Roan Egrethore considered himself incorruptible. He saw his father, Lord Amon, as someone who took too greedily, and he privately assured himself that he would never be the same way. Still, every time he visited the sacred grounds, he found himself more and more taken with lust for power, and a need for one thing in particular.

Of all the people who knew him, Roan probably understood himself the least.

The workshop his father had built on the sacred grounds was a useful place for experiments, but impractical. Seven months ago, the workshop had discovered something of value, but Roan quickly discovered that they didn’t understand how or why. It wasn’t merely that the workshop would not replicate what it had made, it couldn’t; the workers were too sloppy, never keeping notes, never approaching things with an eye to details. He knew approximately what had gone into making the new metal, but not exactly.

So he had built a factory, and this one made careful records. It cost him a fortune, mostly in bribing the staff to keep it secret from his father, but also in finding more trash-humans to staff the place, ones still skilled enough to perform magical labor.

The piles of discarded stone and metal were nothing; the sacred grounds had many holes where you could discard rubbish, and it all seemed to vanish into dream. But keeping the building itself secret from his father, whose powers were phenomenal, that was difficult.

This visit of his father’s was especially tiresome. Amon had been told of the same sample that Roan was taken with, and was retracing the same lines of thought which Roan had taken, trying to get the workers to make a new sample of the same. The workers, to their credit, did nothing to betray him. But they were also unable to explain why the metal had not been reported to him. Roan, with some very careful maneuvering, was able to sneak the sample back to them, and they offered it up to Amon as though it had only been lost.

Still, to Amon, this all smelled of betrayal. He was hunting around the workshop for signs that they had hidden something else from him. He was keen to go scour the rest of the sacred grounds, too, which would have been a disaster. Roan had been trying to come up with excuses or distractions to take his father off the trail, but he could think of nothing that didn’t sound more suspicious than his own ignorance.

So he settled for making small moves to delay his father. And, eventually, he found just the right one.

“What happened with that visitor from the Order you were talking about?”

Lord Amon Egrethore turned and flung the metal ingot in his hand at his son, barely missing him. The ingot, by the sound of it, passed through the wall behind Roan, and from the noise a nearby worker made, it had probably killed someone.

“I’ll tell you what happened,” snarled Amon. “We almost got away cleanly. Almost! But that horse-faced woman, the one you insisted was no threat, she betrayed us. She told him about the entrance to the Vein. I had to have them both killed, and now they will come looking for him. If we can’t get the formula for this… this…” Amon beckoned to a staff member, who reluctantly handed back the ingot, now slick with blood. “This new magi-metal, then our backer won’t protect us. We need SOMETHING to trade. If it were only money, that would be that, but hiding from the Order is a bigger favor than I have standing to ask for.”

“For now,” said Roan, hopefully. Internally, he was ecstatic; perhaps his obsession with the magi-metal was going to save him in his father’s eyes. Still, something inside screamed at him to keep it a secret.

Amon snorted. “Look at these workers, Roan.” He strode into the middle of the workshop and taking on a level of volume he usually reserved for making a grand speech in the main hall. “Look at them! Tainted, and getting worse. The air in the sacred ground is saturated. The more work we do here, the harder it is to keep it from infecting us with the taint. I know you have come here more than a few times, and it’s only the assurances from the groundskeeper that they are short visits that convinced me to allow them. People who come here become filled with twisted magic. The seal burns at their souls. They die a thousand deaths, and we can only release them when they are no longer of use. Even these hours spent here today are dangerous, and I should leave this place and not return for months.”

Roan’s stomach tightened into knots. He had privately assumed that the prohibitions against staying were something obscure, or perhaps meant to keep people unawares of some other project that Amon had put together... not something consequential. Perhaps his father simply disliked crossing over here, or felt uncomfortable around the strange and vibrant flora of the sacred grounds.

No, something in his head says, it still must be a lie. Even for his father, a speech this brazen in front of trash-humans would be a risk, if he meant what he were saying. They would certainly rebel, if they were not a part of his secret.

“Their only redeeming virtue is that they are of use to us. So long as that is true, they may live,” Amon continued, sounding as though he was ready to continue for another five minutes. Then, suddenly, he doubled over in a series of wracking coughs. As they cleared, his face was visibly paler, and his eyes showed pain and stress. “I’ll have your sister take care of the rest of the investigation. You and I both must not return. Now, I think. She can sniff out the problem better than we can. We are too tired and too tainted to do any more.”

“But father…”

“No excuses.” Amon, seemingly unable to summon the poise necessary to hide his pain, stormed forward and caught his son by the arm, dragging him out of the workshop. “I forbid you to come back, and I’ll seal the entrance if I so much as think you are sneaking in. I won’t have my son become a tainted trash-human. Whatever toy you’ve hidden away in this place, you can have her removed later. But you shall not return.”

As Amon rushed him back towards the stone which served as the entryway to the sacred grounds, Roan risked a glance over his shoulder, in the direction of his factory.

If he dared to tell his father… but then he would know that he has already stayed too long, if there truly was such a thing. For now, he had time.

“I can walk on my own, father,” Roan said, removing his father’s hand, and scrounging up both willpower and dignity, he walked the rest of the way with his back straight and his mouth shut.