Gordon Neufeld wipes his heavily sweating forehead using his left hand, or using a part of his left hand which isn’t completely covered in blood. The personal physician to Ser Derek Acanthus and part-time healer sighs, his job completed.

“Don’t fret, my ass.” Gordon complains. “Managed to avoid hitting all the important organs… Yeah, sure.” continues the tired middle-aged man, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

Gordon has just finished the arduous job of patching up Joze, who was brought in a couple of hours ago by Ser Derrek’s personal aide, Devlin. Despite the repeated claims of his esteemed colleague that Joze wasn’t in imminent danger, Gordon still had to push his healing ability to the maximum limit and assert a huge amount of mana, skill and mental focus to preserve the boy’s life. He also had to spend quite a number of herbs, pills and medicines to ensure the boy is fit enough and healthy for the rest of his life.

“No matter how short that life may be.” smiles a proud Gordon as he surveys his finished work. “One would argue that it is a waste of valuable resources, to pull you from the brink of death, just so your old man can send you back there, again and again. But I disagree...” the middle-age man observes the heavily bandaged and unconscious boy laying on the treatment table in front of him.

“If a stranger was to look at you now, who would believe that a father would do this to his only son?”

Well, the status of only son seems to be debatable at the moment if rumors are to be believed, Gordon muses. There are whispers in the mansion, talks about Ser Derek acquiring a new son using the adoption process.

“I remember there was a time, you used to swagger through this mansion like you’re king of the castle. I always wanted to tell you that it’s your daddy that owns the place, not you. But I didn’t want to deal with the hassle of confronting a snotty spoiled brat back then, so I kept my trap shut. Well, I’m telling it to you now… Oh wait, you’re out cold.” grins Gordon as he moves to a nearby sink.

The middle-aged man begins washing his blood-covered hands while still continuing the one-sided conversation with Joze, his back turned against the comatose boy.

As Gordon continues his soliloquy, unbeknownst to him, an intruder slips into the treatment room unannounced. The part-time healer doesn’t even hear the door open behind him, courtesy of the mansion’s maintenance workers who made sure that every hinge in the building is oiled and rust-free.

“Did you know that I helped deliver your baby brother all those years ago? Or baby step-brother if you want to be a dick about it. He was so beautiful that day, the day he came into this world. The purest thing I have ever held in my hands. The maids had to force me to pass him to his mother because it looks as though I wanted to hold him forever.” the middle-aged man reminisces as looks down at both his hands, wet and covered in bubbles and suds. He pauses for a moment before continuing scrubbing them with soap.

The uninvited guest heads toward a nearby medicine cabinet, his footsteps silent as ever. He reaches and take a vial of heavy sedative from the second shelf. This trespasser then turns to leave, but not before pausing beside the treatment table where Joze lays.

“Thus you can only imagine the hopeless fear I felt when they suddenly went missing from the mansion, or the shocking horror I experienced when I heard and finally realized what really happened to them. So please forgive me if you think I find pleasurable delight in your current situation, because I really do. Makes the hassle of dealing with you now totally worth it.”

The figure puts out a hand and begins awkwardly patting the unconscious boy’s head, as if trying to comfort him. He then realizes that the action is not how he thought it would feel like, so the intruder pulls back his hand immediately. The noiseless visitor then swiftly leaves the room, but not before closing the door quietly behind him, leaving Gordon none the wiser.

The middle-man finally turns away from the sink to observe Joze, still lying unmoving on the treatment table. He grabs a nearby towel and begins drying his wet hand.

“Seriously, just look at you. King of the world one day, up shit creek without a paddle the next. Stuck in a well you called that paralyzed body of yours. If this doesn’t show you the gods exist and that they have a wicked sense of humor, I don’t know what does.”

Gordon moves towards the medicine cabinet on his left to fetch something. But it takes him a few moments to realize that what he's looking for isn’t there anymore.

“That’s weird. I could have sworn there was one last vial here. Oh well, we could always order more tomorrow. But it will probably arrive in the afternoon, late evening even, if I purposely delay the order for it. By any right, you should have been asleep through the worst of it, but since we don’t live in a world full of sunshine and rainbows, you’ll just have to suck it up and endure it.”

The part-time healer moves towards his desk, sits down in his leather chair, and begins opening the drawers one by one as if searching for something.

“You’ll probably wake up screaming tomorrow from the pain, and won’t stop until your voice cracks and your throat’s sore. Then you’ll continue screaming internally. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is, what you had experienced these past few days, what you’re currently going through now, what you will be facing in the days to come, I hope you know that it’s just a fraction of the suffering that your mother and little brother went through when you pushed them and sealed them in that well.”

The middle-age man finally finds what he is looking for in the bottom drawer. He takes out a small ivory box and puts it on his desk.

“But Gordon, surely my screams would distract you from your work and ruin the better part of your day? is what you would have asked if you still have the ability to ask that question. Well, my dear Joze, although I do not enjoy my morning coffee being accompanied by the screams of pain and anguish, I do have in my possession something that will remedy that upcoming predicament.”

The personal physician to Ser Derek Acanthus and part-time healer opens the small ivory boy, retrieves the items inside and begins putting them in his ears to see if they still fit.

“Thank the gods for earplugs.”

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As the guards patrolling the hallway move into another part of the mansion, a phantom slips out from the shadows behind them and heads towards the wine cellar. He enters the doorway into darkness and walks downs the stones steps before finally reaching the bottom of the stairs. He moves pass rows and rows of wooden shelves, barely lit by a few lanterns hanging from the walls, before stopping in front of one. This figure carefully takes an inconspicuous bottle of red wine from the middle of the shelf, making sure not to disturb the dust resting on the bottle and the shelf. Or else this will alert the ever vigilant Devlin, Ser Derrek’s personal aide, that the bottle has recently been touched and quite possibly tempered with.

The silent specter takes out from the sling in his arm the newly acquired vial of heavy sedative he pilfered from the treatment room, uncorks the bottle expertly and empties the vial’s content inside the wine bottle. He puts the cork back into the wine bottle and returns it to its previous resting place on the shelf.

The boy then exits the wine cellar and heads towards his room in order to prepare for the dinner he will be having with Synnove and his father later on that night.