On the morning of the first murder, Grackle Nuroon stalked his museum in a complete and utter funk.

Those staff members who had arrived on shift early—unlucky souls bound either by relentless ambition or the cruel betrayal of faulty alarm clocks—did their best to shrink into the shadows and keep well out of his way. But there was seemingly no hiding from a man whose very gaze was capable of carving resignation letters directly from their souls.

Grackle didn’t shout; that would have been almost merciful.

No, the Director of Soar Museum wielded his displeasure like a toddler handed a flamethrower—wildly, haphazardly, and with all the reckless joy of having just discovered no one was saying ‘no more ice cream’ ever again.

Anyone unfortunate enough to accidentally cross his path as he swept from one exhibit to the next, was soon reduced to a sobbing wreck. On his best day, Grackle Nuroon was a curmudgeonly bastard—a Level 56 tyrannical menace wrapped in the shell of rabid wolverine and blessed with all the charm of recurring syphilis.

And today was not one of his better days.

"Which fucking genius mislabeled this piece?" he hissed at a Cleaner who hadn’t heard him coming in time to scamper away. The words ricochet off the stone walls like solidified spite., causing the Cleaner to freeze, caught mid-step, clutching his mop like a shield.

Receiving no satisfactory response, the Director stepped forward, glare intensifying on the poor young man. “I asked you a question. Who mislabeled this exhibit?”

“I . . . I . . . I don’t know, sir,” the Cleaner, barely into Level 6, managed to squeak out. “I just clean them.”

“You just clean them? You just clean them!” The Director’s eyes were two pools of fire now that he had locked down on his next victim. “You have been granted access to the single greatest collection of artefacts in the whole of Soar and you just clean them! You just clean them? You are being allowed into the presence of the stuff of legends! Material that has not seen the light of day since the time before the gods and instead of revelling in a moment of rapture at your proximity to history you instead just fucking clean them! Get the fuck out of my sight you pathetic, ungrateful philistine!”

The Cleaner put his head down and ran. As one of his other jobs was sterilising the bathroom at one of the brothels in the undercity, this was hardly his worst interaction of the day. The girls in there didn’t come to play. Within that context, being berated by a small, spidery-looking man was almost uplifting . . .

Grackle watched the man run and span around for his next victim, continuing to seethe.

Four decades in the Director’s chair had cemented his unwavering disdain for the teeming hordes of plebians who dared to set foot in his museum. "Dull-eyed troglodytes," he called them - often to their faces - and lamented the way they "oozed their uncultured stupidity across his floors like slime trails."

Their lack of intellect offended him as much as their sticky fingers on glass cases, their inane questions about the history of artefacts they couldn’t begin to comprehend, or their gawping, stupid faces as they stood in awe of things whose worth they would never grasp.

His museum was not a place for the masses to parasitically feed on his brilliance. To him, this temple to all he had achieved was sullied daily by the shambling, brainless rabble who thought a guided tour and a latte from the gift shop somehow elevated them to the realms of the ‘cultured’.

"They should be stripped of the ability to speak before they enter," he’d once sneered to an underling. "If I could charge the public a stupidity tax, the museum would have its funding forever."

If the throngs of daily visitors were incapable of appreciating his curated treasures, of even attempting to rise above their festering ignorance, then what right did they have to pollute his air with their toxic presence? They weren’t patrons—they were an infestation of the mindless, and their very existence in his domain was an affront to the grandeur of his life's work.

His theoretical irritation with humanity was, right now, focused on the offending exhibit he had plucked free from its display cabinet. "'Third Aeon Hunting Knife,' my haemorrhoided arse," Grackle growled, activating on his most levelled Skills, Artifact Appraisal, with a click of his fingers. The knife glimmered under the spell’s scrutiny, the faint outline of its true origin emerging like a ghost. "Fifth Aeon, at best," he said as the Skill did its work.

"Bloody Khrichen," Nuroon spat. "That pustulent boil masquerading as a scholar wouldn’t know an artefact if it crawled up his arse and spelled its provenance on his colon walls. Calling that proficient wanker a ‘Senior Curator’ is like handing a lunatic a lute and calling him a Maestro—no sense of rhythm, no talent, and everyone’s worse off for having heard the noise.. Every time he mislabels a relic, I feel the collective intellect of Soar hemorrhage a little more. Fifth Aeon, at best," he growled, turning the knife over in his hands. "Third Aeon? That’d be like calling a glory hole the arse of the Goddess of Beauty."

