Emperor William Siberian the Cruel

Former Emperor of the Sollan Empire. Infamous for his order of Decimation.

—His descendant, Emperor William XXIII

Decimation. Decimation was one of the more serious punishments the Legions leveled against its own. The offending unit—be it a decade, a century, a chiliad, cohort, or even an entire legion—would be gathered up and made to draw lots, blindly taking a coin from a chest. One in ten of those coins was marked with an icon of Death, and the men who received them were lined up and shot by the men who did not. Their former brothers in arms. Decimation had fallen in and out of practice over the long millennia depending on the will and whim of the various Emperors—here outlawed, there enforced. The Emperor William Siberian—whom Impatian named William the Cruel—ordered fully one hundred legions to decimate after the Jaddian principalities won their independence.

Demon in White, Chapter 11: Decimation