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"-. July 11, Year 580 of the King's Calendar .-"

"-. Antonidas D'Ambrosio, Mage of the Advanced Research and Illumination Sect .-"

His findings were sinister.

At first he'd been vexed at being assigned to base sleuthing. His calling lay with the higher mysteries, not the lower, and his specialty was the research of arcane patterns, not human ones. But the Council of Six selected him precisely because of that reputation. He was sufficiently discerning and diligent as to be competent even outside his specialty, the Council told him. More importantly, it would make it less likely that the true purpose of his consignment would be immediately discerned by his fellow mages. His peers that had been entrusted with magical security in Alterac City. The mages he was now investigating while pretending to learn from them for the purpose of taking over one of the Auction House oversight positions later.

Not that they were Antonidas' main concern, anymore.

For all that magical security was a service Dalaran had been providing for centuries, the kingdoms did not much appreciate having to leave such things in the hands of a foreign power. Antonidas didn't blame them, and he would speak in favour of Dalaran gracefully accepting the new status quo when the kingdoms finally gathered the courage to break away from Dalaran's monopoly in favour of home-grown magic organisations. Now that Stormwind had proven the idea viable with its Order of Conjurers, it was only a matter of time. Already many noble scions here in Alterac had studied in Dalaran only to come back and displace the Kirin Tor's own appointees as warders, enchanters, researchers and court mages. It had come to the point where the Auction House security was the only place where Dalaran still had majority.

So it was most surprising that requests for investigation had come from the nobility of Alterac, rather than Dalaran's agents here. What remained of the highest nobility, even. News of the young king's purge had reached Dalaran faster than all other nations, and the Kirin Tor had understandably been keeping an eye on the situation. That no civil war broke out was close to a miracle, and even Strom's reaction was strangely lukewarm. The latter, at least, seemed to be swiftly changing to the point where war might break out this very year, or next at the latest. But what did not change was that the remaining nobility had called on a foreign power to investigate their own affairs. 'Potentially subversive elements' they called them, which had led to 'ruinous information leaks and security failings' at 'all strata of interaction' between Alterac and Dalaran, and even within Alterac itself.

The requests came with so many different envoys, in so many different wordings, and from many enough different sources that even the Kirin Tor didn't know if the nobles suspected incompetence or malice. Or if they suspected it of each other, Dalaran, or the Alterac Crown itself.

Then, to truly throw the fox into the henhouse, a request to do everything requested by the nobles came from the Alterac Crown itself too.

The Council of Six wasn't even sure the nobles and king even knew about each other's entreaties. Or, if they did, they didn't admit it. The only thing they could be sure of was Alterac aimed to use Dalaran as a hammer to get rid of their problems, and by extension take all the blame for the resulting fallout from their rivals and the king, and vice versa.

Asking the Kirin Tor to get rid of subversive mages when those saboteours were most likely blood scions of their peers (if not originating from their own courts or that of King himself) made this a very sensitive issue. Antonidas had explained all this to the King himself, in a secret meeting that the Kirin Tor had arranged for him. Aiden Perenolde was suspicious enough of yet another foreign mage in their midst, despite asking for the job to begin with, however belatedly. The king certainly didn't admit to such, but he couldn't entirely hide his feelings despite his mastery of dissimulation. It made Antonidas certain that the man had only sent the Crown's request after finding out about his nobles' entreaties, in a bid to undermine and supplant them. A bid that was ultimately as successful as it was unnecessary, the Kirin Tor hadn't planned to go around him in any case.

At least the king was mollified when Antonidas assured him his job was not to pull any seams but to find them. As discreetly as possible.

"We will, of course, share all relevant findings with the Crown," Antonidas assured the man as the meeting was winding down.

"Relevant by whose standards?" the king asked mildly. Too mildly. "Go, mage, and try to do a proper job of it, unlike your compatriots."

Whatever could you mean?

Credit to the Council's wisdom, they were right that Antonidas' unwitting peers were reassured by his academic leanings. The Council were also right that he would master this task as easily as all others before it. Once he figured out which principles of research and pattern recognition to conflate and not conflate relative to people's actions – and paperwork – he discovered an area of research that was, at the very least, moderately captivating, if not strictly necessary for his self-attainment.

