Amon Egrethore was awakened to the sound of a crash somewhere on his property. In the moments after he awoke, the crawling agony of his wound threatened to completely overwhelm his mind; now in a panic, with his heart pounding, he could feel every heartbeat in the stump of his arm feeling like a fresh new wound opening up.

It wasn't; he knew it wasn't. He knew his wound wasn't getting worse, because it almost couldn't. The one thing that would definitely make it worse was using dark magic to silence the pain, standing up, and finding out what was going on.

Naturally, as the master of the house, he did exactly that. The dark magic he used on his body was like a weapon, silencing nerves and shoving the parts of his mind that should have warned him about the danger into a closet. He was, he decided once again, his own master, and no amount of pain was going to tell him otherwise.

He didn't really notice the blood seeping as his wound re-opened. If he had noticed it, he might have recalled that he had killed his healer with his own bare hands. With the darkness magic running through him, a lot of parts of his mind that should have told him what he already knew, what he needed to know, simply didn't work properly anymore.

Amon Egrethore drew a long saber from its sheath above his bed and shuffled to the door. It was only when he got there that he realized he didn't have a spare hand with which to unlock the door--paranoid as he was, he had locked himself in. There were too many betrayals happening, too much disaster. He had no idea for a moment where he had set the key, but yes, now he saw it on the table by his bed.

He set the saber against the wall. He didn't notice it fall over, barely registered the sound of metal ringing on stone. He hobbled over, grabbed the key, hobbled back to the door, and unlocked it. His hand went for the saber only to find it missing.

Fear ran through him. Although he barely understood, every beat of his heart was just a little weaker than the last. Only after he spotted and scrambled after the sword did he realize he had yet to open the door, and as he set the sword aside to grab the handle, it fell again.

It wasn't fair.

The thought ran through his head over and over on repeat. It's not fair. Not fair. Not fair. He was supposed to be a genius, a ruthless bastard who had risen to become one of the most notorious businessmen central Seyona. How could his sword have fallen again? How could it have dared? How could reality dare suggest that he wasn't the same ruthless man who had kidnapped and raped a member of the King's Own--the King's cousin, at that--and gotten away with it? Blackmail, necromancy, kidnapping, torture, he succeeded at so many things.

He was supposed to succeed now. His mind didn't accept the thought that he was bumbling, weak. It simply didn't enter into his mind. If his sword fell, it was the sword that did it. He knew better, but the thought refused to register.

Amon Egrethore was the master. All else was his servant.

When finally he bust out of his room, saber in hand, the guards who had been waiting patiently outside for him gave a head-bow. Amon eyed them with distrust. His sword was unlikely to betray him, so these people were far more suspicious than any mere piece of metal. If there was a conspiracy against him, these people were a real danger.

"My daughter," Amon said, "now."

"Would you like--"

"MY DAUGHTER! NOW!" Amon hadn't intended to scream, but screaming was all he had. It would hold off the conspiracy. It would make people fall in line.

The guards ran off, and he trailed after them, unable to keep pace but unwilling and unable to call them back. By the time he had gotten to the stairs, he had no idea where they had gone.

The stairs provided a new challenge. Amon eyed them, because even his addled mind recognized that his balance was atrocious and getting worse. Without a spare hand to hold the banister, he would have to press his arm against the stone wall to keep his balance. Slowly, a step at a time, he forced his way down. If a pair of guards passed by behind him, perhaps realizing that he had been left behind, well, he was too focused to notice, and then he turned the corner on the switchback and was out of their sight.

Amon, unlike his daughter, did not value intelligence or clear thinking in his subordinates, only obedience. The guards would do their best to follow his orders, but what exactly those orders were, they weren't entirely sure.

When he finished the set of stairs, he found himself in the long hallway of the third floor, and even he could not miss the rubble and slain guards. Hobbling to it, sword extended, he found they had been guarding an alchemy room--now empty of people, but he imagined he could smell them, believed they could not have gotten far. He waved his sword back and forth menacingly, then stumbled backwards.

Invisible to him, Wilke--not more than two feet away--watched the display with some amusement, as he held the illusion of the empty room. Wilke could smell the darkness magic pouring off of the man, but still Amon seemed unable to detect the illusion--though it, as light magic, was effectively the same element, if very differently applied. He watched the pudgy, bleeding, demented old man twitch back and forth, then give a shrill screech and start limping back the way he had come. Wilke simply looked back at Chandra, still clutching her head in agony, and shook his head.

Amon forced himself once again to head down the stairs, although now--finally--one of his guards, following the thin trail of blood, had caught up with him. Amon, although he did not recognize the guard and barely even recognized that he wore the house's colors, did eventually allow the man to support him on his trip down the stairs, and even accepted his assistance hobbling down the hall.

Here on the first floor--below ground, if viewed from the front of the house--was the only entrance to the wall-ways that Amon could take in his wounded state. It wasn't so much the wall-ways themselves, but the passages between levels--steep, narrow, and pitch-black--that Amon could not navigate with only one hand and poor balance. If he wanted to get to Janinda, the guard assured him, she would be with the Inquisitor, and he was beneath even this level of the building.

This entrance to the wall-ways doubled as his private stockade. Although Amon himself was blind to it, he stumbled through the narrow corridor between thin cubbies, each holding rotting bodies, most chewed to pieces already by rats. If he were in a different state of mind, he might have looked at the one survivor, now very nearly deranged with pain, or noted the pile of flame-singed limbs in a pile on the floor, without any sign of a torso. Neither had been there the last time he passed through, but it had been a while.

The last narrow stretch of the wall-ways was, of course, a trap; anyone with a signet ring would teleport past it, while anyone fool enough to walk through it was crushed to death by spikes. There were no other ways in or out, save whatever the Inquisitor used to enter and leave the forsaken place. Fortunately, Amon's ring had been kept from his discarded hand and placed on a necklace around his neck. The guard, without asking or needing to be told, used it to bring the two of them through.

That brought Amon at long last to his daughter's side. Janinda had a bit of metal and a sheet of paper, which she had just now presented to the Inquisitor. The inquisitor did not pick up either of the objects, but stared at the two with an intensity reserved for either a genius or an utter fool; it was difficult to tell, not being able to see the Inquisitor's eyes, whether they held any scrap of understanding or not. For all Amon knew, the lumbering oaf was trying to recognize whether the scribbles on the paper were supposed to be writing, or whether they were all a ruse.

Amon pushed the guard away and took two steps into the room. Janinda turned to her father, her face already lined by the stress of her job as head of the house, and showed some surprise. But then, in a move that made no sense to Amon at all, she reached back behind her and snatched one of the Inquisitor's many knives off the wall.

"You aren't supposed to be here," she snarled at Amon.

To Amon, it might have been the last straw, the final betrayal that pushed him over the edge--except that behind him, he heard a laugh.

"Hello, sister," said a voice Amon didn't understand, and by the look on her face, neither did Janinda. "We have much to discuss."

Amon, suddenly, found himself spun around and thrust into the hallway, the one which only existed to serve as a lethal trap. He dropped his sword and fell to his knees, hand reaching for the necklace that held his ring--to find that it wasn't there.

Amon's eyes widened, and he felt magic course through his veins--primal, hot. It felt like a fever, and he was coming to know very well what fever felt like. Ever since his hand had been cut off, it was always there, like an infection.

Amon felt the guard's foot on his ass pushing him forwards towards the trigger for the spikes, but Amon placed his hand on the ground and, to everyone's surprise, vanished into it.