In 1574, in the wake of the notorious rape and strangulation of a young girl, the Grand Counsel of the remote township of Trooft Hoeck in Nova Zembla passed an edict stating in their obscure tongue that, Wruqar dare barosarae, sodak o reka vis su daosr. That is, “Whosoever knowingly takes the life of another shall himself be summarily put to death”—a seemingly straightforward amendment to the former order of detrainment and exile, except that the members of the Counsel added the two careless and catastrophic words: vesruis axcavseum; that is, “without exception.” The blunder did not become apparent until the following winter of 1575, when one Walter Deboubec was arraigned for his involvement in a fatal barroom brawl. The courts, being obliged under the new law to put the murderer to death, commissioned an official executioner to perform the deed. Deboubec was decapitated on the morning of February 3rd, 1576, and his executioner (known to history only by his given name Destrain) was arrested for Deboubec’s execution on the morning of February 4th. Sadly, there is no surviving transcript of the Grand Counsel legal debate on the charges against Destrain, which lasted throughout the night of February 4th and continued until late on February 5th. We know only that the law was declared valid and upheld and that Destrain was put to death by one Angmar on February 7th. With the Destrain affair serving as a legal precedent, all the subsequent cases seem to have progressed rather quickly. Agmar was executed by Gussalen on February 8th; Gussalen on the 9th by Roger de Mowbray who was himself executed that same day by Guernot; Guernot by Beringer on the 10th; Beringer by Arthurus, Arthurus by Borgas and Borgas by Mislosch all on the 12th... So proliferated one chain of executions, the chain initiated by Deboubec, though of course there were many others, overlapping, multiplying, bifurcating... The situation continued in this fashion for around thirty years, with each executioner obliged both to execute and himself be executed, as was his executioner, and his executioner's executioner... The Counsel Register of Deaths stops abruptly in 1602, but we have a legible journal page from one Jon Fenwick of Wallinghall, dated December 31, 1604. If this is not apocryphal, then the last inhabitant of Trooft Hoeck took his own life as he vowed he would, on the following morning: New Year's day, 1605, exactly a year to the day after executing his last living countryman, Iseult Tybaut.