The alcove was around ten feet by ten, cell-like in its makeup. Yarrien had once done an overnight in a local jail for 'fractious intoxication' back when he lived and worked out East in Greywell Tarn for a summer. This hole of a room reminded him of that place. It was an almost picture-perfect recreation: Blue-black rock walls sharpened by the light of just two tall candles, no soft materials or surfaces, a dusting of flint on an un-swept floor, a ceiling carved into a gentle arch shape to promote stability, and a single raised stone platform on which to sit or lay.

  The difference between the two places was not in appearance, but rather that he chose to come to this alcove willingly. He found comfort in it as opposed to confinement. It was also a discovery of both chance and circumstance. Several weeks ago he'd been dispatched by a middleman working within the Council of Buildings to fix a depression that was forming in the floor of one of the scullery kitchens in the south wing of Red Juno, the Ruskelite command centre where the Assembly of Councillors lived and worked. After some time inspecting the sinking flagstones, he found himself exploring the archaic dungeon passages that lay beneath the much-newer Government building.

  It was a quick enough task finding the source of the sinking: Rotted beams and rock erosion from an improperly-directed water channel. He was left to his own devices to fix it despite his request for another everyman hireling to help him - settling even for a junior apprentice if that was all that was available - but the middleman told him there was already a backlog and that he had to "just get on with it."

  Yarrien didn't mind too much in the end. During his lunchbreaks (he was allotted a "strict 15 minutes" by the middleman, but he was never monitored or checked up on once during the two week job, so he allowed himself to stretch the time out somewhat) he took a fancy to wandering the labyrinthine dungeon system. It reminded him of the days of exploring spent in his youth, as well as the ghost stories they'd tell each other about the crypt beneath Red Juno. He found no spirits in his search of the chambers, but instead happened upon the alcove room in which he now sat. This place had now become his sanctuary, one he continued to seek out after each workday even though he finished fixing the warped kitchen floor weeks ago.

  Yarrien took a swig from the bottle of fortified fig wine as he leaned back into the meditative silence, letting his shoulder blades settle into the grooves of the wall, and stared intently at the black square gap in the wall, the entrance to the exhaust vent. It was the size and shape of a large book spine, and the blackness of it was such that the candlelight was barely able to creep inside when held before it. Yarrien had given it little notice when he first started visiting his alcove, a simple gap in the foundation intended to recycle the stagnating air in the dungeon. However, on the second day of coming to this place, he made the discovery that, little to his knowledge at the time, would upturn not just his destiny, but that of all of Oros.

  The first time the voices came it startled Yarrien near to death, not least because he had all but spent the contents of his bottle at that moment and was awash with tipsiness. He'd been about to stand and collect his tools before starting the long walk back home to see his Son and his Father when the ethereal, but remarkably clear, words echoed out of the small letterbox-like hole in the wall. The was a peculiar resonance to them. Amplified, and as if spoken by two separate people a split second apart. The initial snap deduction that Yarrien's mind seized upon was that of a divine revelation from the Godess Ruskel, but he quickly dismissed this for two reasons: One, that Yarrien himself showed no where near as much devotion of the glory of the Gods compared to the majority of his Ruskelite compatriots, and two, while there seemed to be power in the tone of the utterance, the sentence made little contextual sense.

  'The hound is a menace!' Were what came forth from the hole in the wall like some nonsensical gust of air. After the first few seconds of disbelief, and once he'd confirmed they hadn't originated from the narrow walkway that ran parralel to the alcove room, Yarrien had placed the lightened bottle of fig wine on the raised platform, laid on his chest with his palms flat to the cold stone, beard scraping beneath his chin, and positioned his ear right at the opening.

  'Can't you do something about your fucking dog, before I wring it?!' Arrowed straight into Yarrien's eardrum. He shrunk back from the gap, wincing. The voice was sharp, nasal, one that would be jarring even if spoken at a calmer volume. But there was also something wildly familiar about it. He was sure he'd been directly on the receiving end of such a berating.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  'It's chewed off half of the carpet! My sainted Uncle bequeathed that to me...' The voice trailed off until the utterance became unintelligible, and then there was silence once more.

