(Filed under Velvet Warpath Drawer 8. The judgement. Aftermath Bridge.)
Backstage
The stage was still trembling with applause when Jack slipped behind the curtains. The velvet swallowed him whole, the roar of the Court fading into muffled thunder.
There, in the half-light, the Hate-Legged Scribble crouched. Its limbs twitched, sketching frantic arcs in the dust, half-formed words clawed into the floorboards. No audience remained to admire it. No mirror to multiply it. Only the dark.
Jack stepped forward, ledger tucked beneath his arm, knife glinting with a quiet promise.
“You,” he said. One word. Enough.
The Scribble hissed, a smear of shadow and ink, legs snapping outward like quills dipped in poison.
Jack didn’t flinch.
“You were warned. There is no trial.”
The first strike came sudden—limbs lashing, gouging splinters from the wall. Jack sidestepped, blade catching one leg mid-arc, severing it clean. Black ichor splattered, sizzling like acid where it landed.
The Scribble shrieked, a noise like parchment tearing, like words being ripped from a throat.
Jack advanced. His movements were quiet, deliberate, inevitable. He parried a strike, drove his knife upward, and pinned one writhing limb into the boards. Another. Another. Until the Scribble was splayed, caught, thrashing but already undone.
It spat ink at him—sentences half-born, curses that withered before they reached his ears.
Jack leaned close, voice low as steel on steel.
“You don’t get to write her ending.”
And then, with one final thrust, his blade cut through its center.
The Scribble convulsed, limbs curling inward, folding in on themselves until the black mass collapsed into nothing but a stain—a smear of ink that sank into the floorboards, fading even as it spread.
Silence.
Jack wiped his knife on the cuff of his sleeve, closed his ledger, and left without looking back.
The Scribble was gone.
The applause still echoed when the Queen’s delight slipped. The brightness in her eyes dimmed, not into sorrow but into recognition. The performance had ended. So had hers.
She sat straighter, hands folding in her lap. Across the room, Bunny caught her gaze. No words passed. They didn’t need them.
He reached for a different ledger—not the Grudge Book, but the slimmer volume bound in dark silk: The Little Book of Uninvitations.
With his usual precision, he uncapped his pen and wrote.
A slip, crisp and final:
To: The Hate-Legged Scribble
You are no longer welcome.
Your performance is over.
Your ink stains were never invited, and they will not remain.
He tore it free and tucked it between the pages with a soft snap. Then, almost as an afterthought, he drew out one of the black memorial cards—embossed with a single peony, its petals folded like a sigh. He scrawled across it in Petty Blue:
Here Lies: A Scribble Who Mistook Corruption for Power.
He slid the card into the ledger, closed the cover, and tapped it twice with his fingertip. Done.
The Queen inclined her head, a faint acknowledgment. Not gratitude. Not relief. Just recognition.
Somewhere behind the curtain, the stain of ink was already drying.
Velin said nothing.