One hundred Cassian Crows appeared in the north.A spearman killed one and gained his face. A cook poisoned another. A chaplain burned one as a heretic. A dead soldier's mother stabbed one's eyes.Different methods, same reward: Cassian's face, voice, and name.One hundred makeshift scaffolds rose between camps, each holding a Cassian and a line of people waiting to become the next."Let them kill each other," Seraphina proposed in the field tent. "The Empire pays only one bounty for one original face.""Killing is transmission," Adel objected. "Quarantine every scaffold.""All hundred? Rule chooses the cheaper path."Ines pressed a knife to the map."Neither. No one else executes Cassian.""Ownership?""Execution right. Property may change. A target must not."No one awaited Cassian's view.He selected the central scaffold."We go here.""Whose order?" Seraphina asked."It is where all hundred can see."
* * *
One hundred headless corpses hung at the central camp. Their families argued over names lost when the Cassian identity departed.Ria restored them by scars and shoes."First victim: Emil Losk, Fourth Northern Spearmen, missing left thumb. Second: Bran Seto, kitchens, burn behind right ear."True names weakened the command.At the central scaffold stood a nameless man with Cassian's face and a crown of one hundred mouths."I am the first.""Whom did you kill?""Cassian Crow.""Your name before?"Silence. The command had eaten it.He raised a hand; ninety-nine false Cassians looked up."Kill him. Kill me and become you."Soldiers charged.Seraphina declared one imperial bounty. The false Cassians began murdering one another.Their number fell, but faces and voices stacked on survivors.Adel pushed in eleven patients and isolated five scaffolds with treatment cloth.Succession stopped inside; outside, ninety-five accelerated.Both plans worked. Neither sufficed.One survivor gained four faces and four swords."I." "Am." "The true." "Cassian Crow.""Expected?" Cassian asked."The loss was. Failure is named afterward," Seraphina said, already calculating how the state might use a stronger false one.Inside Adel's quarantine, trapped commands flowed back into patients.She opened one side toward an empty treatment bed, then burned the body formed in its sheets. Patients lived; a clinic burned.Quarantine was not free.The four-faced false one advanced with swords for Cassian, Seraphina, Adel, and itself.Ines cut one hilt, erased one charge, broke one witness seal, and nailed the last inside its sheath.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author."Hands can kill," it snarled."Murder, yes. Not execution."She threw it toward Cassian without granting execution.Each strategy stopped one part, not another's cost.A soldier stabbed Cassian and gained his face."I killed him!""Not yet."Cassian pulled the blade deeper, using the soldier as a vessel for false reward.Ria's ledger publicly recorded the crime.The condemned crown activated again: rope, fire, poison, water, horses, earth, silence, and blades.Cassian let all hundred scaffolds see his neck.He climbed the hanging rope to the camp mast and opened his seam.Every false gaze fixed on him."Cut now and it ends," he told Ines.She stood within one stroke."No. Knowing four conditions did not close five escape paths. You offered this death. It is not the execution I chose."She sheathed her sword—not mercy, but refusal of an incomplete execution.
* * *
With every gaze on Cassian, the central speaker's neck emptied.Cutting it could kill all hundred, but make one hundred killers into new Cassians.Cassian did not cut.Ria continued naming victims."Twelfth: Yoren Marsh."Cassian addressed the camp."My name is not a reward."The reward's original owner publicly refused it.Ines pointed."That body is the issuing center."Three conditions overlapped: center exposed, reward refused, victim names and costs public.The false command retreated for the first time.Cracks crossed one hundred faces.Cassian threw the soldier's sword, not through the central man's neck but through the name nailed to the scaffold.The first and last letters of `Cassian` split.The borrowed face peeled away, revealing no face beneath. His original name was already eaten.Ria recorded: `Empty Condemned Man.`Some returned to original faces; some kept Cassian's eyes; some never remembered themselves.Not victory, only weakened infection.Seraphina made the three conditions law. Adel posted them at clinics. Ria placed the case beside victim names so no one could call it Cassian's miracle.But soldiers remembered the reward. Children would soon knock friends down and shout: I am the true Cassian.The command weakened. The ritual remained in society.
* * *
Ria opened the hundredth scaffold record.The target field read: `Derrick Morn.`Ines seized the ledger.An appraisal mirror showed Derrick pinned to a block in an abandoned northern granary of the same house whose winter grain Cassian burned.A small hand pressed his neck.An apron worn backward. Cassian's black feather tied at the throat.The young heir of the Red Table looked through the mirror at Cassian, a matching seam on the child's neck."This time," the child pressed Derrick deeper, "you open the door."