Marley, as it turned out, did in fact have something to drink in his office.

It was a little bottle of brandy and after managing to find two small glasses, pouring a couple of drinks, he was sitting back in his chair once more simply waiting for me to begin.

I was hesitant and a little nervous, I think it must have shown because he didn't push me to hurry up.

“I am going to tell you some things.” I began. “Some things about my past, I need to you understand that just knowing some of these things can be dangerous for you.”

I knew he couldn't understand the danger of knowing what I knew, especially when I hadn't told him yet, but I still tried to impress upon him just how serious this was.

“Marley.” I said. “They're the kind of things that, if the wrong person ever even suspected you might know, someone would be sent to silence you.” I explained, all the while keeping my gaze locked with his.

I could tell my words had made an impact of sorts on him because he was frowning now, but after a moment he nodded once and spoke seriously.

“Alright.” Marley said. “I see what you're getting at, son. I'm not the loose lipped type, but I'll give you my word that even if we don't come to an understanding here, I'll still not speak of it.” Marley gestured to the gold ingots. “Unless those are stolen that is...”

Marley trailed off and looked at me seriously.

I shook my head. “They're not stolen, that's not what this is about.” I told him. “I wish it was something so simple but it isn't.”

I took a mouthful of the drink before me and let it burn as it went down, hardly even tasting it. I set the glass back down on the desk and sighed.

No use for it, better just dive right in.

“I'm a noble.” I told him but didn't look up from the glass of brandy on the desk. It inwardly annoyed me that I didn't want to see the thoughts behind his eyes but I continued to avoid looking up as I spoke on.

“I ran away.” I said but corrected myself quickly. “No, escaped. Escaped is the right word. I escaped from a bad situation.” I took another sip of the fiery liquid.

“Not the kind of things you hear about petty nobles running away from, like a marriage they don't want or because Lord Daddy won't give them more coin.” And my voice was a little bitter at the end but I cleared by throat and spoke on. “I'm talking about the real kind of trouble. Being starved and beaten, being threatened with and shown even worse things.”

Marley made a sound in his throat and spoke.

I couldn't help but look up to finally meet his gaze as his words came out. I didn't see disbelief there, no doubt or rejection only the quiet anger of an honest man.

“Are they still after you, son?” Marley asked me.

It gave me a little heart to keep talking even though I smiled bitterly.

“I doubt it.” I said. “They were, at first, but I think by now they probably think I'm dead and gone.”

Marley hesitated for a moment, just watching me with a slight frown before he spoke.

“I don't know exactly what you've been through, son.” Marley said not unkindly. “But I'm not sure why you're telling me this...” He seemed to realise something and spoke on quickly. “I don't mind you telling me that is, I'm here if you need to talk about it but what I mean is I'm not sure what this has to do with what we were talking about.”

I snorted, I couldn't help it.

I felt a small grin pull at my lips.

“I'm telling you this so you don't think I'm completely mad when I tell you why I want to buy into your business.” I told him. “And you still can say no, what I mean is that I have plans. I didn't come back to Moreland's Rest to try force my way into your business but when I heard I thought I might be able to help out both of us.”

I took another sip of the brandy, only a quarter of it left now.

“Let me start from the beginning.” I told Marley as I set the glass back down.

“I guess it started when I was eight years old...” I began.

I began to tell Marley about the death of my parents, about being a child without anyone else left to him, how I had been given over into my uncle's care.

Starting with tragedy, the deaths of my parents seemed almost normal as I spoke more of my uncle and my time with him.

Things became increasingly bizarre, increasingly cruel.

I told him how I hadn't understood what was happening at first, or rather hadn't understood what was truly happening.

Instead, just knowing in my child-like way that my uncle was a cruel man.

I spoke of my punishments, being confined to my room was the least of them.

Being starved was a favourite of my uncle's.

Not starved enough to seriously take a toll on me and never close to a public appearance that I would have to make, but just enough to leave me in pain, enough to leave me feeling helpless.

Being so young I couldn't understand what was happening really, couldn't see the bigger pitcure, I just knew that the things happening to me weren't good.

Even not really understanding why was a small torment in itself.

Had I done something wrong?

What did I do to deserve this punishment?

I hadn't meant to misbehave or do wrong and yet I was punished anyway, why?

I just didn't understand.

Things progressed further and I was introduced to a greater pain, one beyond the pains of thirst and hunger.

I would be beaten.

Never a wild beating.

Not a beating fuelled by anger or rage but instead, a calculated beating.

Strikes and blows in specific places, small torments and injuries were they wouldn't show.

Belts whipped across my back or chest, maybe I get my shins kicked until they bled.

Which ever seemingly random punishment was chosen, my uncle would often delegate this 'task' to one of his men.

They got worse and worse as time moved on.

Sometimes I would wake up in pain, having been thrown back into my room, not remembering actually passing out during the beating.

Other times I was awake throughout the entire thing, every large fist than hit my ribs or each solid kick to my legs from the heavy boots, I could remember each one of them.

I spoke of how I began to notice the small things going missing, things that had been my parents, things that should belong to me.

