Title: the sword went up, the bloody sword, and pointed to the sky
Fandom: Merlin
Rating: Teen & Up
Length: 148
Content note: canon typical violence and background character death
Summary: She can't look, can't bare to look.

She can’t look, cannot make herself look as the sword – at least it’s not an axe, at least he gives the poor soul he’s condemned the decency of a clean death – is drawn and presented – Uther always enjoys his pageantry, even here, especially here – and raised towards the sun. It gleams, polished to a brilliant, incandescent sheen, bright as the path of lightning across a storm grey sky. Far slower, though. Slower by far. Camelot's executioner is no battle-tested knight. No hunter. His foes are bound when they face him.

And yet she must watch. If she turns away from this, what else would she turn away from? Who else would she let be - be slaughtered, while she dreams of horrors beyond the ken of the latest hedge-witch dragged to face Uther's edict for healing a scrape or delivering a sickly babe? She must.

The blade falls.