[SPEAKER_00]: The Dunhill inheritance, a short-hand missile tail by Matthew C. McLean, parked three the murder.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a killer, a poisoner by trade, and a thief by convenience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it was not always this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: My discovery of my uncle's plans of forced soul transmutation, left me with a problem of how to survive until I could dispose of him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew from what I had witnessed a uncle dam in the degenerating health, he must be planning his wickedness soon, but beyond that, his timeline was his own.
[SPEAKER_00]: unwilling to simply wait for him, I opted to not be in McDowell manner at night, claiming to have had a change of heart and was searching for the poor lost Jacob.
[SPEAKER_00]: I grabbed at the rapier from my fencing lessons and a flint lock from a wall mounting empty, but suitably intimidating, should I run into trouble in the streets of Dunhill?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was during this time that I began to inhabit a tavern of questionable repute, the serpent and ran, finding at a rumor mill of more dark tales of my uncle and others of Dunhill's highest society.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the day as it took me to prepare my plan, Uncle Damon and his closest staff became suspicious of both my newly cheery attitude and my nocturnal rummings.
[SPEAKER_00]: I maintained these for as long as I could until Uncle Damon found me eating a quick meal in the dining hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had stopped taking our meals together long to go, and while I had been carefully watching him of late, it was only then that I noticed how gallanty had become, as once heavy flesh hanging off of him in flacid folds.
[SPEAKER_00]: Never one for delayed gratification, Uncle Damon spoke before you even sat.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are very gay of late.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a bright future ahead of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I lied.
[SPEAKER_00]: This falsehood sharpened my uncle's eyes upon me any quickly replied.
[SPEAKER_00]: How so?
[SPEAKER_00]: I sat down my utensils and looked him in the eyes at discussing my most serious intent, which I suppose my was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've applied to Greymore Academy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I spoke at the famous Institute of Higher Learning that set in the Highlands North of Dunno.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope to start at the new semester.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was only a few weeks away, and I could see the impact this timing had upon my uncle, Damon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what reaction I was expecting, but he did his best to appear considerate until a coughing fit ceased him.
[SPEAKER_00]: When he was done with those exertions, he gathered himself and replied, I suppose coal, it is time for you to leave the matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dodgy bastard.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are still my ward, of course, and as will require my permission and support.
[SPEAKER_00]: He leaned back in his chair, still comfortable in his perceived superiority of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the implication that my scape route might be denied, I let the falsity of my cheery facade fall away.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would stop me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said without hesitation, I will have childless and gildered paracet celebration, a feast for your sendoff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought of a young man chained.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had met at the serpent and run.
[SPEAKER_00]: Out of a strange sense of longing, I asked.
[SPEAKER_00]: Man, man, I invite others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uncle Damon blinked at me and what might have been honest surprise.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have others to invite.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only then that I truly realized how much effort my uncle had gone through to keep me hidden away and how little contact I had with the outside of world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking twice and rather quickly I said no.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well then, I'll have the servant set about it for this evening.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with nothing more to indicate he was planning my murder, Uncle Damon rose from the table and left.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few hours might have been a difficult amount of time to ready things on my end, but I've been putting up my own plans in place for quite a while.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most difficult remained though when I found that Uncle Damon and his closest servants moving to and from the subterranean laboratory made getting there without being seen quite tricky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Certainly not impossible though and I slipped down and noticed to make my own final preparations.
[SPEAKER_00]: In his lab, under the inside lip of the cauldron knew it would be central to his plans.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stuck a razor with spirit gum, putting it out of sight.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even so, I'd selected the blade's color to match that of the pot's iron, blending the near invisibility, unless one knew where to look.
[SPEAKER_00]: To the brazers close to the cauldron, I had a liquid of my own chemical concoction that would remain inactive until the sconces were lit.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my time surveying the laboratory, I'd gathered a rough idea of the dimensions and been able to calculate the intervals between the lighting of these fires and the saturation of the room in the prevailing smoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: God bless the maths.
[SPEAKER_00]: My task complete.
[SPEAKER_00]: I moved to make my way back out when I noticed the blood stain table that Jacob had laid across.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever spirit of his remain, they're halted me, and I stared fixed at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: How many boys had Uncle Damon brought here to meet the same fate?
[SPEAKER_00]: Had he simply not been able to have his own children, so made grist of the orphans of Dunhill?
[SPEAKER_00]: I put these thoughts aside and left as serapticiously as I had entered.
[SPEAKER_00]: I flew to my room, laying out several suitcases as if I was already preparing for my departure to gray more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fleeting clothes about as if the idea had led to an uncontrollable exuberance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dining hall, as always, was cold as the rest of the manner.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wonder if I would ever get that chill out of my bones, or Uncle Damon's plans would make it permanent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though I was supposedly the celebrated guest, I arrived before my uncle.
[SPEAKER_00]: He entered with the speed that Belly did gray-punched kin to shovel thinning hair and jaundice dies.
[SPEAKER_00]: He spoke briefly with false happiness at my acceptance to Greymore.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite his insolubious appearance, I could see the charm that had taken him across the empire and passed the state matron that had brought me here.