He ran his fingers over the blade as if seeking to purge it of Khrichen’s aura. "Might as well replace him with a paederast with a fetish for licking glass cases. At least they’d have the decency to misclassify things in sacrificial virgin blood. But Khrichen? Oh no, he’ll scribble ‘Third Aeon’ on a Fifth Aeon blade and call it a day, all while masturbating himself into a frenzy of self-regard for doing Soar’s ‘cultural heritage a favour. This is the tragedy of academia in action. One mislabel at a time, these mouth-breathing fuckwits are dragging us back to the fucking Age of Reason."

When the ding, confirmation of the error came through, Nuroon’s grin spread across his face like grease on a slick road. He glanced around, searching for some hapless nonentity to soak up the overflow of his irritation. But the halls had already emptied, word spreading fast that the Director was on the prowl in the Exhibition Hall.

Denied a living target, his wrath fixated on the mislabeled knife.

It lay in his hand, an affront to his very existence.

Didn’t these cretins understand? One error, one mislabeled artifact, and the museum’s credibility could collapse faster than a whore’s virtue during a gold rush. Idiots! The thought of their carelessness made his teeth itch.

He threw the knife to the floor. “I swear, I’ll gut every last one of you incompetents with this and label that an exhibit!”

Because this museum wasn’t just bricks and mortar; it was his reputation made manifest.

For decades, Grackle Nuroon had dragged this crumbling pisshole into greatness with the sheer force of his own genius. His name was the museum’s integrity. Its one saving grace, and the thought of that name tarnished by some half-witted cretin’s blunder made his stomach churn.

Mistakes like this weren’t just stupidity—they were an act of war.

In a fit of incandescent rage, Nuroon’s Cultural Appropriation Skill surged. The knife quivered, then crumbled to ash. A spectral stream of ancient XP bled from the ruins, flowing into Nuroon’s Core and starting a stream of notifications.

He exhaled sharply, satisfaction flickering across his face as the familiar surge of power settled in his veins. He dismissed the messages hovering in his vision. At his age and stage, what did he care for more power?

The knife, mislabeled and mismanaged, was no longer a problem. It was now a part of something greater—him.

For a fleeting moment, guilt brushed against Nuroon’s conscience—a faint whisper reminding him that this wasn’t the conduct befitting a professional of his stature. Once, perhaps, back in the wild days when he’d been just another low-levelled, ambitious Archaeologist scraping through the Pits of Panthen, such impulsive actions would have been his stock-in-trade.

It was how he came to prominence, after all. A Skill by which you could absorb the power of ages past was quite a handy one for someone who regularly found himself balls deep in the collected detritus of lost civilisations . . .

But now? Now he was a figure of respect. A man of standing. Such feasting should be beneath him.

The moment passed.

Then the anger that had simmered since the previous night’s insult roared back to life, scorching away any pangs of remorse. The Trustees, with their tone-deaf directives and backhanded disrespect, were lucky he wasn’t storming through the museum, reducing all of their priceless exhibits to ash and siphoning their essence into his Core.

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They thought he was ‘suffocating presence’ now, did they? Wait until he had several millennia of XP on board. Then they’d see of what he was capable! His hand rested on the skeleton of some terrible lizard from the past and half of it crumbled away to nothing before another mountain of notifications caused him to step away.

The thought of absorbing the entire institution ran through his mind, as it always did at moments of high tension. Who, or what, could stand in his way then?

But no.

He had long decided that was not to be his role in life. He would rather be lord and master of all he surveyed in the Museum than a more . . . active presence in the wider world. Starting to calm, he let his charged Skills fade away. Around Soar, several gods that had powered up their own abilities in response to the burgeoning threat, took a sigh of relief.

Slightly calmer now, the Director thought back to his conversation of the previous evening. The one that had put him in such a mood. The one where he was told an auditor would be presenting themselves at the Museum this morning.

He had not taken the news well.

"Grackle, I do think you’re overreacting just a touch," Liando Verlan had ventured, her watery blue eyes flicking to the door of her office as if gauging the distance to safety. Delivering bad news to this man was a task no one relished, least of all Liando, who had been handed the job like a live mana grenade. Nuroon’s temper was the stuff of whispered legend, and she had no desire to become another cautionary tale to future Chairs of the Museum Board.

