Through the gates, up the slightly bent path, in through the door, and following the distastefully done portraits of dead men to the study. Then I could finally start truly dealing with the catastrophe that was the investigation that I myself sparked. It didn't sound all that pleasant to begin with, but I far preferred the scent of ink to this iron reek. In reality, I didn't get much farther than turning the bend of the path before my wishfully droll plan was derailed.

The driver was some couple strides behind me in the way that respect and subservience was normally displayed by servants, so I was fairly certain that I was the first one to notice the smell. For all that my time in this world had been nothing but miserable, I had this odd hope that it wasn't what it was. But inevitably, like all things, it was exactly what it was.

Looking at the veins on the back of your hand, it's easy to convince yourself that blood is blue before it is exposed to oxygen. After that, oxygen makes it a nice full color which we describe as blood red because there is simply no other more common place to find it. Then after it seeps into the ground, it takes on a color that mostly depends on the type of ground that it was: soil, sand, mud, or some other stuff. In the case of the path, it was a dry dirt that bordered on being considered gravel, so in the places where it took in the most, it just looked like water. In the places where only a hint of the stuff had made it, the edges of those dried up puddles, the hint of red showed up much more clearly.

What were utterly convincing though, were the bodies. A couple of the lucky ones had gashes in their necks. Those were just crumpled up in whatever pose that gravity saw fit to put them in. The ones whose intestines I could see seemed less at peace, or at least more actively in pain. Most had their hands close enough to the openings that they were probably trying to hold their insides in up until the last moments. A few were doing their best to drag themselves somewhere. It was a bit mysterious where they thought they were going with wounds like those, but I was actually fairly happy that I couldn't empathize.

"Sarah!" the driver called as he rounded the corner. It was as if he hoped that she would turn around and greet him back. "Sarah! No, please!" he wailed, a little more in touch with reality now.

"Leave her. All of these are dead. I have a feeling that there are more. If any of them are still breathing, then they're more in need of help than Sarah is," I told the driver. I still wasn't quite sure if Sarah was the woman with a hole through her lung and out the other end or the one who had somewhere she needed to be at the end, but neither of them were anything resembling alive.

The driver gave the bodies a moment to wake up before he stood back up and looked back at me. He was obviously shocked, but I couldn't quite decide whether it was at the terrific violence or at me. I understood both angles, intellectually at least, but neither was conducive to further action, so I compromised with a bit of feigned anger, "I won't let more die than I have to."

It wasn't as if the morality of my actions hinged on having some emotional part of my brain make me feel that the actions were right. I fully intended to produce moral outcomes here, it was just difficult to care about dead flesh.

Depending on what the assumptions were that we took in with us, it was both lucky and unlucky that the strategy of attackers was apparently to guard the exits and corral their victims to a centralized spot. Of those that didn't make their escape from the building before the exits were secured, there was very little doubt that any of them were still alive. On one side of the room was where bodies had been stacked and on the other side was where the bodies' decapitated heads were arranged. It seemed like the attackers had been very concerned with finding someone, probably me. For me, it was lucky because the headcount was remarkably easy. All the heads were lined up in neat rows and columns. For my driver though, it seemed that it just made it easier for him to find his daughter whose head he was now cradling.

In a way, my driver had been rewarded for doing his job and staying the night with his life. That wasn't to say that the rest of my staff had been doing something wrong as this was clearly well organized enough that they never had a chance, but it was enough that I would've bet the story could've been labelled a miracle by the faithful. Perhaps if he forgave the actions of their killers, then he would be inducted into sainthood within the odd Christianity inspired church that existed in this world.

I left the future saint to his grief and checked on the rest of the house. There was the occasional bloodstain from what I assumed was the little resistance that was put up, but nothing comparable to the scene at the main entrance. When I finally made it to the main bedroom and study, they were completely torn apart. All the furniture was overturned, portraits littered the ground, and the walls were pocked with holes. Eventually they had found some sort of secret passageway that I hadn't even known existed. It looked like it led down and out the opposite way of the main gate. It also looked like their beating down the walls had put it on the edge of collapse, enough so that there was no way that I would be going in.

