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Alex did not know what drove him to the podium. It was not dignity. Not acceptance, it was not even obedience out of some vain hope for mercy: there was nothing in the lamb’s screaming, kicking, infantile body that could have walked him so docile and easy, as though he were on a leash, and so Alex did not know what will it was that drove him to the podium.
There was a speaking. Was there? The sound of his doomed heart against his ribcage and throat and skull was too loud to discern words, so it could just as easily have been buzzing that came from the impending vulture on the monitor. It didn’t matter either way.
The simple fact ensnared him that he was going to die.
He was grateful, when the black iron slammed around him, that it was loud enough to hide his scream from the others. Less grateful when he found himself alive and ejected on the other side of a glass panel linking to the hall. Alex staggered to his feet. There were only six faces left now, to watch him in horror from the other side.
He didn’t watch back.
He swallowed a yelp when the sacrificial ground before him began to sink, five, ten meters deep in an instant, abandoning him suddenly on a sheer ledge kicking and flailing as he struggled for precarious balance. He breathed desperately to still himself.
There was a single moment of pause.
...This was it? Really? What, was he meant to fall to his death?
That didn’t sound like her. The fall was far, yes, but he doubted it would even kill him.
One fat drop of clear fluid landed dead in the center of the spontaneous quarry. Instinctively, he looked up—precisely as the ceiling split open to jet a torrent of icy water into the pit with a resounding shatter, the typhoon arcing into a tremendous wave: Alex yelped, bracing fruitlessly. It engulfed him completely.
Cold was not the word. For the glacial, howling, bright-sharp pain that sank into his submerged flesh in a second as though his clothes were less than nothing, cold was most certainly not the word—he realized this could not have been water, for it was far below freezing and when he moved his hands to his arms in pain the motion was late as though it clung to his muscles.
Among the many words being said above him now he heard brine through his fiercely juddering mandible. It meant nothing. Negative twenty degrees definitely helped clarify, though.
He fumbled for better footing on his wetted ledge against the now-numbing of his extremities, and the unbidden thought came that someone smaller wouldn’t have struggled there at all. He wanted to glare up at the monitor humiliating him but could not muster the defiance. Someone braver wouldn’t have hesitated.
He became dimly aware of a tiny mechanical pressure at his back.
And Alex was shoved in.
Screaming was a mistake. Ice, raw ice flooded his throat, arcing, branching, crystallizing against his drowned esophagus; he thrashed desperately through the heaviness in his limbs from the thick and shredding water smothering him and begged with it for oxygen, for a sinking, waterlogged half-minute he worked at his own failing body and the crystal weight around his neck for surface until his lungs endly burst with open air.
He breathed for a merciful five seconds before he realized his makeup must’ve washed off. Hands flying to his face on reflex he nearly whimpered at the shame of it, the failure of letting himself be seen, turning from the aquarium glass through which everyone watched him still he curled into himself as far as he could. The chill was so stark against him, inside his very chest now that he thought his lips must already have turned blue, his limbs reduced to such unfeeling pain that he thought it was a fleeting miracle he was keeping himself afloat. He could flail, part of him wanted to thrash and move and fight but how long, for what? There were more emerald words above him now but he had not the energy nor courage to defrost them. He knew she would be proposing the dilemma he already knew he faced: whether to drown swimming, or surrendered.
Someone more honorable would have chosen to go. Someone more dignified would’ve let the icy water end them quick, would’ve taken their death in stride, someone worth honoring would have kept their mouth shut and their eyes fixed and their jaw set against certainty, someone worthwhile would’ve—Alex could’ve wept with relief as a tiny gray platform emerged from the whipping water, unthinking he fought against its fanged and jet-blue surface until he could toss an arm onto dryness and heave himself up.
He coughed, spitting saltwater—he would’ve flushed at the indignity had his face not frozen with cold. Land was almost worse: he curled in on himself, quietly cursing the frigid air and wind—how was there wind?—as it struck and bit and flayed him in its ferocity. Would it be hypothermia, then? He wondered briefly how long that would even take. Would his spectators have the patience to watch him die?
He felt the smallest creeping warmth at his back. Alex whipped around to it the moment he became sure it wasn’t imagined: the mirage of a blissful fire had sprouted impossibly a little ways from his meager platform. Clumsily with senseless, frostbit limbs he rushed to it, warmth-starved he could care no longer for grace or image and he thought he might throw himself into the golden warmth before he rammed into icy glass and kicked back with a skull reverberating in pain.
Alex clutched his head, wincing a moment, and then wild with desperate refusal he ran his hands down the sheened surface that split the fire away from him; he bent in fumbling agitation for a gap in the barrier and found one, at the bottom, small, too small—
Too small. The realization came with all the plummeting reality of everything around him. He was unquestionably to die here, of course there wasn’t...
He pressed against the crystalline gap. There was hardly room for his legs. Someone smaller, someone more adaptable might indeed’ve passed, but he... not he.
Never for him the grace of diminuty, of course—he'd known that for such a long time, he should’ve known better than to hope. Never for him to be nimble, adaptive, intimate; like a soldier he was, he would have wept from the grief and the self-pity so close to a fire, if not at least for the tears to warm his face—but even here, unshakably, unflinchingly like a soldier he was. He did not weep.
Alex could think of very little to do besides lay down and die.
