertips burn.

I crumpled the parchment and started again. And again. Each attempt met the same fate—the magic of truth embedded in these materials refused my diplomatic falsehoods. By the eighth hour, my desk was littered with failed beginnings, each one magically erased by the paper's stubborn integrity.

As I stared at yet another blank sheet, the shadows in my study seemed to deepen. For a moment, I thought I saw my brother's face reflected in the inkwell—gaunt and accusing, as he had looked the day the guards dragged him away. All because I had written the decree. All because I had lacked the courage to defy the king. The same voice whispered again: You know what you must choose.

"Not this time," I whispered to the empty room. "This time, I choose truth."

The clock's hands moved relentlessly backward as I began anew. Seven hours remained. The quill felt heavier with each passing minute, as if the weight of judgment itself pressed down upon my fingers.

"King Solgrath IV," I wrote, "ruled with an iron fist for three decades." The ink flowed smoothly this time, accepting this unvarnished beginning. "His reign brought prosperity to the noble houses and suffering to the common folk."

As I wrote, the ink shimmered on the page, tiny faces forming in the liquid before drying into permanent truth. I recognized some of them—the baker executed for speaking against grain taxes, the poet whose tongue was cut out for satirizing the court, my own brother vanishing into exile. The binding paper hummed with a low, resonant energy, accepting these truths, hungry for more.

My candles guttered as a cold draft swept through my chambers. Four hours remained. Outside, the city had grown unnaturally quiet, as if holding its breath. Even the palace guards who normally patrolled the corridor outside my door had vanished.

I continued writing, detailing the king's cruelties with dispassionate precision. Each sentence felt like both a betrayal and a liberation. The king's loyalists would call this treason, but the binding paper called it truth. Which master was I serving?

"His campaigns in the eastern provinces left thousands dead," I wrote, "while his palace grew ever more opulent with stolen treasures."

The quill vibrated between my fingers, and for a moment, I could feel the king's childhood memories flowing through it—a boy laughing by a stream, a youth receiving his first sword, a young prince weeping at his father's deathbed. There had been goodness in him once. Perhaps there still was, buried beneath decades of corruption and power.

Three hours remained when a knock shattered my concentration.

"Master Scribe?" came a voice I recognized as Lady Elyse, the king's niece. "The royal physician says His Majesty has taken a turn. They... they don't think he'll last until dawn."

My heart hammered against my ribs. "I understand," I called back, not opening the door. "The eulogy will be ready."

Her footsteps retreated, and I returned to my task with renewed urgency. The king might die before midnight, before the eulogy was complete. What then? Would an unfinished judgment leave his soul in limbo?

Two hours remained when I began to feel the magic working through me. My hand moved almost independently of my thoughts, recording truths I had never dared speak aloud. The binding paper grew warm beneath my fingers, and the ink seemed to draw itself from the quill, eager to form words that would become fate.

"Despite his cruelties," I found myself writing, "King Solgrath feared death above all things. In this, he was merely human, as frightened of judgment as the lowliest peasant."

The clock ticked backward with increasing urgency. One hour remained. The final page waited before me, and with it, the conclusion that would determine everything. That whisper came again, clearer now: Every scribe faces this choice. Every scribe becomes what he writes.

My quill hesitated above the parchment. What ending did justice demand? What ending could I live with?

***

The midnight hour approached with supernatural weight. The air in my study thickened until each breath felt like drawing in honey. Thirty minutes remained, and still my quill hovered above that final, fateful page.

I thought of my brother, somewhere beyond the kingdom's borders, perhaps still alive, perhaps not. I thought of the families who had suffered, the voices silenced, the lives cut short by royal decree. I thought, too, of the king as a child, before the crown had twisted him. The quill in my hand had once been a part of that innocent boy.

"In the end," I wrote at last, "King Solgrath's legacy is one of—"

The door to my chambers burst open with such force that the hinges screamed in protest. I jerked upright, spattering ink across the parchment. In the doorway stood a figure that defied description—neither fully alive nor properly dead.

King Solgrath himself.

His skin hung gray and loose on his frame, and his eyes burned with feverish light. He wore his nightclothes, stained with medicines and sweat, and his crown sat askew on his thinning hair. Behind him, terrified physicians and courtiers hovered, unwilling to touch the dying monarch yet unable to leave him unattended.

"So," he rasped, his voice like stones grinding together, "you write my fate, Soren?"

I rose from my chair, the unfinished eulogy clutched against my chest. "Your Majesty should be resting."

"I'll rest soon enough." He shambled forward, each step seeming to cost him dearly. "But not before I read what you've written. Not before I know where I'm bound."

Ten minutes until midnight. The clock's backward motion had slowed to an agonizing crawl.

The king reached for the papers with trembling hands stained with ink-like bruises. I hesitated, then surrendered them. What choice did I have?