"It’s not that the Trustees are implying you have done anything untoward," she continued. "It’s just... well, you know how it is. Our Articles of Association are quite clear on this point. An annual audit of the exhibits is standard procedure to remain compliant with our insurance. Checks and balances, Grackle. Checks and balance. Nothing more sinister at play here."

Her fingers tightened around the edge of the report she’d brought with her, a flimsy shield against the firestorm she expected to follow. "And... well... from our records, it seems it’s been some time since—"

But Nuroon wasn’t listening. He rarely did when his temper was in full swing.

"Interference," he snapped. "Plain and simple. What you’re suggesting is the very betrayal I was assured would never happen when I agreed to take on this role so many years ago. Do you know what a museum is without the independence of its leadership? A circus. A sideshow. A political instrument. And, with your actions, you are threatening to turn this institution into precisely that."

He didn’t stop to let her interject—his anger rolled on, building in momentum. "What’s next, I wonder? Will one of the Trustees suggest we turn over the Minaron Wing to showcase their personal histories? Shall we swap out the Hall of Kings for an exhibit of the art of their latest whores and mistresses? This is a travesty, Liando. A travesty!" His hands slammed down on her desk for emphasis, sending a stack of documents skittering to the floor.

"I have tolerated much in my tenure here, but up with this sort of thing, I will not put!" The Director’s voice echoed in the room like the final gavel in a courtroom, daring her to argue.

Grimacing at the Director’s tone, Verlan raised her hands in a gesture of what can I do? "I hear your concerns, Grackle. Truly, I do. But I must be clear—the Trustees are united on this matter. The Auditor is already booked and she will be here first thing tomorrow morning."

Her voice softened, though it was more out of self-preservation than sympathy. "We, of course, expect you to extend them every courtesy. There’s no reason—none whatsoever—that this audit cannot be resolved swiftly and without fuss. By the supper bell, it’ll all be over. You let them in, walk them through the exhibits they wish to inspect, and if everything is in order - as I’m sure it will be - you won’t have to deal with this again for another year."

She paused, offering a carefully practised smile. "This is just a routine formality, Grackle. Nothing more. I’m sure you’ll handle it... impeccably."

It was a challenge to sustain the full heat of his indignation in the face of Verlan’s calm, reasonable tone, but Nuroon gave it his best shot.

"And that," he said, jabbing a finger toward her for emphasis, "is yet another outrage. Why am I only hearing about this inspection now? We had a Board meeting last week—last week, Liando! An event of this magnitude should have been front and centre on that agenda. Not snuck in like this!" His voice rose, echoing off the offices’s polished walls. "It is scandalous—absolutely scandalous—that I’ve only been informed of this inspection on the eve of its occurrence. The Trustees, it seems, have decided that humiliating me is their new pastime!"

Nuroon’s words dripped with theatrical venom, his eyes narrowing as if daring Verlan to contradict him. "Is this what my decades of service have earned me? To be blindsided like some novice Curator in charge of a backwater artefact swapmeet?"

Verlan privately reflected that a significant factor in the Director’s prickly personality was likely the fact that he hadn’t been humiliated nearly enough during his long and self-important life.

Of course, now didn’t seem like the moment to offer that observation.

"I can assure you, Grackle, there’s no conspiracy at play here. Tomorrow is simply the first available date we could secure. That’s all. "Frankly," she continued, "we must also consider our responsibilities. I’m sure I don’t need to explain this to someone with your experience, but Soar Museum houses some of the most priceless artefacts in the region. In the event of fire, flood, or an act of the gods themselves, the Trustees must be certain we’re in full compliance with insurance requirements." Her gaze became steady, almost challenging. "You understand, of course, that such oversight is not only prudent but essential to safeguarding our collection—and, by extension, your impeccable reputation."

Of course, the deliberately short notice of the inspection also ensured that Nuroon would have little time to make their lives a living hell in the interim.

And that was the whole point.

The Trustees had learned long ago that giving the Director too much lead time meant he’d have the chance to unearth a host of old skeletons—metaphorical and otherwise—and use them to drag anyone standing in his way into the muck.

There had been countless occasions during his lengthy tenure when the former Archaeologist’s Skills had not been confined to the excavation of ancient artefacts. No, Grackle Nuroon had a particular knack for unearthing the kind of inconvenient truths that others desperately hoped would stay buried.

