The High Magistrate's voice did not crack, but it seemed to thin under the weight of the words he was forced to deliver. The finality of the law was a heavy thing, a blunt instrument designed to crush the spirit long before it touched the flesh.
"The accused," he began, the vellum crinkling in his grip like dry bone, "is hereby stripped of all titles, honors, and legal identity. Her name shall be excised from the Imperial Record, effective immediately. She shall be bound in permanent arcane suppression, her core leashed by the Crown's own will. She is to be imprisoned in the Void Tower for the remainder of her natural life, held in a cell of absolute silence, without right of speech, correspondence, or appeal."
The sentence was not an execution; it was an erasure.
Oblivion.
Death would have been a mercy, a final period at the end of a bloody sentence.
