Centuries changed like seasons for him, each subsequent lifetime bursting open with a dazzling newness that tarnished as soon as he realized how dreadfully similar it would be to the last. Fashions evolved, but mortals always stayed the same—their small jealousies, their petty greed, their laughable and unearned sense of pride. A hundred years or more might elapse while the Corrupter slept, and yet every time he opened his eyes, he found himself looking out at a generation of humans that would have reliably learned nothing from their own endless history of warring and bloodshed.

The cart shook, and the deliberately humble cap they’d given the Corrupter itched against his shorn scalp. A filthy mob shouted from the roadside, their rage so potent he could smell brimstone on the air. Secretly, it delighted him. The fury, the elemental rawness of their bloodlust … it called to him like a siren’s song, stirring the power that trembled inside this moribund shell of meat and bone. To release it would be an indescribable pleasure—the act he’d died countless times waiting to perform. But he couldn’t.

This body was strong, but not quite strong enough.

An apple sailed at the cart from somewhere in the crowd, and the Corrupter leaned out of its path, letting it hit the boards near his feet. For all this rage and clamoring arrogance, the only name history would remember from this day would be that of the woman these red-faced rustics were determined to destroy.

Just because he could, he twisted around and locked eyes with the youth responsible for throwing the piece of fruit—a factory worker with pitted skin. The boy’s thoughts rang clear as a bell in the Corrupter’s mind as their gazes met, a din of hatred.

He had plenty to be angry about, the Corrupter acknowledged, feeling his way through the boy’s short and miserable history before their tenuous connection evaporated. The details were a little hazy, but certain facts were quite clear: backbreaking labor, starvation, loss. The young revolutionary blamed the woman in the cart because of what she represented, and because he had no one else to blame. He wanted her to die.

The cart turned again, and then once more, the crowd growing louder and thicker; then they entered a vast public square packed with people. Soldiers with bayoneted rifles, Parisians climbing on statues to get a better view, parents hoisting their children up as if attending a carnival. Their zeal, their desire for carnage, made the Corrupter hum deep in his borrowed throat as the horses pulled him closer to the scaffold and the guillotine.