Those things coupled with all the other small clues and I began to realise, the 'lessons' and punishments my uncle gave me, the words he spoke about obedience, about my 'proper' place all solidified into place and then I understood.

Understood what he was trying to do, what he wanted.

My inheritance, the coin, the estate and more importantly, I understood how he planned to get it.

The small fire within me burned hotter and as it did, fear and confusion began to turn into anger and hatred for this man.

The man who had supposed to care for me, the man who planned to grind me down into nothing.

That fire kept me going and as I started to grow, so did it.

It let me take the beatings, it kept me going through the times of hunger, through each new cruel and unusual punishment he had for me.

I remembered having to stand in a room with my uncle, he was writing letters at a desk and my punishment was to stand there, holding an ink pot out with both my hands.

It sounds so stupid, like it was just a minor inconvenience, but when you had been beaten into unconsciousness the previous day, simply having to stand for all those hours was another torture.

Even as my arms burned in pain from having to force myself to keep them held out with the ink pot, I kept my silent gaze on my uncle.

I knew my eyes showed nothing but hatred for him and I think it was that small glimpse into my inner thoughts, that small proof that I was still not fully cowed by him, that spurred him onto what came next.

I told of the first time my uncle had introduced a new horror.

He had had me brought to a room in the estate, inside the room were seven of his men and a boy. The boy was already beaten and bloody but not as badly as I was used to.

He was clearly a boy from somewhere in the city, common born by his worn clothing.

My uncle had ordered two of the men to force me down into a chair and hold me in place, then he had ordered Marran to begin.

Marran.

I hated that man almost as much as I hated my uncle.

His sadistic glee, the twinkle in his eyes as he went about my uncle's cruel business was close enough to rival my uncle himself.

He was a man who enjoyed the suffering of others, but it was more than that though.

It was as if the suffering of another was the most important thing to him.

If he happened to gain some other kind of pleasure from whatever he was doing to them, then it was simply a bonus, a secondary but unintended consequence of his actions.

It was their pain that was the primary pleasure for him.

That is what lay at the core of that man.

I was held in place and forced to watch as the men, lead by Marran raped that boy.

It was a horror that I had never seen before, something I hadn't even considered.

I was untouched and unharmed in that regard, it was a horror that I hadn't, and never did, experience personally, for which I could only be grateful.

I watched it thought, I had no choice.

And that was the point.

I remember the screams, the muffled sobs, the laughing and grunts of the men. What stuck with me the most though was the light fading from that boy's eyes.

Even as they took from him, they didn't stop with the violence.

Fists kept swinging throughout, kicks and then harsher and harder blows.

The boy whose name I never knew, died there in that room and all for a simple lesson from my uncle.

This is what could happen to you if you don't do as I say.

It was even left open to me.

Implied that it might just happen anyway if my uncle chose to make it so.

I had been very very subdued for months afterwards.

Haunted by those dying eyes, that fear, the nightmares and the laughing eyes of Marran and my uncle.

Through this I had glanced only occasionally at Marley, the face of the older man had become more and more drawn.

A tightening of his jaw and lips as his eyes blazed with anger.

I was telling him of my eventual escape.

“-knew the maid planned to take the coin she thought I had in my chests but it was my only chance to escape.” I sighed regretfully. “I never wished for her death but a part of me knows that if they had caught her alive...” I trailed off as we both shared a look.

The kind of men who had been after me weren't the kind to forgive or even simply give a quick death.

Nothing beyond the shared look between us was needed for us both to acknowledge what the maid's fate would have been had she been caught alive.

“I managed to get a head of them but I ended up falling into a cave system near the mountains.” I told Marley. “They didn't find me but it took me a long time to get out of them.”

I was deliberately keeping what happened next vague, I trusted Marley to keep his word about not speaking to anyone else about this... but I couldn't help but feel that giving away specifics about that place, about the grimoire wouldn't just be giving away my own secrets.

Irrational as it was, it felt like it would have been a betrayal of Althalan's hidden retreat and so I twisted the truth.

“When I got out eventually, I ended up finding something that helped.” I said and looked to the older man. “But that is another story entirely.” I said firmly still holding his gaze.

“But I will tell you this.” I said. “I am no longer afraid of my uncle. I'm not afraid of his men or anything he might try to do to me.”

“You're going to kill them aren't you?” Marley asked me, his voice was odd. Almost empty of emotion but there was a hint of something. It wasn't approval or disapproval but something else.

I raised a hand up between us and a small flame blossomed in my upturned palm, it span itself into a small orb that burned furiously and I spoke on to a now startled Marley.

“If I wanted.” I said quietly. “I could kill them all.”

I closed my fist and the ball of fire vanished.

“But I don't want to kill them.” I told him truthfully. “It's too easy.”

Marley swallowed slightly before he spoke, it was as if he already knew the answer before he even asked but was unable to help himself.

“What are you doing to do?” Marley asked the question.

“I'm going to destroy them.” I said, my voice serious. “I'm going take everything from them, I'm going to utterly ruin them and everything they have ever hoped for.”

