📜 Entry: “Of Wings, Fire, and Ritual Silence”

Location: Onadbyr, Lord Monder’s Guest House
Recorded: After returning with Kiryn Rumlyn from Old Grinder

I have learned to observe cruelty in the world—but this was not cruelty. This was intent. Deliberate. Cold. And I fear I do not yet understand it.

We are resting now in Lord Monder’s guest house. A gracious gesture, to be sure, though I confess: no mattress, however fine, is thick enough to insulate the mind from what we witnessed in that windmill.

The Old Grinder. A name once whispered in jest now stains my thoughts in full color. There, beneath stone and rot and the heavy stink of old wheat and blood, the Rumlyn family was all but extinguished. Lady Finia. Lord Wedras. Lord Zakar. All sacrificed—daggers in hand, rituals halfway spoken—while we fought claw and tooth to reach them in time. One survived: the boy Kiryn. A thread spared from the flame.

I cannot claim we failed. We saved a life. Perhaps two. But it feels hollow, this victory. Not because it was small, but because it was so narrowly wrested from whatever darkness had taken root in those stone walls. And because, even in victory, I do not yet understand the shape of what we interrupted.

Lord Zakar spoke to me, in death. So too did Wedras. Their spirits—still lucid, still aching—named jealousy as the Countess’s motive. Spite. Vindictiveness rooted in ancient resentment. But that does not explain the ritual itself. The symbols carved into the floor were not merely theatrical. There was a pattern. A purpose. Something meant to happen.

I remember the boy’s voice, brittle as a frost-laced leaf, recounting what he heard as his family died: wings flapping. Chanting in a tongue no child should know. And then the Tiefling—a monstrous figure with blades of fire and the cruel ease of a butcher—giving orders. Was he summoned by the sacrifice? Or merely drawn to it?

Secrets are the constant companion of evil.
—Personal reflection, annotated beside my notes on the ritual circle

I do not yet know what the Countess was trying to achieve. Her cruelty seemed too... precise. Too timed. She waited to strike the boy until the final moment. As if the sequence mattered. As if the deaths were not an act of rage but of punctuation—each life ending not with a scream, but a period in a sentence I cannot yet read.

I have copied the symbols carefully. I detected no magic lingering, but the weave is subtle when corrupted. I will compare them against the scrolls I copied during my tenure at the College of Minstrels. Some of them referenced old faiths. Forbidden rites. Perhaps the answer lies not in the blood that was spilled—but in the ink of those that tried to warn us.

I find myself increasingly aware of the fragility of order. How thin the membrane is between civility and chaos. These cultists, if that is what they are, were not robed strangers whispering in alleyways. They were stable boys. A countess. People with names and occupations and, one assumes, memories of laughter. How does one drift from feeding horses to slaughtering nobles beneath a grinding wheel?

I do not write these words to assign blame. I write them because I do not understand. And that—that—is the most troubling thing of all.

Lord Monder has asked that we rest and attend the King’s Games. He offers this as reprieve. But I confess, part of me wonders if the games themselves are not simply another ritual. One of spectacle and politics instead of blood—but ritual nonetheless. Perhaps we are all performing in something older than any of us know.

I will rest. I must. But not long. I have work to do. Symbols to decode. Motives to reassemble. Names to remember. And a boy, now a lord, who must survive the burdens placed upon him.

May clarity walk with me.

— A.J.