Send me ‘I want the K’ and I’ll generate a number…
"We both knew this was inevitable."
Not the exact circumstances necessarily, but their general idea. Betrayal, violence, agonizing death, the like. Perhaps she’d expected their roles in the process to be reversed, but such was the price to pay for arrogance.
God, but it was easy to fall into the role of executioner when all you chose to portray was victim. Luring the creature being entity had been accomplished with a simple smile and simpler request, hardly even insidious and deceptive enough to call it luring. The only shame of it was that he rather liked her.
It might bat those eyes and toss its hair, but it was no more a she than he was a he. Convenience, that was all it came down to, and it was due to a lack of it that he could no longer keep her around. She was too possessive, too arbitrary, too conspicuous to keep in his company. Or alive at all. She had served her purpose and contributed to his stores of experience and knowledge.
She was an unknown, which rendered her both fascinating and hugely dangerous, and to allow her continued existence would render him almost painfully foolish. He was uncertain of how exactly to snuff out that existence, but found himself confident in the methods he chose to employ.
Wards to bind and to banish and to crush, words of power in languages older than him that alternately swept along in flowing rivers or carved themselves out in blocks and stone. They strung along a great ring, written in the clearest holy, eternal oil of a ner tamid. The breadth of the chosen symbols was extensive and wide and violent enough to ensure she would not step out of the ring they formed ever again.
He met her gaze one last time, and the warmth in his smile gave his eyes a wide berth. With all the precision and ceremony that had gone into drawing up the wards and incantations and brushing them in delicate drops of oil, it seemed less than fitting to drop a single frayed paper match in completion of the execution. But the flames flared up instant and golden and far to bright to fix his eyes upon.
They wouldn’t go out for a long time yet.