Take, for instance, the now-infamous "Goat, Gallon, and Melon Incident"—a debacle that still haunted certain members of the Board. Nuroon had stumbled upon it during what he liked to call "routine diligence" and what everyone else would call "a targeted campaign of blackmail."

It turned out that a former Chair had been moonlighting as a particularly enthusiastic supporter of the local Fruit Growers’ Guild. This would have been harmless enough, except for an after-hours event in the Museum's Hall of Mythic Agriculture that had somehow involved a goat, a gallon of lube, and twelve exquisitely carved melons. The details were mercifully lost to history—something about an interpretive performance art piece gone horribly wrong—but the few grainy Mana-Captured images that survived were more than enough to bend the will of the most obstinate Trustee.

"I don’t need to know why the goat was on a wheeled platform," Nuroon had said at the time, lounging back in his chair as the Chairperson’s face turned an increasingly impressive shade of scarlet. "I don’t need to know why the melons were hollowed out. And I certainly don’t need to know what the lube was for. What I do need is for you to approve my budget proposal. Otherwise, I might find myself inspired to mount a new exhibit on 'Unusual Rituals of the Late Fourth Aeon.' Can you imagine the public interest? The scholarly debate?"

Suffice it to say, the funding was approved in record time, and the Chairperson quietly resigned a week later.

It was one of Nuroon’s prouder moments—not because of the leverage, but because it so perfectly encapsulated the fundamental truth of his philosophy: there was no closet without a skeleton, and no skeleton without a story to be told at just the right moment.

This time, however, the Trustees were determined to avoid such a bloodbath. They had learned from past mistakes, and they had made sure the cards were stacked against the Director.

No dirty laundry to air, no whispered deals to be put in place and no desperate alliances to be formed.

This time, they were playing it smart—keeping things tight, contained, and most importantly, keeping Nuroon’s arsenal of secrets just a little out of reach. All of them had ‘gone away to the country’ the moment Liandro had sat down with the spidery little tyrant.

"And if I were to offer my resignation?" Nuroon said, skinny nostrils flaring. "Would that make a difference?"

Verlan stiffened. Rising to the Chairwomanship of Soar Museum, the beating heart of the city’s cultural life, was no small feat. One didn’t get there without learning how to wield sharp elbows and an even sharper mind.

As a Level 40 Captain of Industry, she had recently been granted an unusual threshold bonus by her patron god, and while she wasn’t exactly itching to bend Grackle fucking Nuroon to her will, she was also done indulging his petty tantrums over a relatively minor request.

"Of course, Grackle," she said, "that would be a matter of considerable regret to the Trustees. We wouldn’t want you to feel that was your only option." She leaned forward slightly, just enough to let him know she wasn’t going to back down. "However, on behalf of the Trustees, I have been empowered to accept... should you insist that to be your wish."

If Nuroon wanted to escalate this into something personal, she’d play that game. But it would be on her terms, not his. The ball, for once, was not in his court.

Verlan raised a hand, summoning Nuroon’s contract into it in a puff of theatrically satisfying smoke—entirely unnecessary, but it served its purpose. She glanced down at the document, her fingers tracing its edges as if contemplating the weight of its words.

"We extended the term of your Directorship just last year," she said. "It would indeed be disappointing to see your long career at Soar Museum come to an end over a matter as trifling as this. But make no mistake, Grackle—while you may regard this as a minor inconvenience, the Trustees cannot afford to compromise on the matter of compliance with our constitutional rules."

She let the silence hang between them. "This audit will proceed, whether you like it or not. And if you choose to obstruct it, we will find a way forward regardless. The reputation of this institution, and the legal standing of its operations, cannot—and will not—be jeopardized over personal grievances."

Despite a little more back-and-forth, there was nothing left to say, not after the stakes had been laid bare.

Now, this morning, here he stood, watching the hands of the clock tick towards the arrival of an Auditor—one who might be poised to unravel everything he’d spent years carefully constructing.

His carefully built empire, each piece of the museum’s intricate operations a fragile card stacked upon the next, could very well come crashing down around him. And that was quite without mentioning the astonishing find even now being explored in the Great Hall . . .

This had the potential to be a truly disastrous day.

Nuroon let the remaining ash from the desiccated knife fall from his fingers.

Well, there was little to be done about it now, in any event.

It wasn't like he could have the fucking Auditor killed, was it?