The iron did not just hold him; it owned him.
Raven hung from the ceiling of a salt-crusted cell that tasted of ancient tides and rotted marrow. His wrists were no longer skin and bone; they were a mess of purpled pulp and exposed white radius, the metal cuffs grinding into the marrow every time he gasped. His body was a map of every atrocity he had ever committed, etched in black ink and red ruin. Tattoos of weeping eyes and jagged crows danced under the flow of his own blood—a thick, sluggish crimson that didn't just drip; it pattered against the stone like a heavy rain.
He was dying, and he knew the texture of it. It felt like cold lead settling in his gut. Yet, through the mask of gore that was his face, Raven was laughing. It was a wet, bubbling sound, the noise of a man who had looked into the Maw of the End and found it hilarious.
Then, the world broke.
The shadows in the corner of the room didn't move; they were erased. A violent, vertical laceration of light tore through the stone ceiling, a white-hot radiance that didn't bring warmth, but a crushing, atmospheric pressure. The Lord of Light descended, not as a man, but as a pillar of blinding, agonizing perfection. The air turned to ozone. The salt on the floor began to hum.
The Lord extended a hand that looked like forged glass, the light from his palm scouring the filth from Raven's skin, burning the very ink out of his pores.
"Raven," the voice was a landslide of glass. "Your malice has choked the stars. You have turned the earth into a whetstone for your blade. For your evil, there is no silence. There is no void. Your punishment shall be the Weight of the Other. Your soul will be cast into the vessels of the weak, the broken, and the dying. You will suffer their ends until your sins are scoured clean by the very deaths you once dealt."
Raven's eyes, milky with cataracts and blood, narrowed. He didn't look for mercy. He looked for a weakness in the light.
"I've... died a thousand times... in my head," Raven rasped, the words tearing his throat. "You think... a change of clothes... will stop me?"
The Lord's hand closed. The room vanished. The chains snapped with a sound like a thunderclap, and Raven's soul was ripped from his ribcage with the violence of a hook through a fish's lip. He was cast into the "Between"—a screaming vacuum of grey static.
And through it all, as he was flayed of his flesh and reduced to a spark of pure, unadulterated hate, Raven's laughter echoed. It was the last thing the Lord heard: a jagged, defiant cackle that promised one thing—he wasn't going to be redeemed. He was going to be a plague.
The reincarnation was not a grace. It was a collision.
Raven woke up in the body of a starving beggar in a city of mud and iron. He felt the man's hunger like a dull saw blade against his spine. He felt the lice crawling in the hair he didn't recognize. He stood up, his new limbs trembling, and looked at his hands. They were thin. Weak.
He found a piece of rusted hoop-iron in the gutter. He spent three days sharpening it against a tombstone. On the fourth day, he killed the man who had stolen the beggar's boots. He didn't do it for the boots. He did it because the muscle memory of his soul demanded the sensation of a blade meeting resistance.
As the life left the victim's eyes, the beggar's body collapsed. Raven's soul was torn out again, the "punishment" triggering because he had shed blood.
He woke up in the body of a merchant's daughter. He woke up in the body of a blind monk. He woke up in the body of a king's favorite hound. Each time, he brought the darkness with him. He didn't wash his sins; he stained the souls he inhabited.
In the high mountains of the North, he was a woodcutter. He lived for six months in silence until the urge became a physical fever. He took his axe to the village elder, not out of rage, but out of a cold, judicial necessity. He was the Executioner. He was the balance.
"You think you can hide behind your gray hair?" he whispered with the woodcutter's tongue, his eyes suddenly flashing with a cold, ancient light that didn't belong to that face. "I see the rot in you. I am the rot."
He buried the axe in the wood of the floor, through the elder's chest.
Crack.
The soul was yanked again.
For five hundred years, the world bled in strange, localized bursts. A massacre in a locked room. A judge found hanged by his own robes. A general who turned his sword on his own reflection. People spoke of "The Ghost Killer"—a presence that seemed to leap from body to body, leaving nothing but carnage and a faint scent of ozone in its wake.
But then, the activity stopped.
The Lord's plan backfired. Raven didn't become a saint; he became a master of the system. He learned to reside in the "Between." He learned to hold his breath in the dark places of the spirit world, refusing to take a body. He slipped into the cracks of the universe, hiding from the Lord's light.
One thousand years passed.
The name "Raven" was forgotten. The title "The Executioner" became a nursery rhyme, a cautionary tale told to children who played too close to the shadows. The world moved on. Stone towers became steel skyscrapers. The smell of woodsmoke was replaced by the acrid burn of diesel and the hum of fiber optics.
The Lord of Light watched the world from his high, cold throne, searching for the spark of Raven's soul. But there was nothing. No blood-soaked laughter. No jagged massacres. It was as if the Executioner had finally been extinguished by the weight of time.
He was wrong.
Deep in the subterranean gut of a nameless metropolis, where the city's waste flows through concrete arteries, something stirred.
It wasn't a man. Not yet.
It was a concentration of shadow so dense it felt like a physical weight. For a thousand years, Raven had been gathering the "dirt" of the world. He had been feeding on the ambient cruelty of a billion human thoughts. He didn't need the Lord to give him a body anymore. He was building his own out of the dark.
A hand emerged from the sludge of a drainage pipe. It was pale, the color of a drowned moon. On the wrist, a faint, black line began to pulse—the ghost of a tattoo, a crow with tattered wings, reasserting itself on a body made of malice and memory.
He pulled himself out of the filth, his movements slow, deliberate, and heavy with the gravity of ten centuries of waiting. He stood up in the dark, the water dripping from his chin with a slow, rhythmic thud-thud-thud.
He reached out and touched the concrete wall. The stone cracked under his fingers.
He wasn't the beggar anymore. He wasn't the woodcutter. He was the accumulation of every death he had witnessed and every sin he had supposedly "washed away." He was the Executioner, and his debt was paid in full. Now, he was the collector.
He looked up toward the surface, toward the light of the stars that the Lord claimed as his own. Raven's mouth opened. He hadn't used his own lungs in a millennium. The air felt like needles.
He began to laugh.
It started as a dry, rasping rattle in his chest, a sound of grinding gears and shifting tectonic plates. Then it grew. It became a low, melodic vibration that made the rats in the sewers stop in their tracks. It was a laugh that had been fermented in the dark, distilled into something so cold it could freeze the heart of a god.
He began to walk. Every step left a footprint of black, oily residue that burned into the concrete. He didn't have a blade. He didn't need one. He was the blade.
The Executioner had returned. And this time, he wasn't there to judge the guilty. He was there to execute the world.