The student body rivaled the Institute’s vastness so that even I could sometimes get lost in the fray. To my shock, some students were hesitant to handle the muck and piping of our being. That was no issue with my studies, and I enjoyed anatomy class over the more daunting core requirements that left my head a scrambled bowl of confusion.
Dreams are a strange thing. Standing too close to the street performer may often lead one to see the flaws in his act and the streaks in his makeup.
I was passing the courses, though some with great struggle. But I noticed that I never read poetry anymore. My collection of works sat dusty and unused in a corner above all my research papers, scribbled in haste to make punitive deadlines. My muscles ached from inaction, and collapsing into a chair became a ritual after classes. Slowly I began to see my peers as spiritless larvae rather than prestigious scholars.
After a semester, it was clear my life was not in the clean walls of the Institute, or among the kind that never had to fight for their plate. I dropped out shortly after marks were posted. I was tired of feeling sucked dry and hung up in some closet apart from the world. I left numb. Nothing that was shown to me could raise the hairs on my neck or streak wide a smile across my face any longer.
Except for one.
In route from my dorm to my composition class, I would cut through the exhibits. In the Wing of Trauma, displaying hundreds of examples of life’s hard edges, I walked past a familiar skull with a hole in its frontal plate.
I returned to the Pauper Morgue, where my return was met with great rejoice. They doubled my old salary, killed my replacement, and with a warm broth escorted me back to my old station, where, aside from a fresh batch of run-through workers who’d proved unsatisfactory to the House of Rogaire, laid many a fair corpse, nude and uninspected.
Such things, so beautiful yet so dead, went to their final resting places uncaressed. The post-mortem with Somyellia would remain unique. Call it loyalty, perhaps.
A Tale From A Good Butler
A Tale From A Good Butler
I: Humble Beginnings
My name is Tymothus Snier. At least that is the name scribbled on the paperwork at the orphanage where I spent my childhood. I never knew my parents and have honestly given it little thought. A whore and a priest, an actress and a soldier; it all makes little difference to my plight. Having always been on my own, unknowable parents did little but cloud the mind.
The books that I dusted and rearranged had to be worth something. They better—fair compensation for suffering the House of Rogaire, and, in what was a growing likelihood in some peculiar way, the House of Ordrid too.