***

~Mary~

"You can't just spend all your time there, Mary," Mellok said, "If you don't want to have to see Phillip, then you can help me with my work, but you haven't left the house for days now."

Mary looked up from the soft rise and fall of Chella's chest. It was more peaceful than it had been, but she hadn't shown a single sign of waking the entire time. Perhaps it would be better if she did force herself to take a break. At least it would be what Chella would've wanted her to do. Even if it made her feel like she was honoring her memory rather than doing her a favor. The superstitious nonsense that made it matter was bunk anyway, so she followed her father out of the room.

The work itself started with a mountain of background reading that she needed to catch up on. At least the inked words didn't dance around and morph like the thoughts in her head. She hadn't done much reading since the incident and it felt a little like a return to normalcy.

Some of the developments were directly related to Mary's own actions. For one, the pro-war faction had started to prod Prince Phillip with promises of glory and asserting what was rightfully his. It was a thinly veiled promise to usher in an age of increased royal freedom in return for their war. Thinly veiled or not though, it was an effective ploy that was already pulling in parts of the prince's coalition. It was easy to see the temptation of increasing his support, especially for those who didn't much care whether there was a war or not.

The only major shift on the other side of the coin was that House Finer was hardening its anti-war stance. They had gone as far as threatening to outlaw the levying of troops unilaterally. It was a widely popular position among the masses who preferred not to be forcefully dragged into wars, but it also meant that even defensive actions would become prohibitively difficult to muster. Very few other powers were willing to go as far with their stances even given the moderating reputation of House Finer.

One of the few exceptions to that had previously been House Masler, but Darren was largely taken as an unknown since he hadn't yet made any moves. After the conviction of Herbert Masler, there was also speculation that their stance had been more to prevent weapons prices from dropping in the event of a state-led war effort. It was much more profitable to sell high quality imports to nobles and their private outfits than to try and scale an illegal operation like the one they had been running. Mary couldn't believe she hadn't even thought to ask Darren what the position of House Masler would be going forward. If she hadn't been so preoccupied with the prince and his antics she would never have gone into this so blindly.

The rest of the new developments were the uninspired politicking of men and women born into their power and with nothing to do but wield it. Her father had spent enough dinners either complaining that they were all useless fools or being thankful that they were all useless fools. It wasn't exactly anything new.

"Dad, I'm up to date. What am I doing next?" Mary called out across the room to where Mellok was going through some papers of his own.

"Give me a guess. You probably had some idea going in didn't you? You are your mother's daughter after all," he said.

More than not having an idea, there were just too many to choose from. It might be something menial like going over reports and passing on anything that was actually worth his time, or it could even be having her take over as chief justice while he made some overtures. But if his objective was cheering her up, then it was probably neither so boring nor so stressful. By process of elimination Mary guessed, "Does it have to do with House Finer?"

"Nothing less from you, eh? I know Jezbeth is your classmate, so I was thinking that you could talk to her and figure out what they're thinking." Mellok poked at his stack of papers, "It doesn't quite add up from what I know of them. There's something going on that we don't know about."

***

It always amazed her that messages could be so quickly passed from one end of the city to the other. As a part of the capital's culture, it was often taken for granted, but that also meant that Mary hadn't seen any real analysis of how such a system had come to be. Its workings were straightforward enough, just a constant flow of messengers going on set routes to mass deliver messages, but the sheer expense was staggering. It started by taking messages for just a few noble houses, but eventually they expanded into taking a fee from every noble house in the city. Not only that, they were routinely trusted with secret messages that a noble based in another city would never have given to anyone but their own people. It was basically sacred. Any attempt at intercepting messages going through the system or accosting the messengers themselves would lead to universal condemnation.

So it was through that system that Jezbeth had gotten the message to meet with her here in the back rooms of the council chambers. Mary was sure that the excuse that she had used to leave behind her classes had been, like always, completely irrefutable and transparently false. It was always as if she needed to demonstrate her power and yet never endanger it. In many ways, Darren purported to think just like Jezbeth acted, and yet he always ended up taking some sort of risk in the end.