The world was vague. Occasionally his mind suggested consciousness, and he would shudder and writhe for a while as frigid death teased about him, but for the most part he thought and felt and was not at all.
Until he jolted awake with the certainty he was burning. He could not feel anything but his beating chest and head, but he could taste everywhere the impossible fire that was subsuming him, taking him, covering his senses, could sense it coiling and turning in the deep insulatory layers upon layers of his clothing—some part of him may have known a long time ago never to yield to sensation like this but scrambling to his feet he was less than him now, like an animal he ripped the branding silver around his hands off with his teeth, like an animal, he wailed with the need to shed his smothering jacket but his hands were fumbling and did not recognize the careful-preened buttons that trapped him inside—he would die, he knew he would die of the temperature, he half-expected to smell cooking meat and more than anything he wished the frost around his digits would yield for a moment to let him pry his jacket open. Somewhere above him there was a harpy, laughing as he worked to rid himself of the fire, as he felt it strip him of his sense, laughing and laughing her ice-green voice paraded around some vicious triumph he could not make out.
Finally wrestling his tailcoat from his body he flung it to the ground with a frosted sense of victory. There was a quaking impact a little ways from his platform and he whipped around in shock.
Even in his bone-chilled stupor he could recognize a guillotine.
He nearly choked with the need to think through his crystallizing brain. What was happening?! He was meant to overheat to death, wasn't he? What was the point of—Alex yelped with the sudden tightness of metallic claws against his limbs, brutely dragging him across the pool to the heavy blade. He could not muster the strength even to kick against them anymore, and they left him in a crumpled heap at the foot of the machine. Briefly, he thought he heard his one of his mothers' voices say dignity.
Dignity indeed. He felt a wave of futile warmth in the air now, but it was impossible for it to fight through the ice around his body anymore, impossible for him to resist when another metal clasp settled around his wrist. His mind conjured the sickening image of a kid at a claw machine. The iron limb rested his arm against the pillory and only then did it occur to him how unusually small the guillotine was. He doubted his head would even fit through the gap in the wood.
So confused was he that when the blade released above his cubit he barely had time for fear. In a second his arm was little more than cloven flesh; claret gushed, claret wept from the wound and wrenching it back he wailed at the pitiless sky until he thought his throat would shake apart, but the warmth of his gore on him was a relief—even now he fretted briefly over how it stained his clothing, over letting his undershirt be torn. Dignity, he recalled, and grace.
He could hardly believe that would be his last thought.
Above him rang his reaper's voice and for the first time he could discern her words.
"Now, we do have to hurry! I can't have you miss too much of the show..."
The guillotine blade, now shiny with his blood, rose again. Another mechanical limb pulled his right arm now to the clamping wood.
Alex let out a sob before it had even dropped. What was there to do? He was desecrated, his face and hands and shirt had been bared and he couldn't keep himself bleeding or shuddering, couldn't bring himself to move any more than to arch in pain and the tears were hot relief on his face. Torturous pain wracked him like a thunderclap and there was nothing yet to do with the remains of his arms but—
"Now, you've all been so patient, and it would be a shame to waste all this meat after we spent so long freezing it up,"
—lightning shock ripped through his chest and he looked up in disbelief—
"So I'm treating you all to an English classic," called she above, her voice like a death toll. A jagged machine he could barely discern ruptured from the pool.
"Pork pie!"
More metal talons. He barely knew what to think. In a revolting display they pulled the faintly dripping limbs to the oven as it seethed; it stripped them, and even through his hypothermia and pain he had to bite back a retch at the sound as they were ground, bone and all, into a cruel mockery of edible meat, as the machine pulled and seared and injected its abominable product from his flesh.
And indeed—he had to hold back a hysterical laugh from the absurdity, even now—after an agonal ten minutes, out came six steaming pies.
Six.
He didn't know whether to be more disquieted by the fact they were going to his spectators or the fact that there were only that many of them left.
Since I'm now good as dead. He chanced one look at the group that had condemned him: God, how he'd failed them. How he'd abandoned and defected and faltered, how he'd let himself be ruined like this, how he'd let them see and taste it all—half-heartedly (for the other half had stopped) he hoped his wounds would congeal so he could at least die slowly for them, at least die a frigid death like how all of this had started: if he couldn't muster dignity, if he couldn't satisfy the demands of his name he hoped with what remains were still in his chest that he would die like the common man, if he couldn't bring himself to surpass him.
He choked. Thinking was harder than ice alone had ever made it, he couldn't quite tell what he was seeing (he thought he was, in fact, seeing), couldn't quite... there was a pain in his spine that reminisced of falling. The frigid room tilted; the suggestions of objects around him lolled into long, patient smears of color. Each breath came like a petty theft — too shallow to buy him much, too noisy to be dignified. The noise of the world narrowed to a buzzing behind his ears and a single bright thing at the edge of his sight, pale as bone.
He thought of failing them, of all the ways he'd measured himself and come up too tall—and then, with a small, surprised relief, he thought of nothing at all. There was no thunderous reckoning, no final speech; only the slow, almost polite unthreading of sensation. The end itself was a rumor, felt common, ordinary as a shut door. He let his lips fall apart and listened, distantly, to his own breath thin into silence, and then the world folded inward like paper, and closed.
From one of the six came a hesitant chewing.