“Dear sodding rot!”

Exasperation throws his hands high above his head. A grumble and a growl as he rounds his desk and shoves a desk out of the way of a wall in his cabin. A wall well covered in mathematics and charts and other writings. One hand reaches out to snag a cloth pinned to the wall to swipe hard work off dark green slate stone.

“Right.”

Plucked from its similar place of rest, a piece of chalk is quickly procured and set to scratching across the space haphazardly prepared. Each inch quickly filling with diagrams of spell, soul, a few equations, and some code sprinkled between the lines.

Soul theory linked into a curse and woven into a line of code. A fragment playing a long game and making certain that he can watch from whatever angle he feels the need to.

“If all of you are so cussed worried about the feathered bastard then here. It’s in writing! If he were actually just as much a bleeding saint as you all think, he’d be bloody free by now! Not a single damned feather to his name!” Well that piece of chalk just got lost somewhere to the room.

Some places reek of memory.

The ruins that sit above a city by the sea seem to hold a number of stagnant ones. Echoes that if you stand just in the right place almost seem to glitch into echoes of a time long past, or is it a time not too far into the future?

A horn call that bellows like the bellow of an undead dragon, the answering trumpet of a true one echoed by horn calls from hundreds and thousands of ships coming to port answering a call to battle, a call to raid. Above all, a call that is death itself calling challenge to those that would dare, laughing even as it roars to dare even the gods to strike it down.  What a laugh!

Memories that call. Lines spoken, recited by another spoken far truer by a voice younger but no less dignified. Clearer, smoother, sweater to the ears. “Murder cries the vilified… -“ It is a voice that sounds not angry, but sorrowful. Wracked not with anger but with tears. Bitter regret and the weight of the words it speaks. The weight of the death of which those words carry. Slowly turning from sorrow to outraged as such weight turns to lead, pounded to iron, made to steal to forge a blade to swing upon the gallows.

It is within the stillness words echo with deadly quiet. Echoing as if said to many a foe. Parroted and yet said differently with feeling to so many different notes.