But I walked around the table in the same fashion that I had done with Somyellia back on Red Wolf. This cold mound looked familiar, causing me without effort to mumble near-forgotten words.

Tension filled the room, making home the places saved for the cobwebs and rodents grown fat on my occasional forgetting to close the back door.

I knew who this reminded me of, with deathly certainty. I hadn’t thought about him in ages, and he had been as dead to me as the inhabitants of the mass grave.

For a moment I wondered if it was him. But I was looking down on flabby jowls on top of a weak chin. His hair had been the same color, but coarse and curled. Just to be sure, and with some effort, I rolled the corpse onto his side. No, no giant scar on his back.

I had completely forgotten about it until using it as an identifier. My father had a deep swathe between his shoulders from a battle in the first campaign he’d ever embarked on.

He’d told of the ambushing Pelats and their crude, bony weapons. How they had skewered his horse and overwhelmed him. How he had one pinned to the ground, and how a moment before the fatal strike a sneaky Pelats opened up his back in the vain attempt to save his fellow savage.

Surviving the ordeal with a fresh trophy of tongues and charms, a field hospital repaired Father’s back, and adorning citations followed in his recovery.

It may have been the thick neck, or some indescribable similarity, but I couldn’t shake what I began to feel. An idea germinated in me, powerful and driven. Closure, something I had never known. It began to squeak and plea from the core of my being.

The rest of the day was spent in a hurried discontent.

After days of research in a back room at the Nilghorde Hall of Records, I learned that he was indeed still alive. He must have had squandered his war spoils. The house in Templeton had been sold long ago. Shoeing for a Ward substation, and likely led with a rabid taste for Black Monk, he took up residence in a small loft off Iron Belfry Boulevard. There, most roads and weaving allies remained nameless, and the view cast on a once thriving populace that hadn’t progressed in the better part of a century.

When I took my covert observations on foot, for a fleeting moment I saw, silhouetted by firelight, a large figure limp past a window. Cloaked in a black hood, I moved like a rat. The few Metropolitan Ward who trotted by were oblivious. But I wanted to be sure my efforts would not be thwarted. I needed perfect concealment, and a moonless night was soon to arrive.