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[Isk]

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At the beginning of the rainy season, Britanian herdsmen ranged the grasslands in search of the sandy soil where the grasses grew quicker. When the rain swelled, they drove their herds to harder ground, where the grasses grew slower but remained greener longer. Then, when the warm winds chased the clouds to the edge of Sosaria, they simply followed the forage, always searching for the wild herbs and short grasses that made for best meat or milk.

This pursuit always caught someone, particularly those who were too greedy to cull wilful animals from their herd. Headstrong cattle could lead an entire herd too far afield, into vast tracts of over-grazed or blighted pasture. Every season it seemed some fool returned without horse or cattle.

Isk felt himself to be such a fool.

“I let them wander too far”

Dashing though the second floor of the Athenaeum Annex the porcelain masked Magnate sunk his hand into the nearest bookshelf and collapsed great tomes onto the floor. Rage. Rage gave fuel to his heart as he searched for things to take his anger out on. His mind swimming with the most negative thoughts. His nose was bleeding from the mental stress of it all, marking his mask with two lines of streaking crimson. “Why is this happening!?” his screams echoed through the library’s stone walls. Books on dark lore, recent events and khaldunic journals all lay scattered on the floor. They were not the final testament to his anger.

Alizia Randerstill was pursued. Isk knew Mark, her now dead husband, rolled in his grave each time her charmer Eldred touched her hand. To seek and claim the wife of another was a moral sin to Isk. Simply thinking about the possibility of Eldred raising Mark’s child and bedding Mark’s wife caused his heart to sting and his head to throb. He touched the nose of his mask with his gloved hands and looked at the stain his blood caused on the material.



Like a bull seeing red the Magnate slammed a fist against the nearby stone table. It hurt and he screamed all the more for it. He buried his fist into the stone just to see how alive he was.

Alive... that was one thing Gabriel wasn’t. The foolish elf and former member of Humanis was a recent suicide. “You joined Sanctus to die” Isk heard himself say. “That kingdom wants to take everything away from me... Gabriel, an elf I might have called a friend... Alizia.” He reached for a chair and slammed it against the wall. Stone hitting stone. The vibrations went to his fingers. He grasped at his pulsating mind, hands to his head as he reeled back against a bookshelf. “Too much, too much” He slid down to his knees with a hand on a shelf.

Deep down inside he knew Alizia Randersill had to be partially to blame. Had she blocked Eldred’s initial advances the earlier scene at the Trinsic Prison of Love event would not have played out. Alizia stated she loved Mark then, that she loved her previous husband Charles as well. The suggestion was self evident. She could love more than one man and just that in itself was an oddity to him. A moral flaw.

“How corrupt we humans can become to move from bed to bed. How sinister our hearts. Why was I not there to point the shepherd’s crook? Herd them back in line.”

Isk wallowed in maddened misery. Like an overacting performer he disbursed his fury and when single moments of clarity overcame him he would bring himself to his feet only to lash out more against the library’s chamber.

He had to put an end to this madness.