“Yes, yes, thank you,” the doctor said pleasantly to the maid. He waited for her to disappear down the hall with his newest instructions on washing fabrics before turning back to the bedroom.

He slunk in slowly, peeking around to make sure any of the other maids weren’t currently around inside, sweeping or the like. But it was empty, with only the ‘patient’ still resting on her bed. He felt a needle in his chest which pushed deeply into his sense of oathbound duty, but what choice did he have? He smelled incense ash, and wondered if people from Norwen burned incense for their ill too.

He crept up close to her bed and looked down at her and then stepped back in surprise. She had regained some color in her face and was no longer sweating as badly, her fever must have gone down as well.

The doctor looked to the table where he left the bottles, having been confident that the maids and servants would not have bothered them. One was missing.

A noise of wood grinding against wood above made him turn his head upwards. His guts immediately shriveled into cold worms as something clutched the ceiling, staring down at him. It dropped to the ground beside him in a pool of black and white. Then it rose upwards smoothly, more like smoke than anything with bones. Its long arms ended with thin hands that were topped with vicious claws, long black hair swarmed around its head as though it were suspended underwater, but its gleaming white eyes gazed outwards like sullen moons.

It took a step forward.

He fell backwards, shuffling back quickly. “W-what are you?”

“Judgment,” it answered in a dry voice.

He found it hard to breathe as the being stared down at him. His heart trembled. He glanced over at the unaware sleeping girl and then back at the being before him. In all his years of study, he only heard one being had ever referred to itself in such a term. The Headless God, who avenged broken oaths and swam through the ashes of sinners. A fierce god that few worshiped in joy, but many feared. Before judgment by the Empress of Hell, one must first cross paths with such a monstrous being. “I… I…”

“You are a doctor.”

“Y-yes.”

“You passed the examinations, your clothes are those of a physician from the lower royal court.”

“I-I am. I am!”

“Before doctors can be allowed within even the lower royal courts, they must first make an oath to the earth, the throne, and the heavens that they would never use their knowledge for cruelty or evil...You broke your oath,” the being’s voice rasped. A great horrible pressure pushed on him. “You used your knowledge of healing to harm. Do you know what happens to those who break their oaths?”

Of course he knew. In the exams there was an entire portion on ethics, as well as the oath they would all take at the end when they passed examinations into the royal house’s veritable army of physicians. How could he not know? But…

“It’s… it’s not my fault!” He said, tears running over his face. “Please, it’s not my fault! If I did not do this, then my wife and children-”

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“So you remained silent and agreed to do this?” The being asked, leaning over him. The hair was still suspended as though in water, but now he could see a demonic leering face of wood and burning white flame beneath.

“P-please, the others-!” The doctor found himself sobbing, barely able to string together a coherent sentence as the being stared down at him. “I’m just a doctor! I don’t have men to command or anything else!”

“Kneel.”

The pressure on him arrested his limbs. He could not even breathe.

“I said kneel.”

“I… I can’t!” The doctor sobbed.

“Do it.”

His fear finally empowered his limbs enough that he could shift so that he was on his knees and hands. He felt a heavy weight on his back and thought his spine might be pulverized to dust.

“You broke an oath, and nearly had blood on your hands. Are you the only one doing this?”

“No, no! I'm just a doctor! I... I don't have any political goals or any such thing, that's the others!” He sobbed, feeling like his soul was already being torn to shreds by hungry demons and vengeful spirits. “Th-the others though…”

“Who are they?”

“P-powerful… powerful people,” the doctor cried. “I come from a common family, I don’t have any way of-”

“What are their names?”

The names spilled out of his mouth like a torrent, from a high ranking general to a minor noble with some distant relation to the royal family. Scholars of great respect and inner court officials who had served with excellence for fifty years. The names flowed outwards, tumbling and crashing onto the ground as his heart and stomach emptied out.

The weight lifted from his back and he looked up at the twisting visage of the deity in front of him. “You’re still broken an oath,” it said without kindness or anger.

“I-I’m sorry I-”

“For ten years you will wander the countryside and heal people. You will bring no more harm to anyone. You will do this all without payment in coin.” It announced with a voice more akin to the dry roar of desert wind, “anything you require for medicine will be given to you by willow trees and the fire.” The words felt like shackles, looping invisibly through his flesh, past his bones, and burrowing ever deeper in. Blood seeped from the doctor's nose.

“Wh-what about my family?” The doctor asked breathlessly. He could not just leave them behind!

“They will go with you,” the god answered flatly.

The doctor felt its looming presence grow again, a terrible pressure that hurt his bones. Yet he knew this was a mercy. A cold one. He was still being allowed to live, he was being given a chance to make up for his transgression. A terrible fate could still be avoided. He slammed his forehead to the ground, “thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” He repeated over and over again, his skull burning with agony as the flesh bruised, then split, blood smearing on the floorboards as he repeatedly smashed his face into it. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!”

The doctor, with his bloodied face, quickly left the manor and ran home to grab his wife and children to flee the city.

By the dawn of the next day, in the capital of the Southern Kingdom, seventy six men were hanging upside down in the royal courtyard. Each man still wore the same clothes he had gone to sleep with, and every single body had the same clean cuts across their tendons. Roots of some sort of tree were balled up in their mouths and extending into their arteries while ash had replaced their blood. They all wore expressions of complete terror on their bloodless faces. Their blood had pooled on the ground beneath where their bodies hung, and piled in the middle of the macabre display were numerous letters and hidden communiques about a plotted mass assassination of foreign ambassadors and the little queen herself.

Once the shock had worn off, the Bureau of Five Eyes had set about rooting out every last member of the conspiracy, annihilating six noble families in their entirety and further extending it to distant relations who had even fled to the other kingdoms in their efforts to ensure the poison of treachery had been completely cleansed. Most came to believe the initial slaughter had been their doing as well.

But a maid in the house of one of the conspirators, a general, claimed otherwise. She said the night of the slaughter an eerily beautiful young man in white had appeared in the hallways, the smell of incense ash following him as he walked and the trees in her master's yard stretching like evil hands into the bedroom.