  Yarrien stayed laying on his chest for some time, his wine-pickled brain trying the piece the dots together. Where had he heard that arrogant, nasal voice before? It was only when he realised how late it must be that he picked himself up and stumbled out the door, gripping his tool satchel in one hand and the wine bottle in the other. The night had indeed descended by the time he emerged onto the streets of Wyndylith, and he still had the long journey to the one bedroom bungalow up in the far north of town.

  The next few hours were not to be enjoyed. Yarrien hated moving at pace through Wyndylith. The swaths of soldiers drinking and marching and blocking the walkways always watched the urgent-looking citizens with a keener eye. Chances were they were going to stop him for his papers several times on the route back, but he didn't want to keep his father and Hidell waiting too long. The question 'where have you been?' was a painful one. Adwin Fala would ask it with notes of frustration and distrust. He was the one who could identify the smell of wine on the breath, the bulbous flushed cheeks, and know what they inferred. Hidell, while too young to really understand, still missed his Dad nonetheless, and would wait at the greasy kitchen window even as his soup grew cold, waiting for the return.

  The sight of his yearning son from the street nipped the heartstrings, as Yarrien walked the final stretch of the journey home each night, but he needed this solitude, had done for a while. The duties of home and work had burdened him too long. It was unsustainable, hence why he continued to spend a portion of his evenings in the dungeon, despite the questions thrown at him as he opened the front door. But that wasn't the only reason he returned to the alcove room, perhaps not even the main reason.

  After that first time hearing it, the voice came sporadically over the following days, sometimes in regular patches and sometimes not at all. And yet Yarrien still struggled to pin it. A second voice then began to appear, this time a woman's, shrill and equally haughty, but less frequent. It was on a Friday evening that the epiphany finally came to Yarrien. The source of the first voice. It was the realisation that the familiarity grew stronger during the times that the words were being shouted rather than spoken in simple conversation that catalysed the revelation: It was Gwilleme Keight, The Head Councillor of Honour.

  Yarrien was kicking himself for not recognising it sooner. He'd worked for Head Councillor Keight for on a 20-day job some three years ago, when the Councillor, or more his wife, demanded that the washroom in their Red Juno apartments be upgraded from the "insulting pigpit" that they'd been "forced to endure."

  Another of the faceless middlemen had then, once again, picked Yarrien and Yarrien alone from the workpool logbooks, with the reason being that the "state budget could only spare one hireling."

  The memories of those 20 long days ricocheted in his mind. The micromanaging, classism, denigration, painful punctiliousness, overt and covert insults, and the time Brangwen Keight threw an antique tea stirrer at his head for his protest at their demand that he shorten the veranda doors by an inch. Thus, the daily visits to the alcove room took on a newer, bolder purpose. This modest, mildewy little room in the deep recesses of the ancient dungeons provided the opportunity to bear witness to the private conversations of one of the eight most powerful figures in all of Ruskel. And, better yet, these sojourns provided little reason for any guilt, for Keight was a man whom Yarrien had ample reason to despise entirely.

  It took Yarrien a few more days of analysis to work out that there must be some auditory phenomenon occurring within the channels of the dungeon air funnels, which themselves were likely connected by circumstance to the Keights' hearth's ash disposal chute. He remembered from the time spent working on their washroom that a vast and ornate, but well-kept, blue and gold hand-knitted flatweave rug lay before the ivory drawing room fireplace, the very rug one of their Dobermans must've been chewing on. The first time he saw it it stopped him in his tracks, the tasteful elegance of it, the care with which the patterns of birds in flight and grand manor houses had been drawn with gold thread. Brangwen had then caught him, and remarked as to how it must have a value far greater than the meagre riches of the entire Fala family.

  Yarrien thought on all of these events of the last few weeks, and how this random discovery meant that the slow river of his life had seemed to take on a little more water. Unbeknownst to him, though, this river was set to become a flume this very evening, when he overheard two new voices - the two invited guests of Gwilleme Keight.