Now, as I toil among the dead, the statues of Do-Gooder’s Row are finished, polished weekly by working parties sent from the Municipal Dungeon. Never one to forgo the juices of irony, tonight’s assignment was brought to me from the vast confines of this Row. These poor sots killed each other over a damned mule cart. A mule cart! All five of them. Skewered and heads busted over life’s wares and trinkets—though such wares and trinkets feed the desperate gullet, as I used to know all too well. Snier also knew this. I’ll get to him later. He is, or, I’ve grown to worry, was one of the wiliest men ever to be met in Nilghorde—and that is no small feat, considering my home’s rather well-deserved reputation for what I’d once heard coined “pleasant predation.” I reckon that, if he would have slipped into this fiasco, Snier would have picked these dead men clean before the first horse hoof had echoed. But who knows where some end up, especially those prone to the ebb and flow like flotsam.

Ready for the table, all ten eyes have curiously found a way to look into one another. Flopped off a Ward cart to form a crude ring on my floor, Somyellia would have likely been able to summon some obedient demon straight up from its center.

And I must say, before embarking on this tale of magic and murder, I think this ring of dead men is fitting. An apt metaphor, if you will. Yes, morticians can be as lettered as they are solitary. The metaphor in that what lies ahead is more than just corpses on floors, but different people—characters on this grand macabre stage—different angles to be presented. Some would say it’s the only way. Even time itself can become angular, for what is time to the dead? For this is the province we now call Rehleia, and most of us are inescapably linked, even if some will never know it.

I can’t impress that, this linkage, enough. Leading me, if you are one unfamiliar with our ways, to beg for what you may call some pre-tale forgiveness.