The Devil’s Mark
Romance short. In medieval Bohemia, a young man trails after the executioner after the hanging of his father.
11k, rated E, M/M. After the hanging of his father, a young man lingers on the doorstep of the village executioner. Eventually taking pity on him, the executioner invites him inside.
Some age difference, intimacy, oral sex, and masturbation, but the E rating here is more for heavy themes, including social ostracisation, religious trauma, past rape, and past incestuous abuse.
Jan strings up Wójslav on the bailiff’s orders — he’d been caught thieving, Jan is told, not that it matters all that much to him. “Thieving” is a charge that can account for all manner of charges, and if he spent all his time wondering what the men and women he hangs have done, precisely, he’d have little time left for other things.
It’s blood on his hands, either way. Such is the nature of the thing.
When Jan walks down the hill, his hands stained with grave dirt, he finds a boy sitting outside the gate of his house. He’s a scrawny, underfed thing, openly weeping, and Jan sees in the planes of his face a similarity to those of Wójslav’s — his son, probably.
“Away with you,” Jan says harshly. “There’s no place for you here.”
