A Final Message

[Blackest`Ashes]

He was a young boy -- an impressionable boy. He was a new employee, an urchin Pritchard hired merely from pity. But he worked fast, worked well, and worked efficiently. Without a word, the blonde-haired master did the tasks set upon him, if only for a meager wage and a pillow on which to rest his heavy head at the conclusion of a busy day.

There had been one more task to complete before he returned to his bunk; a warm order pounded out by kitchen-marms. In unsteady hands, he balanced the wooden tray and cautiously climbed the Dagger's creaking stairs. Steam filtered roughly from the punctures atop the dinner-plate's stone cover, and scrumptuous food nearly had him sneaking away to partake of it on his own accord, but he would not.

It was with a rapping of knuckles that he would announce the delivery of the meal, and he placed the covered tray down before The woman's doorway. A note -- one he was told, under no circumstances, to open -- was placed folded aside the tray. He howled through the wooden doorway.

"Dinner for you, madame, purchased by another in your name! Please do enjoy your meal!"

Without much further ado, the young worker turned and was already stripping himself of apron and overcoat. It was a tray worthy of a king, of warm liver, and steamed greens, and sauteed onions.

Among them? A garnish of crimson. If Quincy Randall were curious enough, the juices of the meal might seem darker and thicker than they often were.

Reeking of stale, sour decay, a tangle of torn, human intestine was rested amidst a bed of sweet-peas.


* * * * * *


There was little more fine than a rough day of important tasks and delegation followed by a bout of utter, simple relaxation. Treadwell was a fine example of the very task, and pipes and cigars seemed to be his utmost pleasure.

Amidst his choice of pipes, there was a gift delivered in the absence of the overweight councilor. A leaflet of folded paper was stuffed between the bells of two of his more oft-utilized pipes. Only when a fat finger would squeeze tobacco into its corncob recepticle would the horror of the creased note be revealed.

There, packed just as he might his tobacco, there was a squelch of wetness. In the bottom of smoke-pipe reservoirs, one in each, there were horrid, disembodied eyes staring upwards, and the mouthpieces of the pipes were coated with a fine lathering of red.

The eyes were someone else's, and by the blood in the pipes, certainly not removed with proper consent.


* * * * * *


It was not uncommonly-known that she was an avid reader; an avid evader of reality, where there were other worlds contained in the leather-bound covers of books. Even if they were an escape, they were lies woven within pretty poetry, and Lamai Carver seemed a frequent escapee of Myrken when her nose would be stuffed within the pages of a book.

The page of her most recent read would have been marked by a new book-ribbon -- or rather, by a leaflet of folded parchment sneaked within when she might not have been looking. And only when fingers would turn the pages would Lamai Carver discover a new ink to the pages.

Mashed between heavy breasts of chapters read, and chapters not-yet-thumbed, a lonely tongue would have been found mashed within the pages of her book, and its dry, blue veins had long-since dribbled free of their contents.

The words scribed thereupon were smeared in blood, and the tongue -- cut free of its owner some time before -- would have spoken a testament to Lamai Caver in silent violence that no manner of words or stories could ever dare recreate.


* * * * * *


Ariane Carnath-Emory was a statue of rigid, war-torn strength -- a feminine warrior gone mostly unscathed through years of intense training and sudden battle. But even the strongest need find rest at some point or another.

When Ariane Carnath-Emory would come to her bedside one evening, she might have discovered a peculiar difference in the making of the sheets. It was as though another body lay curled beneath them, and the lumps of a tired frame were stones beneath the drawn sheets and quilts that warmed her bed.

When these were drawn back, she would find the culprit splattered across her mattress in a sprawl of murder. Sheets were hard and soaked with drying gore, and clumps of hair were clumped in wetness at the edge of the body's ever-furrowed brow. It was bloated and fat with rot, and its distended, slit belly pregnant with the vapors and gasses of decay. Unoccupied eye-sockets stared with black-leaking, scabbed holes towards the ceiling above, and a the forefinger of one of the hands placed calmly across its stomach had been long-before removed.

Its stomach smiled with a wound of vivisection, and where intestines and guts should have been, maggots squirmed in sullen desire. The stench was putrid and foul, and a fly perched upon the grayed edge of the lifeless body's nose.

Although they were bloodstained, broken teeth held a roll of parchment. Mutilated and destroyed as the child was, Luke Delstuccio, the page of Governor Bromn, was loyal in servitude, even after death had long claimed him at sick hands.

The message stuffed in Luke's tongueless mouth, if read, was identical to those found by Quincy Randall, and Treadwell, and Lamai Carver. All written with ash-stained fingers, they would read the following:

Dearest Quincy Randall, Lamai Carver, Ariane Carnath-Emory, and Councilor Treadwell:

It is with this final, gruesome reminder that I suggest you admit to your whispers of treachery, and turn yourselves into the Order of Straka at once. Let it be known that this is the fate of all traitors, and even from heartfelt love and the closest of friendships, hatred can blossom.

If this warning goes still unheeded within the next week, a state of critical punishment will be called. These mutinous provocations will be met with a fair trial if you rise to your errors... and if you still yet refuse to turn yourselves to the law?

May whatever sick gods you worship have mercy on your souls.

The letters were signed in a familiar, haunting signature. Fires of insanity still burned within the ashen embers of a shattered mind.

Your Governor,
Altias Bromn

[Treadwell]

The note would go unread for a night. Treadwell's response to the eyeballs in his two pipes would simply be a horrendous Tready-shaking shriek, and back he would go flumping onto a parlor sofa. There he'll sit the whole night, awake at times and shaking from nightmares at others--at least, there he'll sit 'til brought back to bed by his beloved wife and two grumpily woken infants.