Something in your Eye

[frill 2277]

Spoiler

 

I see no better location for the War Office’s research and development division than The Eye. As such, we must provide the space in which our comrades may peacefully conduct their work without fear of interruption nor the wandering eye of external agents.

Alren DeNurem, General of the Holy Orenian Empire, addressing the expeditionary 5^th brigade amidst construction. 1766.

 

***

 

21st of The First Seed, 1771.

Around 3am.

 

O what a curious and beautiful, yet also what an unreal fascination this eye evoked! And how interesting is it for an unlearned mali’ker to see such a fortress. With the day among the autumn a fine one, the mali’ker pressed closer his fur-lined travelling cloak, drawing it close over his ears, snuggling cosily, comfortably into a crack through the walls of the keep, the last relics of a shiver coursing through his limbs, the heat of the imperials’ lanterns ensuing a warmth that should put to flight the cold and damp of the thick Curonian north with some ease.

 

It would be a delightful drowsiness that would steal upon a less experienced thief-de-jour, even the ‘ker struggling yet as his eyelids drooped with the welcome warmth of the keep. It seemed that stealing away to a barred window of the fortress, further buttressed hard-fast with iron doors allowed him to slip a view of the superstructure above. As the moonlight glints over the sheeted snow thick over the keep, the ‘ker would almost believe that the walls and bricks and flagstones of the place were spread with bed-sheets, shot with the coal-black shadow which made the few trees around it grow brighter under the slanting beams of the pale moon above.

 

Nowhere is another soul to be seen, for everyone is plunged into sleep or working hard-fast on the construction in climes more foreign than this. Yet no! In a solitary window of the keep a torchlight is flickering where some soldier is mending his boots, some legionary drawing his blade across the whetstone in the dulled winding-down of the last tired cogs of the decades-working machine of war.

 

How perfect is this blackness of the infinite vault of the sky - the lofty, remote and inaccessible depths spread into some silence. But it was for a different vault that the ‘ker had climbed to these reaches in this darkest evening.

 

He fills his pockets and leaves. Nothing but boot-prints in the snow remain.

 

[FlemishSupremacy 6115]

A certain high elf does not know this occurred, but would he have known, it would no doubt elicit a chuckle from him.

But, alas, since he did not know he thought to himself;

“Fyrr’s been gone for a long time... Might have to cut his pay.”  

[frill 2277]

Spoiler

***

 

4th of Sun’s Smile, 1771.
Around 9pm.

 

The mali’ker returned the next day if but only to test his wit.

 

For his part, Fyrrathul was delighted to see the Imperial engineers fill the crevices and crooks that the ‘ker had utilised to make his entrance. Of the life underground,  the ‘ker was only tired and weary - what small alcoves of the world far too tight to work oneself against in the nipping air, necessitating a stripping-down to his ashen torso from his wintered furcloth. The ‘ker at time ponders himself at times predisposed with the wrong profession, becoming a clothier or fishmerchant. Not now, of course, but later, when his chief aim of entering the unenterable had been achieved. To become a fishmonger while back to the wind, stories above the ground, would not be a choice that the wisest would take. The ‘ker rose from a land of a lawless, reckless culture, where they built not fortresses nor castles and each mal’ erected a tent wherever he happened to find himself. The idea of some thief, or enterer-of-the-entererable was indiscernibly alien and not of the illiterate’s vocabulary.

 

With what little strength the cold afforded him, the mali’ker heaved himself through an unglassed window in the same manner a brick would a glazed one, rolling prostrate into the tiled halls before standing, eyes awide, and admiring the scenery. It was good.