Chapter 121: The Impossible Question.

Chapter 121: Chapter 121: The Impossible Question.

The voice, ancient and powerful and utterly devoid of interest, echoed from all around them.

"The Adjudicators will see you now."

The words settled like stone into the silence, and the vast, circular chamber seemed to grow colder. The air was thick with the dry, papery scent of a million forgotten documents. A faint, scratching sound, like a thousand invisible quills writing at once, bled from the very walls—a constant, unnerving reminder that everything they did was being recorded.

The team stood frozen in the center of a sea of polished grey stone. Pip, his eyes darting to every shadowless corner, leaned towards Gilda. "Is there a form we can file now," he whispered, "that counts as us being sorry... before we got caught?"

She didn’t even turn. She just let out a low, final grunt.

A faint rustling filled the air, like the turning of a thousand brittle pages. It ended with a sharp —snap, like a heavy book being slammed shut. With that sound, the first Adjudicator materialized in the leftmost chair.

He was a stern, ancient fairy with a beard that looked braided from dusty legal scrolls, and his wings shimmered faintly with the weight of all the rules that came before. This was the Adjudicator of Law.

FaeLina’s wings locked stiff. She zipped close to Gilda’s ear, her voice was like a tiny, frantic whisper.

"That’s Valerius the Inflexible," she whispered, trembling. "I heard he once represented the Bureau at a peace summit between two warring kingdoms, but the peace treaty was delayed for an entire month... only over a misplaced semicolon."

Her warning sent a ripple of silent panic through the group. Pip, looking pale, instinctively patted his pockets as if he might find a comma he wasn’t supposed to have hiding in there. Beside him, Sir Crumplebuns straightened his plush spine, puffed out his stitched chest, and raised his Spoonblade in a salute so slow and serious it could have been carved from stone.

As they watching, the Adjudicator of Law settled into his stone dais.A hush fell over the chamber—the kind that comes after a verdict is spoken, when words have ended and only judgment remains. He lifted his gavel and brought it down with a single, deliberate strike. And a single, heavy thud

Pip swallowed hard. "Do you think he knows about that library book," he whispered to Gilda, "the one I still owe from that port town?"

Gilda just grunted, her hand moving unconsciously to rest on the pommel of her axe, not as a threat, but as if for comfort.

Sir Crumplebuns, meanwhile, took the Adjudicator’s gaze as a personal challenge. He raised his chin a fraction higher, trembling slightly with the effort, as though he were personally saluting the very concept of Law itself.

The Adjudicator of Law finally fully settled into his dais, and a heavy silence fell as the team processed his sheer, immovable presence. Before they could even recover, that silence was shattered by a new sound.

It began as a faint thump and built into a quick, steady rhythm—thump-thump-thump—the sound of a thousand forms being stamped all at once. As the sound reached its peak, the rightmost chair filled.

A figure of perfect, unsettling neatness appeared, her grey robes creased so neatly they seemed to challenge the very idea of a wrinkle. She held a shimmering clipboard that flickered with endless shifting forms.

"That one..." FaeLina whispered, her voice cracking with a new kind of fear, "is Scribonia the Meticulous. For her, there is a single, correct order for everything in the universe, and she believes it is her personal duty to enforce it."

As if to prove FaeLina’s words, Scribonia noticed a tiny speck of dust on her clipboard—a single point of chaos in her perfect world. She flicked it away with a sharp movement of her finger, then frowned as if the speck had broken a serious Bureau rule. The display seemed to inspire Sir Crumplebuns; he adjusted his salute, making it even stiffer and straighter.

Her words hung in the air, thick and heavy with implications. Pip swallowed hard, suddenly feeling as though his boots were on the wrong feet and his shirt was buttoned incorrectly. Zazu just closed his eyes, a flicker of pain on his face, as if the very thought of a universe with only one correct order was an academic insult.

The stamping faded, leaving a different kind of silence in its place. It was a deeper, heavier quiet, the kind of heavy quiet that comes right before bad news.

And then, the central chair filled. No sound, no flash. The final Adjudicator simply appeared, the way a sad memory arrives mid-lunch. She looked like a kind, elderly fairy, her wings was like faded rose petals, her eyes deep wells of tired understanding.

FaeLina’s breath hitched. "Lyra the Compassionate," she whispered, the name half prayer, half curse. "She doesn’t punish. She just... understands. And that’s so much worse."

