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Maryc awoke to the familiar throb of a hangover. Groaning, he rolled stiffly from the squat, low table that was the only piece of furniture in his small room. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet, overturning several brass drinking vessels and spilling the now-cold remnants of rich pressed coffee upon the table. Painfully, he stretched, his thick, scarred limbs protesting and aching joints popping with every movement.

Muttering blasphemies against the first half-dozen gods to enter his mind, he absently overturned the beaten silver dish that served as his ashtray, emptying an improbably large pile of ashes and a collection of chewed cigar butts onto the livewood surface, amid many such similar stains and marks of abuse.

“Urrrghhh.” It was nearly noon – far too early an hour to suit his comfort. He eyed one promising cigar butt, fished it from the pile, and chewed on it experimentally. “Blaaghhh!!” With an expertise born of extensive repetition, he spit the butt contemptuously into an anonymous corner of the room, where it might join its fellows.

Upending the water pipe, which was presently unemployed, though the lingering narcotic scent of mordayn vapor still hung in the room, he sloshed its contents into the silver dish and gazed blearily into the resulting scum-crusted pool. Distorted features danced on its troubled surface, and as he often did, he fancied he saw her face gazing back at him.

“Jayne….” His voice was a rasp like the tearing of rotten steel.

He could still smell the scent of her through the haze of the years; almost taste the rich fullness of her lips again. How many decades since he’d held her in his arms? How many decades since he’d murdered her, his only love, in a red-hazed frenzy of hatred? Tears came unasked-for, and he angrily rubbed at his one good eye and gazed accusingly at the silver basin, as though it had wronged him somehow.

She was gone, of course. There was only the face of a bitter old man with grey in his hair and four days growth of beard, one eye red and bloodshot and the other white and filmed over from the ancient wound Zaeurl had left him. Angrily he swiped at the face in the basin, putting another dent in the dish as it clanged off the wall and drawing a wince as the noise hammered into his pain-riddled skull.

“Quori blood….” The idea slipped unbidden into his mind. Forgetfulness. Void. Absolution. His good eye suddenly alert with purpose and intent, he burst into a frenzy of motion, scavenging the small room with lethal efficiency. With a too-loud curse and another wince of pain, he halted, gazing mournfully at an empty wineskin and a black, sticky stain on the intricately carved livewood surface of the table.

“So my friend…I see you have a taste for demon essence as well.” He laughed bitterly at the joke. “Will this finally sate your appetite for blood?”

Maryc had constructed the table himself, had dragged the lumber for it, along with the body if his friend Tallessen, from the festering jungles of the Khraal. It was a repository for all the horrors of a decade of war, the loneliness of a life spent fleeing his sins, and the enduring pain of rejection by the only family he’d ever known. For uncounted sleepless nights, he had carved the faces of half-remembered nightmares into its living wood. With endless hours of tedious labor, he had etched the abuses and failures of a shattered life into its dark and hungry surface.

Unbidden, the memories returned, though in recent years he thought he’d confined them to the locked room of his nightmares. Jayne’s blood, fresh on his hands. The iron in Andrey’s face as the man who’d been his mentor and father figure turned him out of the monastery. The desperate years in the forests of the Eldeen Reaches, half-mad with grief and despair and living in filth like an animal. Tears misted his eyes. Maryc’s hands locked into fists as the memories wracked him, and unconsciously he shifted. A growl rose low in his throat as fur thickened along his forearms and talons grew from his fingers, pricking his gnarled flesh and dripping blood onto the ever-thirsty surface of the table. He could still feel the hellish heat and humidity of the fens of the Khraal , could still hear the lethal flit of the goblin’s poison darts that had slain his friends in ones and twos as they fled that cursed place. His body shook with the remembered booms of magical explosions, and once again he held his friend as Tallessen died slowly from an acid arrow wound in his gut, bleeding and stinking from the release of his own bowels. He shuddered once more in the cold clinging fog of the Mournlands, where he’d sought and failed to find the death that would have been a welcome escape from his nightmares. How many years those awful dreams had haunted him! It had become easier when he learned that his sleep was dreamless while he was stoned.

Gods, he needed a hit. Throwing on a loose-fitting pair of breeches and a stained and baggy shirt, he lifted up his satchel and let out an explosive curse, his loudest of the morning as the weight of his coin purse proved it to be as empty as the skin of quori blood. Damn. He was going to have to find some work. Well, a few more scars on his hide would be nothing next to the scars on his soul. And wasn’t that pretty-boy noble he’d followed into the Mournlands here in Argonth? Stormshaft or something like that. Maryc’s headache began to subside as the beginnings of a plan coalesced. He even whistled a little, tone-deaf and out of key, as he threw open the door and went in search of the young courtier, leaving the table behind, crouched in its darkness.