An old wall made up of planks and pallets, supported by crooked masts which disappeared
into the corners of the ceiling above. The subtle musk of old candle wax filled the room, as
a small flame flickered forwards and back. A shadow of a slouched figure could be made out
on the basement wall, his hand shakily making work of the binded ledger which laid open for
his drought eyes.
“... remember.”
The long silence had been broken by the man's lost word, it would drift off into the room and
fade as the sound of the flame being drawn back by another shallow breath drowned it out.
His cracked lips parted and closed as the scribbles and lines turned into a cohort of names
and places.
As the chatter in the man's skull escaped through whispers loosely caged behind his teeth, the
writing on the page would extend and expand like the blossoming of a white rose in spring. He’d
suddenly tear a page from the ledger, scrunching it up in his hand as if the rose had materialised
right before his very eyes.
Angrily would he toss the paper, watching as it roll off the end of the long oak desk at which he sat.
Past the end of the desk his gaze continued, settling on a staff. Alfred escaped from the depths
of his mind, ascending the creaky wooden stairs which lead him up and out into the familiar streets.
Limp after limp the grizzled man trudged, the thick stench of decay and ash infiltrated his nostrils
and reminded him of the horrors which laden the streets of this place. The distant cries of a mourning
mother brushed past him, he had walked this path many times before.
“What will become of you now, where in this land will the echoes of the damned not find you.
Death looms over every... single doorstep, creeping throughout this city like a cursed ivy. It is not right,
for the men and women and children of Valdarr have been wronged.”
His hallowed eye’s became brightened by the sight before him, he winced and trembled before it.
The aftermath of what could only be explained as blind ignorance, the forgetting of one's people.
It was overwhelming, the ash of the forgotten filled his lungs and made him remember.
“... Finton.”
