There was a more pressing judgment at hand.

Still, Eldon found himself unable to ignore the question of why the hangman’s noose had not done its job…

In a burning fit of curiosity, he relinquished his single-handed grip around the man’s throat for an ever so brief moment and quickly felt for the nylon rope.

It wasn’t there!

In that fateful second, the warlock coughed and gasped, quickly sucking in the air he had previously been denied.

Through the darkness and fog, Eldon could just make out the rope stretched taut from the railing above, thinly scribing a tight line in the night to finally disappear behind the man’s outstretched arm. He had thought perhaps the rope had merely twisted beneath the man’s shoulder during the struggle, but now he knew this was not the case. The noose was cinched tight about the warlock’s arm instead of his neck where it should have been. A triple twist of the rope serpentined around the man’s appendage and trailed through his tightly clenched fist.

The warlock had managed to slip out of the noose and save himself. But he still couldn’t avoid his final judgment. Eldon would see to that.

“It won’t be long now,” he thought, as he slipped his pale hand back around the man’s throat and compressed it tight with a renewed urgency. Just a few more moments and the sentence will have been carried out.

The warlock would finally be dead.

He was sure he could feel his victim’s windpipe starting to give way against the pressure of his long fingers. As his bony digits spasmed slightly from the force he was trying to exert, he was forced to stretch them quickly, fighting to keep his grip secure.

Warlock.

Witch.

Sinner.

Heretic.

Different words but all the same. This one-the warlock Rowan Gant-was himself evil incarnate. A minion of Satan set forth on this earth to do the bidding of the Dark Lord. Surreptitiously spreading the vileness of sin and debauchery among the lambs of Almighty God under the false guise of goodness and light.