[SPEAKER_00]: His teeth remained bright and white as he flashed him in a smile, then made me wish a simple brutal murder could be how I ended this.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I knew this would only bring Danielle's black coats and my own execution, so I returned to Smile and waited.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uncle Damon commenced the meal with the toast, standing at the opposite end of the halls long and lonely table, he raised a glass, launching into a lengthy and pompous speech, beginning with, ah, but you were only a four-larne and lonely lad when you came to me, Cole.
[SPEAKER_00]: He continued by boasting about everything he provided for me, and how it led to me being a fine specimen of young man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listening to him, I could only feel that I had not changed much since my arrival.
[SPEAKER_00]: Still covered in the shroud of grief that I had arrived in since my parents' death.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sadness stayed upon me until the food was brought.
[SPEAKER_00]: There, in physical form, was my largest gamble.
[SPEAKER_00]: While I had fortified myself against what I believed to be the anesthesia that I was certain gildered had added to my food, I knew this was my escape's biggest risk.
[SPEAKER_00]: What if I were to eat and never awaken?
[SPEAKER_00]: I steeled myself and hoped that long distance of the table would conceal my consternation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I raised a glass to return the toast, but found myself tight-lipped as I always was.
[SPEAKER_00]: My anger and fear are warring inside me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Uncle Damon took this as my usual reticence, and allowed Charles and Gilford to continue serving us without further comment.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I slowly began to eat, wondering which bite might be my last.
[SPEAKER_00]: Damon spoke about Graham War, and his peers that it studied there, and asked what parts of its curriculum were of interest to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I felt the wave of unconsciousness begin to take hold, I found my fears slipping away, replaced by a gratitude that no matter the outcome, I would never have to listen to my uncle Damon's self-serving blather ever again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I completed my journey over the sedative border between a wake and near death without being truly aware of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was sitting at the table, tucking into a rather fine dock breast, then I was in the dark, laying on my side with my legs bunched close to my chest, the dim light of the dining hall replaced with total darkness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly I became aware of the hardness of the colder and around me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I shook my head and tried to gain full consciousness.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I did so, I realized that I was naked.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cold iron of the large pot I had been put into pressing into my skin.
[SPEAKER_00]: The ropes I was bound dug into my flesh.
[SPEAKER_00]: I struggled against my bones.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the darkness I couldn't see if the razors still remained adhered to the underside of the pot's lip.
[SPEAKER_00]: This rising uncertainty caused my breath to quicken, pushing harshly through my nose and past the gag in my mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew the culture into dimensions, but in that moment it was both as small as to prisons, and in ascapable as the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The star is forming behind my eyes, giving testament to the darkness I was trapped in.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was only a clip by my uncle Damon's pallet face rising above the lip of the cauldron, lit by a ghastly light, he spoke quietly and near tenderly.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is meaningless now, dear boy.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I did want to tell you that I'm sorry I came to this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I did my best to find a suitable replacement.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even as it's most successful with Jacob, I can only maintain the transference for a short period of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have enjoyed you in every way, and would have preferred to continue that in my new form.
[SPEAKER_00]: But last, had I not killed your parents to arrange your move here?
[SPEAKER_00]: We would have never met.
[SPEAKER_00]: The admission of my parents' murder opened up something in me, both hidden and intellectual, and I felt tears begin to roll down my face.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd suspected this truth on a level so deep that I had not admitted it to myself until Damon's words pulled it from my soul, leaving me to observe the wreckage of my life that he had wrought.
[SPEAKER_00]: with a ghost of my parents and innocent Jacob sitting upon that ruin.
[SPEAKER_00]: My tears became the uncontrollable sobbing of a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: Observing my lamentations, dim and lean closer, wiping tears from my cheek.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what was most likely the closest his damned soul could ever come to true sympathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He smiled sweetly and said, I knew you were a good boy from the beginning, coal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the reward of all good boys.
[SPEAKER_00]: This pushed a new surge of anger upon me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cheeks puffing as I tried to breathe past the gag.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was only then that I noticed the peculiar greenish cast to light on Damon's face.
[SPEAKER_00]: The brazers had been lit.
[SPEAKER_00]: This small thing and knowing what it meant halted my crying and replaced it with calm.
[SPEAKER_00]: I relaxed against the bottom of the cauldron.
[SPEAKER_00]: Knowing it was now the safest place at
[SPEAKER_00]: in the entirety of the laboratory as it filled with my gaseous poison.
[SPEAKER_00]: The smile that came to my face must have been grotesque as Damont's own faded into uncertainty.
[SPEAKER_00]: He backed away from the cauldroning, quickly and foolishly put aside his doubts to call the servants, unseen beyond the horizon of the cauldron.
[SPEAKER_00]: This left only the play of flickering torches and shadowed movement.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their excited steps came to halt as their shadows fell over the cauldrons' mouth, arranging themselves around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a flaring sound of a burning as another torch waslet, and all became bathed in a phosphorescent blue.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even in my circumstance, as I momentarily wondered it this until Damon and his bedevilled chorus began to chant.