Hearing this even Gilda shifted uneasily; She could fight an enemy. But a judge who forgave her in advance? That was much more terrifying. Meanwhile, Sir Crumplebuns took his salute to its final form: knees bent in a dramatic knight’s bow, Spoonblade raised high above his head, button eyes squeezed shut in reverent strain. His plush arm trembled violently, as if he were holding up the entire concept of Respect itself.

The Adjudicator of Heart just sighed. It wasn’t loud like Valerius’s gavel or sharp like Scribonia’s stamps. It was soft, weary, and infinitely worse. It was the sound of disappointment.

Zazu shivered. "Compassion as judgment," he whispered. "How... terribly dangerous."

His fearful words faded into silence, and the chamber seemed to tighten around them. It was the Adjudicator of Law, Valerius, who spoke first. His voice was the dry rustle of a forgotten treaty as he began to list their crimes.

"The document in question, Form 115-C, was presented without the necessary accompanying implements, a procedural failing on the part of the Bureau. An unscheduled resource—the ink—was provided by an unsanctioned, third-party magical entity. This resource was subsequently applied in a non-standard manner, without the filing of Form Q-12. This constitutes an unauthorized procedural bypass."

He paused, his cold eyes pinning them in place.

"Therefore," he concluded, his voice flat and final, "which of the three thousand, four hundred and seventy-two bylaws governing unscheduled petitions did you intended to violate?"

The silence that followed was worse than the question. Pip’s mouth opened, then closed again, like a goldfish that was out of water. Gilda’s grip on her axe tightened until her knuckles turned bone white. Zazu’s lips moved in silent panic, his brain rifling through centuries of precedent and finding nothing. This trap was too perfect.

FaeLina’s wings buzzed once, sharp and sudden. Her terror went quiet, replaced by a single, clear thought: ’They are not judging our crime. They are judging our composure’.

She zipped into the center of the group, her voice have a low, urgent hiss. "Don’t answer."

Gilda frowned. "What do you mean, don’t answer? He asked a question to us."

"But which one do we pick?" Pip hissed, eyes wide. "Is there a bylaw with a smaller fine? Maybe one that only costs a goat instead of three? Do they take partial goats? Like... half a goat? A rental goat? What if we just lease the goat?! Do they have goat paperwork?!"

"This isn’t about goats!" FaeLina snapped, wings buzzing furiously. "Nothing is about goats!"

"They are not testing our knowledge," Zazu murmured, his face grim. "They are testing our character. Any answer is an admission of guilt."

FaeLina’s wings gave a sharp buzz. Zazu was right. "Exactly," she hissed, her voice low and urgent. "So we don’t answer their question. We answer a different one." She looked around at the team’s confused faces, her managerial brain kicking into overdrive. "Gilda, you will talk about the proper way to sharpen an axe. Pip, you will discuss the structural integrity of their daises. Zazu, the calming properties of tea. Sir Crumplebuns, the moral importance of well-fluffed pillows. We give them so much useless, boring, but technically accurate information that they decide we are a waste of time. We stall."

Her frantic whisper was cut short. The Adjudicator of Procedure looked up from her clipboard, her gaze cold and sharp.

"The Bureau is waiting for your testimony," she said, her voice flat and impersonal. "We will begin with the warrior."

All eyes—the team’s, the Adjudicators’, and FaeLina’s—snapped to Gilda. She had just been handed the first turn in a game she didn’t understand, armed with a strategy that was both a joke and her only hope.

She took a slow breath. She had faced sieges, monsters, even curses. But this? Talking? This was worse.

Gilda squared her shoulders.

’Right’, she thought. ’Time to talk about axes’.

_________

Author’s Note

And the Hearing begins! I loved writing the arrival of the three Adjudicators—each embodying a different flavor of bureaucratic doom. We have Valerius the Inflexible, who treats law like scripture; Scribonia the Meticulous, who would happily reformat the alphabet if given the chance; and Lyra the Compassionate, whose pity is somehow the most terrifying judgment of all.

But the best part is FaeLina’s desperate, managerial epiphany: don’t answer the question—answer something else. It’s such a petty, procedural kind of rebellion, and now Gilda, of all people, has to be the one to pull it off. A warrior forced to wield words instead of steel.

Next Chapter: Will Gilda’s "axe testimony" save them—or just sharpen the Adjudicators’ interest?

Thanks for reading!