"I am of course glad that you thought to correspond with me of all people, but may I ask what in particular you wanted to discuss?" Jezbeth asked over her steaming cup of tea. Another similarity with Darren that was.

"I don't want to be strangers here, so I'll admit that my father put me up to this," Mary began, "He is curious as to the nature of your house's latest announcement."

"Announcement? If you want to treat this as a meeting among friends, then we should call a threat as such, don't you think?" Jezbeth shot back.

"Your latest threat then, to what ends do you make it?" Mary asked.

"It wouldn't be fair if I was the only one offering something though. Can't you think of something that would make me more inclined to share?" Jezbeth asked in return.

It wasn't as if she had no latitude, it was just preferable if she didn't have to exercise it. At least it was promising that Jezbeth was offering to share so long as she got something in return.

"House Wellsworth is willing to help uphold the prime minister's decrees if we find the reasoning sound," Mary said.

"You make it sound like there's a chance Duke Wellsworth would do anything else. No, how about you tell me about what your fiancé is thinking?" Jezbeth said.

"I would need to confirm with him first," Mary said.

"How loyal of you. Then a promise that you will inform me when you do get his permission will be enough," Jezbeth said.

"You have it then," Mary said.

Jezbeth looked pensive for a moment and then let out a deep sigh. "Broadly speaking, House Finer has no designs other than the long term well-being of the people. We see the possibility of a war as running counter to our preferred direction, so we are opposing it."

"I understand why House Finer opposes the war. What I don't understand is why you haven't done as normal and made concessions to the outer territories in exchange for preventing war," Mary pressed.

"And what concessions do you expect us to make?" Jezbeth asked, this time with a hint of frustration. "I think you have spent too long in this damned city. For every beggar on the streets here, there is an entire family of farmers who sit on the brink. We can't let the outer territory lords squeeze any harder or they will collapse. The infrastructure for trade doesn't exist on the frontier. They farm for sustenance and the next time a yield is low, they either starve or they string up their local lord for not providing a backstop and then we put them down. The lords here in the capital that push for war are fools, the lot of them, but the outer territories are desperate. Win or lose, pensions for the dead are paid with coin from the royal reserve. That coin can keep them afloat."

"Stopping a war isn't the solution then, there's more," said Mary.

***

~Darren~

If there was any one theme that games were particularly unsuited to exploring, it was mortality. No amount of bad endings would lead to a permanent consequence. Even the most extreme games could only ever go as far as requiring a re-install to get a fresh start. My own situation was perhaps close, but in the end it was impossible to truly die to tell the tale. Surrounded by the once living though, it felt less real, not more. Going to school, talking to people, even getting kidnapped were things that happened to people. The sort of massacre that had welcomed me only happened in games.

***

For all that online discussion about Hearts of Glass and Steel was dominated by strategy guides and walkthroughs, it had been popular enough that there had still been a fair amount of effort dedicated to the lore. Other than the expected battles over which capture target was the best, one topic in particular stood out. That was the mystery of the character widely accepted as filling the role of villainess, Jezbeth Finer.

There were two main mysteries. First was the question of her personality. When following the conventional strategy of choosing a target and aiming to raise their affection by any means possible, for all the targets except for Lorn, Jezbeth acted in accordance with the normal tropes. She would target the player with harassment and generally appeal to the difference in status as the reason for her actions. Eventually, if the player managed to reach a point where their target would stand up to Jezbeth for them, she would then back down and disappear from the final act. Initial reactions to this were usually either anger that she hadn't been punished for her actions or simply accepting it as a slight variation on the normal formula.

The more interesting cases were when the player decided to make the political connections necessary to arrange marriages with the capture targets. For Prince Phillip that meant that coming into control of a significant coalition necessary for his smooth transition to the throne. For Georn, it meant that building up connections within the army so that he could be a high ranking officer. In these cases though, Jezbeth would become an impediment in a very different way, sometimes outright having the player killed. This was sometimes cited as a particularly frustrating element of the game, the sudden game overs for crossing certain lines, but it was largely overshadowed by the second mystery. Unlike every other named character in the game, not a single player had ever succeeded in killing or witnessing the death of Jezbeth Finer.