Unfortunately, captivating became disconcerting and then disquieting within the space of a month. After weeks of shadowing his nominal seniors, circumventing them under illusory disguises to reach restricted areas (often as said seniors themselves), trawling through countless customer lists and transaction ledgers, questioning (or interviewing) various notables and non-notables all throughout the city (whose accounts were as consistent as they were mutually contradictory), and even magically disguising himself as the odd acquaintance or rival of the locals in question, Antonidas was reaching the disquieting conclusion that he was on the trail of himself.

Not literally, rather it was looking as if whoever or whatever was (or had been) at work in Alterac City had used his exact same approach to achieve his nefarious aims. Whatever they were. Or, alternatively, it was an entire unknown group of subversive mages. A possibility that Antonidas had trouble seeing plausibility in, as such people didn't come out of nowhere, especially multiple people with such specialised skillset.

Archmage Krasus, his contact with the Council of Six back in Dalaran, was sceptical. "Be careful not to ascribe magical explanations to what could be achieved with mundane competence." He cautioned him via projection. "Or corruption. Skulduggery can account for much, especially there."

Antonidas could see his point, the Alterac court was more decadent and deadly than anything he had imagined, even after thoroughly reading up on the Magocrats. Additionally, despite the best work and pay incentives, corruption was inevitable in any monopoly and the Auction House was no different. Antonidas, of course, passed on the relevant names for disciplinary action and prosecution to the Kirin Tor or the King's representative as required.

What did not make sense, however, was that too many of the more catastrophic failures of diplomacy had happened in public or semi-public venues. Or, rather, in private venues nonetheless attended by many of the others ultimately doomed to the gallows – balls, hunts, feasts and soirees. Very uncharacteristic of Alterac if they truly were so competent at shadow games, something Krasus and the Council agreed with. For all their decadence, the notables here were usually much more discreet, and their hired help tended towards the proficient or recently deceased. It was why Antonidas had so much trouble with what should have been a simple fact-finding mission. Moreover, many of the stories were conflicting even from the people least likely to be lying.

Not all of the nobles he'd managed to interview were as opaque as they thought. They were certainly skilled wordsmiths and hard to get a hold of, as he only got audiences by leaning hard on the pull of Dalaran (as the King refused to show his own hand), and often only because they were already in the city for other reasons. They were more than willing to gossip and demean their various rivals, but their stories didn't match up more than half the time.

"Even the ones least likely to be lying had differing accounts of the disagreements of the deceased," Antonidas explained to Krasus during their communication. "Disagreements that led to bad blood on top of the inherited one. Someone recalled the then-yet-unhanged outbidding them on the same item. Another would claim someone bribed the Auction House staff to keep quiet about certain items on offer, and they only found out because of convenient information leaks. Other times, it was conflicts of interest over individuals secretly blacklisted." Corruption and leaks which the Kirin Tor should have found out about well before this, even if it was beyond magical purview. "Even for the more personal feuds unrelated to us, some remember ridiculing each other, while the others recall threats. There is even a case where one remembers his compatriot being spat in the face while the other side remembers a brawl. And the times these events supposedly happened are inconsistent between their viewpoints as well."

Looking through the conviction records of the nobles that saw their end at the gallows, the same pattern emerged. While defence testimonies were never going to match witness accounts or presented evidence – otherwise they wouldn't have been convicted in the first place – the character witness accounts told a different story.

"Even their direct enemies seemed disbelieving of their crimes in at least half the cases I could independently verify," Antonidas reported. "Or at least disbelieving that they would be caught, never mind so embarrassingly. The biggest anomaly is House Angevin, who everyone agrees wouldn't be involved in any dark games, though the same number of people – if not all the same people – also agree that it could only have ended this way for the same reason."

"Dissent is punished harshly in Alterac, it seems," Krasus noted philosophically, shaking his head. "Especially when that dissent is to the good. Almost as harshly as trying to finally conform after lifetimes of the opposite."

"Which does not seem to truly have been the case here."

"Quite."

Eventually, Antonidas concluded that the Angevin testimony was the only one genuine, and they were the only ones who had been truly innocent in the whole affair. Unfortunately, this also meant they were the only lead he could definitively dismiss, meaning he had wasted all that time chasing geese.

He found a new trail almost by accident, when he took a break from his prime investigation to look into the more recent developments that might be related to his cover. After all, that had to be maintained as well.

"What's this?"

Very closely before the nobles of Alterac began suffering failures of discretion one after another, half the standing mercenary contracts on auction were taken down and replaced with almost identical versions, save the mention that they were 'no longer accepting hits on child saints or their dependents.'

