#unmentioned

Lamps guttered above, casting a warm yellow glaze onto Lyris’s long night and the purple hue on fine features. She ignored the ache, not all jobs went as planned and scrapes were common, even the red spider web flare in her left eye where broken blood vessels glared their complaints held little in the way of remarkable. She had certainly looked worse as two fingers, bound together, shifted the contract at her desk from one pile to another.

 The movement displaced the tidy piles, one piece escaping her attempts at organization and perching itself upon the jumble of apprentice scrawled coded messages, just above a singular word. 

ValanthiusLyris paused, spring eyes affixed on the note beneath her wayward paper, on that particular, singular word. The tight, small letters revealed the handwriting belonged to her second apprentice, and the note supposedly nothing more then daily news. The paper was pulled from the pile, all others that built rectangular islands on her desk now forgotten as her mind wrenched words from what anyone else would see as nonsense.“Mr. Valanthius.”  She found his name freed from her lips before the notion came to pass that she spoke to no one but perhaps now, a ghost. “How very disappointing you are.” She continued to no one, eyes rested on the peculiar arrangement of letters that spelled out fallen in her mind’s eye. “What a waste.”The paper was flung away, the very notion that such a creature as that beast had been removed from the plane somehow offended. The dismissal of parchment should have been the end, but as the Midlander filed and righted the pathways of her assignments, her eyes wandered back and back again to the antagonizing code teetering on the very edge of the desk.

 Revarik Valanthius had fallen

With a defeated sigh the paper was snatched up again and the meager contents, that gave very little detail, was read over again. Lyris leaned back into the cushion of her chair, knee propped on the wooden edge of her work space as a wandering mind imagined farther then the landscape of information the note painted.

 She hadn’t the faintest idea why his death even warranted a second glance, but she found it easy enough to blame her newly found humanity on the woman who claimed her friendship. Somehow this emotional distraction, this fact that she returned to a concluded matter, might have been Ms. La’Fleur’s fault.

Another paper was plucked from the sorted islands. Coded letters was painted in quick, sharp lines and black carved across the white surface faster then her mind bothered to keep up.Ms. Li, 

Your report is incomplete. There are no details of Mr. Valanthius’s demise and this dismissal of information needs to be remedied. Find out what happened.Gather Ms. Lie, I want information on the Valanthius line, I want to know where the beast came from, who is left alive and who this newly sprouted Ms. Valanthius is. Find Ms. Harrow, have her track down Ms. La’Fleur.I want this done 

Today.