Forty-One: Of the Knight’s Death, and of the Judgment

Thomas collapses in the Avignon courtyard, aware his arm is gone and his body failing. Sensation ebbs as he voids and loses breath; his perception detaches, seeing his bloody, aging body from above. A hostile voice claims him, and the battlefield dissolves.

Thomas awakens in a small, doorless chamber, reduced to a child—the image of his son. A deformed, suffering clerk-creature hobbles around a table, consulting books and parchments. It laments the devils’ breach of order in seizing souls after Avignon and coolly frames Thomas’s plight as one of unjust damnation and sharpened pain.

The clerk approaches, smells of rot, and formally sentences him: “Thomas de Givras, I damn thee.” Begging and screams echo nearby as a bell tolls. Mouths open across the clerk’s body; it seizes the child-Thomas and eats him, inaugurating a cycle of judgment-through-devouring.

Time blurs into innumerable repetitions. Thomas tries pleading, debating, hiding, and fleeing, yet each iteration ends with the same pronouncement and consumption. Gradually, despair dulls his resistance; he shivers, cries, and finally submits without protest.

When Thomas ceases to scream, the process shortens to its stark essentials—name, sentence, and swallowing. His resignation marks a threshold: the tormentors deem him ready for something worse, advancing him deeper into Hell’s design.