>>5206006Federigo had been instructed to continue his indignant ‘cooperation’ with the investigation and, highly-ranked Magus Auctor that he is, they did not see fit to torture or jail him. Foolish humans! In a rolled scroll of parchment bearing the official, magically-identifiable and extremely-distinctive seal of a Hawksong mages’ Tower official, he writes of everything you (and he!) know of the Tower’s dark dealings. He writes of the Chimericists’ attempts to use dragon-matter to recreate the menace which once nearly annihilated their people, of the human experimentation which Henzler all-but-admitted to. He tells of the late Head Demonologist Pavlov, and the horrors he kept in his crypt, and how the killings and curfews which have horrified Hawksong’s human public spilled forth from his vault. He tells of mages who covered up affairs and bastard children of others, even while banishing students of lesser families for minor infidelities.
You embellish the tale, insinuating a connection between the Mages’ Tower and the wererat infestation. You sew discord between already-fractious allies and insinuate distrust into the future readers by suggesting that the Paladins and their Paladin King, who procure their gryphons through the Tower’s programs, must have known of some of this… And suggesting that there are still other secrets the Tower keeps from them, and vice versa, and that both agencies are working against one another. You even make a martyr of Felman: you call him a hero, paint him as incorruptible, and insinuate that he was tortured and disappeared for trying to tell the truth which Federigo now writes—you even write a modified and editorialized tale of how he died, and where, KNOWING that the Tower is bound to cover up the truth of the storehouse fire you started, and to be caught in this lie and thus implicate themselves in further half-truths and deceptions which will lend credence to this manifesto!
“I cannot take it any longer,” you murmured, as Federigo wrote the words, “the lying, the corruption, the threasts and interrogationss, the murderss and monsstrouss abominationss unto the Godsss of Light and Virtue!”
“Wait… What am I…?” Federigo muttered, as if sleep-talking.
“By the time you read this,” you spoke, and he continued to write, “I will already be dead. May these Gods see what I have done—what I am attempting to do in publishing these accounts—and have mercy on my damnable soul.”
“But… I don’t wish to…” Federigo struggled to speak up.
“Now roll it up, sseal it, and deliver it to The Gray Pressss,” you told him, “then, climb the Tower, and jump to your death.”
