Accept a Regency and give up the Phoenix Company

You look out over the rows of bodies dangling from nooses, each man and woman naked but for a black sack covering each head and a binding round the wrists.

Here is the Phoenix Company of the King’s Own, come to its end. Men you’ve laughed and trained with. Women you’ve flirted with, worked alongside, whose faces you’ve seen transformed with pleasure. All sacrificed to the excuse of tradition, of order, of propriety. Only the pregnant women were spared. Merrimay’s careful guarding of her virginity had cost her her life.

It makes you sick.

Even now, here and there, a man or woman trembles with the fading energy of life. Spatters of piss, shit, and blood from nosebleeds spot the dusty ground. And the old legend, you discovered, was true. More than one man had a final cockstand and even spent his seed while writhing in the noose’s fatal embrace.

With so many victims, the hanging had taken all day, and even so, had been hurried for lack of gibbets and knowledgeable hangmen. The first part of the Company have already been taken down and were piled in carts, ready to be taken away.

Flora, heavily pregnant, sobs quietly at your side. You swear silently that you’ll have **** on the authors of this day, for the King’s Own, for Flora, and for yourself.

The Regency Council means to marry you off soon. You sigh. Nothing to it, but to do it, you suppose.

And still you reign.