And with those words, I downed the last of my glass of brandy and began to explain my plans to Marley.

**************

My plans were flexible.

There was so much that I didn't know yet, that they had to be flexible.

I'd told Marley about the things I ended to do, thing I thought would work, the small back ups and contingencies I had come up with for a number of different situations.

By that point Marley had been on board.

There had been a subtle change in the man as he had learned more and more of my uncle and what I intended to do, by the end of it he had been offering suggestions and trying to help improve my plans.

We'd stepped out of the office briefly at once point, to go back to the warehouse.

The workmen had been dismissed for the rest of the day, I'd watched as his words had put fear into their eyes.

After everything that had been going on lately, they thought they would end up losing their jobs too.

It was only when Marley casually asked them to look for the others who had worked there and if they could be found, to let them know that he had work enough for them again.

Their expressions changed from that unease to one of cautious excitement.

I'd gotten more than a few glances at those words, they weren't stupid, they knew I must have had something to do with the seemingly changing situation.

I had helped Marley lock up the warehouse and we'd returned to the office once again.

We spent a long time talking, we parted ways that evening as the sun was almost set.

The fruits of our hours of discussion remained in Marley's office, papers written up that would be the outline for contract.

One that would be written up today by the local Justice Office.

There was a kind of contract that could be written up, it wasn't your ordinary contract that bound you legally by laws of the land.

It was a contract, bordered with a complex series of runic inscriptions that could not be signed unless your intentions were true.

If the actual contents of the contract itself were something you knew you could not or would not fulfil, then when you tried to put ink to the page, quite simply nothing would happen.

You would not physically be able to sign it.

The reason these contracts weren't widely used outside higher circles were because of a few things.

Firstly, even though any scribe worth his salt could perfectly recreate the runes themselves, the runes would be nothing but strange markings on a page without someone to actually put magic into them.

Magic was uncommon, maybe one in every five thousand people had the ability to learn a gift, like the healer Glenn.

These people were essentially one trick ponies albeit extremely varied in the things they could do.

A healing gift like Glenn's was an incredible gift, while someone else might get the ability to move a very specific and rare kind of stone or material with their mind.

It was unfortunate, because the chances were they would never even know they had such an ability and it would go completely unnoticed and unused in their life time.

There were even fewer people who could learn true magic, the kind that let you do more than just the one thing.

The kind that let you pull in magic from the world around and not just simply from their own personal well.

It was this kind of magic user that was needed to be able to push magic into the contract to activate it.

The price to make it worthwhile for someone like this to actually come to activate your contract was costly.

The second reason these contracts weren't widely used was quite simple and was actually part of the contract itself.

You can't sign it if you intent break it's terms or try to weasel your way through them.

These problems weren't issues for the contract we intended to sign because even if I wasn't going to simply activate the contract myself, I still had more than enough coin to pay for it.

I had no intentions to cheat, steal or otherwise break the terms of the partnership between Marley and myself and we had spent a considerable amount of time coming up with the contents for our contract with both of us having enough knowledge of the situation to be aware of the dangers.

So both Marley and myself spent most of the morning the next day sitting around the offices of the local Justice Office while scribes went over our drawn up terms and wrote them into an official inscribed contract.

It was almost noon when the two of us each pressed a bloody thumb to the paper before signing it with absolutely no issues.

It had been an odd sensation to empower the contract with my magic, it felt much like the runes I'd carved into my mountain, a bleeding of force that whirled around and was sucked into the runes to hold a steady thrum of power.

Only once the contract was actually signed, all the power it had contained simply vanished.

We were left with a contract that had all the same inscriptions as before but couldn't be activated again.

While I wasn't sure if I would be making another contract like it myself, I still had a burning curiosity to study those runes, to pick them apart to find out their secrets.

We were both given regular copies of the true contract, which was filed away into the official records of Moreland's Rest Justice Office, they were sealed away and this was witnessed by the Justice himself.

It would be legally binding to us both anywhere that the King of Gresh held power, which was most of the land this side of the Clearwater Ridges.

We had entered the building at different times but we left together as business partners.

I turned to Marley with a grin.

“Marley, how about we get some lunch?” I asked.

“Sure, Edo.” Marley replied with a mocking tilt to the name.

Who was Edo? I was Edo, or I would be.

I'd signed under my own name, my true name, Ash Blackthorn.

I didn't want the name Blackthorn out there for the world to see though, especially my uncle. I could even now imagine his outrage that some commoner in another kingdom shared the Blackthorn name.

Edo was actually the word for a Blackthorn bush in one of the dead tongues I had taken from Althalan.

It was a childish and literal translation but I had no fear of the small deception being discovered because as far as I knew, there was no one living who spoke that tongue any more.

I was to be known as Al Edo from now on and I would be no mere commoner.

But that was to come later in truth, a different part of my plan and one that would have to wait at least until I reached the city of Gresh.

For now, I was simply Edo, new business partner of Marley, of Marley & Edo.

We still had much to discuss but lunch would come first.