I have but a few moments to recollect my recent experiences. The dungeon-master already has me wrangled in his hands and I’m being led to the executioner. I don’t have the energy to stand on my own, so I’m basically being dragged across hard stone and rock. I want my life to end. This existence no longer has any meaning to me because I’ve been stripped of all will to survive. During the torture sessions I kept my sense of hope, but now all hope is lost—not because I find it impossible to hope, but because it has already come and gone.

These are the recollections of my life in its final moments.

The day was bitter cold and a rain fell on the earth steadily and incessantly. The clouds hung low and I felt that I could almost touch them with my trembling fingers. I hadn’t eaten for days, and my body ached with an unimaginable pain. My torturers kept me locked in a stagnant room reeking of urine and feces. Rats the size of my fist scurried across the floor and squealed loudly, like sick hungry babies. The only light that reached me poured through a small window for which I barely had enough strength to lift myself up to and look from. It faced out into the common market where my friends and enemies alike used what remaining money they had after a visit from the Earl’s tax collector to buy a small spot of food for their starving families. I often wondered if they were really any better off than I was, stuck in that stinking cell.

The thought then hit me that they would most likely be in my position within days. The village had gone mad with accusations of witchcraft. I myself had to implicate many of my neighbors, people I even hardly knew. This all occurred under the machinations of torture, of course. The Inquisitors would ask me a name, and because of the pain I had endured I was forced to admit that they had participated in ecstatic orgies with me, the Dark Lord, and other witches upon the appearance of every full moon.

The truth was, I had tried my hand at witchcraft and did join in His orgies, especially with the other male witches. Before the courts stripped me of my humanity and dignity, I was a lawyer in the village. There were a number of cases that I felt I was almost certain to lose. Losing those cases would have cost me dearly: both respect and money. As a result, I turned to Satan’s powers, because praying to God certainly wasn’t getting me anywhere. Nothing ever exactly happened when I attempted to summon Him. Instead, I had to obtain an unguent from a woman that many claimed was a witch before the craze ever started. I rubbed the ointment over my entire body and slept. The numerous tales that had circulated about the testimonies of the accused witches in the village matched what would happen to me in the night: I had been ushered away in spirit to one of the Devil’s grand orgies, I kissed His anus, and in return for my soul’s servitude, I was granted success in my legal career.

I came to be arrested because of a stolen chicken. A neighbor, a lowly