#vyra

But not without having it all first. It was the Brass Architect herself who'd gotten through to you, after all, who'd seen you as more than 'trouble', and whipped you into shape. She'd taken one look at the engine in your big old brain, fed it the nuts and bolts of tonal theory, and got it to work, got you to work, got you to love, got you to hunger, and you grew. You grew until you towered over everyone else, one of the brightest minds of your generation, right until you were shining at the top of the spire. Introduced you to the big names, to the players and shakers, to Chief Architect themselves, who picked as one of their favourites - and they did pick favourites among acolytes, that was no secret. Yes, you were good. And once you realised exactly what you were reaching for, you wanted none of it.

The Numidium Project would ruin you all.

You had told people - you'd yelled your damn lungs out - that it was all no good, that it was all was rotten to the core, years before anyone else did. You brought it to the Grand Debate, where you were scolded like a child, and got ousted from Grand Chamber by the Chief Architect herself, who'd carved you up into little pieces and served them up to applause - but by the grace of the very same Chief Architect, you had not fallen fully from your previous stature. No, you'd been offered some write-off tonal engineer position in a minor outpost where you couldn't cause any more 'upsets' nor rouse any other 'upstarts'.

'She didn't want this to happen, Zakya. She's already overcome with grief,' you were told, by the woman you'd considered more than a mother, like you were already dead.

So you left.

You left the only world you knew and you spent forty years being raw and furious with the open skies and roads before you. You cut your hair and shaved your beard, threw out every precise instrument you'd ever touched for netch leather and a well-oiled crossbow. You cut yout hair and ran a caravan from Nchumzel to Tel Enora to half-way across Tamriel that you stashed with knock-off brass implements and any runaway who could pull their weight on your pathetic, wretched father's guilt money and you hated everything and everyone you saw along the way. You cut your hair and it always grew back long and thick and curly, no matter how savagely you cut it. You cut your hair and rode out your rage, tear up the road and everything on it, until the end--

-- until the Call came --

And 'I was right,' turns out to be no comfort at all, not even a bitter one, when the world's rolled on past you, and you haven't changed a bit.

Except that your hair's grown back.

You've realised you miss your grandparents. Even though they died fifty -- four thousand and fifty -- years ago. And you'll never see your cunt of a father again -- more's the fucking pity -- nor your half-brother, unless you waste half a funeral at an ancestral -- shit, what's the word for those things? Shrine?

Your hair's long past that feeling of fresh-cut grass and is beginning to curl around your ears. It itches.

You on keep counting their names. Lyr, the stable kid sweetheart who liked your guar -- you'd let her name them, Mistymuck and Needle and Calamity, that last one you both had a soft spot for -- she'd liked them far more than she ever liked you. She's gone. So is Knocks-on-Wood, the drover your father hired to spy on you, the only person you'd ever considered taking an arrow for. You'll never catch sight of Melyn Drels and his dimwit brother again, nor Shady Jade, nor the Alessian nuns, nor the Tel Enora cornerclub crew nor ---

Kagrenac would never speak to you again.

Kagrenac is still missing. You half-wonder whether she'd thrown herself into Red Mountain in spite.

But Bthemetz might. Bthemetz--

You learn that Red Mountain still smokes in the distance in Ald Resdayn, but the trees are now younger than you are. You only recognise half the road signs in Ald Cyrod. The traders on the high road gawk at you. The route is the same.

You miss them. You've always missed them. You'll always miss them. Your life will always be missing something, and you think you'll have to live with that. You're not happy, but you're no longer so furious you don't know what to do with yourself. The old world you wanted to tear up with you is missing. And you're what's left, Vyra--

When you get enough coin together to get a good look at yourself in a looking glass and not a muddy lake, rough stubble's coming through along the length of your jaw. You decide not to touch it. You pull your hand through your hair. Strange, how its length feels like a comfort now, when it had felt like a wound before.

When you raise a knife to your scalp--