His eyes darted across the pages, widening with each truth revealed. His breathing grew labored, whistling through clenched teeth. When he finished, he looked up at me with an expression I had never seen before on his face—not rage, but something far more devastating.

Recognition. And perhaps, impossibly, relief.

"You wrote the truth," he whispered.

"I did, Your Majesty."

"And yet"—he gestured weakly at the unfinished page—"you haven't concluded. You haven't determined my fate." His voice cracked. "Why show mercy now, scribe? After documenting every sin with such... precision?"

Five minutes remained. The clock's ticking filled the silence between us, each backward second like a hammer blow.

I took back the papers, aware of every eye upon me—the king's, the courtiers', and somehow, impossibly, the eyes of every citizen whose fate I had ever written. The whisper in my mind had become a chorus: Choose. Choose. Choose.

"Because it is not for me to judge, Your Majesty. Not completely."

The king laughed, a terrible sound that dissolved into coughing. "Then who? Your precious gods? They've been silent my entire reign."

One minute remained. The binding magic hummed through the room, making the candles flicker blue. The quill in my hand grew hot, demanding completion.

I met the king's gaze and saw, for the first time, fear naked in his eyes. But I also saw something else—a glimmer of the boy who had once owned this quill, who had once believed in justice and mercy.

"May he be judged," I wrote, the words burning into the parchment, "as he judged others."

And then, with steady hand, I signed my name. But as I did, I noticed something that made my blood freeze: the ink had already begun forming new letters beneath my signature, letters I had not written. Letters that spelled out my own name, waiting for another hand to complete them.

The clock struck midnight with a sound like breaking glass. The binding paper glowed with ethereal light, illuminating the king's face from below, casting his features in stark relief. For one suspended moment, we all stood frozen—the king, the courtiers, myself—as the magic took hold.

"What have you done?" the king whispered, but his voice seemed to come from very far away.

The parchment rose from my desk of its own accord, hovering in the air between us. The ink began to move, flowing like living creatures across the page, reshaping into images—a courtroom, a throne, a prison cell. The king's own decrees, written over decades, materialized in shimmering script around him like accusatory phantoms.

"No," he gasped, reaching for the floating document. His fingers passed through it as though it were smoke. "No, I can't—"

But he could not finish. The binding magic enveloped him, wrapping him in tendrils of midnight ink. His body remained standing before us, eyes wide and unseeing, but I knew his consciousness had been pulled elsewhere—into a realm of parchment and ink, where every word he had ever ordered written now surrounded him, judging him as he had judged others.

The courtiers fled in terror, their screams echoing down the palace corridors. Only I remained, watching as the king's body crumpled to the floor, empty yet still breathing. His soul trapped in literary purgatory.

Relief flooded through me, so intense it was almost painful. I had done it. I had written the truth, and somehow survived. The backward-ticking clock on my desk shuddered, then resumed its normal forward motion with a sound like a sigh.

I slumped back into my chair, exhaustion washing over me. It was done. Justice, of a sort, had been served.

But as I sat there, catching my breath, I noticed something that made my victory taste like ashes. The brass nameplate beneath the clock was changing, the king's name fading away like morning mist. And in its place, letter by letter, my own name was appearing.

A sharp knock at the door confirmed my growing dread. A royal courier entered, carefully stepping around the king's prone form without comment, as though such sights were commonplace.

"Master Scribe," he said, extending a sealed envelope with hands that trembled slightly. "From the Royal Council."

I broke the seal with numb fingers. Inside was a single sheet of parchment, bearing the council's insignia. My eyes scanned the formal language, then froze on the central passage:

"In light of recent events, the Royal Council requests the preparation of a eulogy for Soren Voss, Royal Scribe, to be written by his successor before tomorrow's midnight hour."

My gaze shot to the clock on my desk. The steady forward ticking slowed, hesitated, then stopped completely. In the sudden silence, I could hear my own heartbeat, thunderous and irregular.

I looked down at the king's body, still breathing but empty. Then at my own hands, stained with the same ink that had sealed his fate. The cycle would continue. Another scribe would judge me, just as I had judged Solgrath. The voice in my mind, now clearly my own, whispered: This is what it means to wield the quill. This is the price of judgment.

In this city of binding words, no one who wields the quill escapes its judgment. Every writer becomes, in time, the subject. Every judge, the judged.

Outside my window, a new day was dawning over Karvenfall. Citizens would wake to find their tyrant gone but not dead, trapped in a prison of his own making. They would celebrate in the streets, unaware that the machinery of fate had already selected its next subject.

I picked up a fresh sheet of binding paper and placed it before me. If my eulogy was to be written, I would leave behind my own words first—a testament, a warning, perhaps even a plea for mercy.

The clock on my desk began ticking backward.