[SPEAKER_00]: At first, the deep and sonorous voices might have meant echoing from Dunn Hills Cathedral.
[SPEAKER_00]: But a quickly became an eldritch refrain, the language becoming unrecognizable and unholy, bending around me in a way that quickly restored my previous panic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I began my struggle a new, trying to move myself so I might get a hold of the razor, feeling that I was racing Damon's words as whatever diabolical ritual he was conducting gain speed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Given time, I knew I could have reached the razor and freed myself from the ropes, but as the heavy words continued, it seemed to form a fog that laid itself across my mind, pulling it into a strange, netherworld that existed neither inside nor outside of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: but in some more fierce place.
[SPEAKER_00]: As it's bitten, I felt myself moving to the cerebral mark with no feet of my own to stop me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stepped through that fog until it started to coalesce as a new prison outside of the cauldron.
[SPEAKER_00]: Surrounding me in heavy broken flesh, an age in ached my bones that my youth was unfamiliar with.
[SPEAKER_00]: A cold that was even deeper than the manners.
[SPEAKER_00]: As something familiar yet horrible floated by me, I felt an excitement, an adulation past through me.
[SPEAKER_00]: a profane zenith of years and effort coming to pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: Against my well, I felt my own lips moving and toning words that were unknown and foreign beyond human reckoning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then my lips stopped, a cough escaping them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I pressed on, struggling to complete the words that flowed from me, but the urge became uncontrollable, rattling the weak lungs and pain the bones of my body.
[SPEAKER_00]: This continued until the expiration overwhelmed all else, except the need to out the invading poison.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hands dropped what they were holding, moving you to cover my mouth, and then thrown out to catch me before I fell to the floor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I blinked, and I was again in the darkness of the cauldron.
[SPEAKER_00]: Outside of it, the blue light had faded into the green from before, and only the faint sound of morning was in the air.
[SPEAKER_00]: My limbs regained their usual strength and pliability, and I rolled over searched the lower lip of the cauldron.
[SPEAKER_00]: The release I breathed when I found the razor was so great, I thought it might expel the gag from my mouth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Cutting through the rope that bound me took time, but I only had the gurgling sound of diseased breath to interrupt me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The light of the brazers faded as I cut the rope.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stung myself on occasion, but unwilling to let small pain stop my work, as my life was at the end of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Naked and bloodied, I stood from a cauldron and lifted on uncertain leg to step out into the dim green light.
[SPEAKER_00]: I covered my mouth, the gag, in case any poison remained in the air.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the dim glow, the brazers, I saw the bodies of Damon and his servants, prone near the positions they had taken up near the cauldron.
[SPEAKER_00]: I picked up the last things I had hidden in the laboratory and took them over to my uncle.
[SPEAKER_00]: I rolled Damon over with an ungenital foot, satisfied to see him staring up the ceiling with unblinking paralyzed eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I bent down, closer to him that I had since I had fended off his last molestation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stared him in the eye, unable to control my own horrid satisfaction as a fear years in the making clouded his vision.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you have no doubt ascertained certain uncle, you have been poisoned.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a toxin of my own making when the paralyzes fast, but kills slow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your limbs have ceased and given enough time, so will your heart and lungs.
[SPEAKER_00]: I held up the vile that I had taken from his table to make sure he could see the amber fluid in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is the antidote.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few drops on your tongue would nurse for power to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a testament to Damon's terrible will, he groaned at this, eyes besieging as he mentally reached for the ampoule.
[SPEAKER_00]: His power over me was such that even then, I nearly pulled away from him, afraid of whatever black magic he had left, somehow it'd come for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I took pride at the point of pleasure that I did not, but stayed steady, holding Damon's salvation inches from him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I let that moment linger and pass.
[SPEAKER_00]: I then took the midnight blue cloak from Damon's shoulders to cover myself in the cold underground.
[SPEAKER_00]: Finished.
[SPEAKER_00]: I took the vial away into the garment's interior pocket.
[SPEAKER_00]: I made a show of this and then my empty hands is if I were a magician making Damon's only salvation disappear from in front of his eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will not do this, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will leave this place, and seal your secret door behind me, bearing you under your own manner for all eternity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Damon managed an expulsion of breath, a protest hurtled from the bottom of his dark soul, and I only smiled and returned.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I knew about this layer, and the secret entrance to it from the library, it has been your arrogance as well as your evil that has been your undoing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stood, feeling that some final words or gestures should be necessary with Damon's wide and horrified eye as upon me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, I stepped over him, moving to leave the cavern that be his grave without another word or backward glance.
[SPEAKER_00]: When some above, I sealed the library so you could door behind me.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a time, afterwards, at rough intervals, I imagined I could hear noises from the passage beyond.
[SPEAKER_00]: I ignored it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, it ceased.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before an investigation by Dunnhill's black coats required me to leave McDowell Manor, there were a few occasions that I considered removing whatever cantrip damage it set up on the door and replacing it with a more mundane mechanism.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I did not wish to tamper with whatever spell sat upon it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like my father, I am a man of science, not of magic.