"I must be missing something important."

Thankfully, this was material his cover was fully privy to, so he could just walk up to one of his local peers and ask.

"Oh, that." The woman pursed her lips. "You missed quite the event last year."

Learning that he had missed the emergence of the first non-ordained Light-using human in written history made Antonidas, for the first time, question whether he had perhaps buried himself in his tomes too deeply. His only consolation was that the news was still mostly rumors outside of Alterac, and the people who had since had dealings with this…

"A fourteen year-old boy? Or would he be fifteen, now?"

"Yes. We were all surprised, but the Archbishop himself spent hours of his visit over in Strahnbrad confirming it. He's something of a local legend there now, and here too, though you're not likely to run into him anymore. Last I heard he and his family had moved out to a farm somewhere."

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"What is his name?"

"Wayland Hywel. A cobbler's son, if you can believe it."

Quite the local legend indeed, if people knew his name off-hand.

There might be something there.

Antonidas considered the reports of other investigators he'd read in preparation for this assignment. According to normal procedure, now would be a good time to go to the market, perhaps under a nondescript illusion, and casually inquire about this local legend. But he'd already wasted days on a tangent, and there was no reason he would draw suspicion for doing what anyone could do on a whim. He decided to forgo any disguise and instead teleported to Strahnbrad to talk to the local priest.

"The Council knew the full extent of my skills when they sent me here," Antonidas idly told his steed, Hengroen, as he led the gelding out of the stables. "Why didn't they supply this information when they gave me this assignment? Perhaps they were worried it would bias my investigation? I cannot imagine they did not know."

The clerist was surprised at his visit. Most mages did not attend church in his experience. Antonidas himself was not strictly pious, he certainly trusted his mastery of the Arcane over anything else, but he did believe. The priest was inordinately surprised by that.

"Perhaps faith is not the right term," Antonidas mused. "It is merely that the Light is a visible, palpable, quantifiable phenomenon, so it's not so much faith as acknowledging an objective fact."

This, to his surprise, was the best thing he could have said, because it prompted the priest to compare him to his very person of interest. They shared the same viewpoint, it seemed, which the cleric found inordinately remarkable. Antonidas didn't exactly understand why, his view was not exactly rare in Dalaran, but he did not say anything. The Priest turned out to be quite contrite as well, strangely enough.

"I cannot shake the feeling I was in some ways responsible for him leaving the city," the man confessed, an odd turn of phrase for an equally odd reversal of the standard convention when visiting a priest. "I heard rumors of him holding the Light's healing grace for ransom and assumed the worst. I was perhaps too adverse during the annual sanctification of home and hearth. But enough of my maudlin gossip, did you have other questions? Perhaps you require healing?"

Antonidas politely said no and excused himself. There was no point in pushing now that the man had caught himself after his indiscretion. He paid his respects to Great Tyr and Saint Mereldar and left pondering the issue of average cobbler income. What it would take to overcome its limitations in order for a family of three to afford a journey away from Alterac City, never mind settling somewhere else. In the end, after teleporting back to Alterac he still went to the market to make casual inquiries, in disguise of course. He learned that no one had made a business of healing people with the Light, and later questions with his noble contacts confirmed the mysterious child saint hadn't sought patronage among the high and rich either. He did hear enough to prompt a follow-up examination of Auction House ledgers, however, though it took an embarrassingly long time to cotton on to his use of a fake name. They revealed that the child was either a genius inventor or a very good deal-maker. Whatever the truth, the numbers added up to quite a bit of coin steadily accumulating over the course of roughly half a year. Revenue, not one-time payments, though the Auction House was not privy to how these arrangements might have evolved or changed after the auctions were completed.

Most important of all, Antonidas slowly pieced together that all of the nobles that harassed the child had hung, and a fair few of them even had the King's favour. Though this seemed lost on the people he talked to. All they knew was that the people executed had been convicted of alleged crimes related to national security, and few to none of them actually believed the official story (and, thus, the Crown).

For the Crown to turn on them, their crimes had to have been particularly heinous, Antonidas thought. Or perhaps not, considering the dark things the Crown itself had ordered that weren't as unknown as Perenolde wished. Alternatively, the ones killed knew things that might implicate the royal family in something they didn't want found out.

Following the record trail all the way finally revealed that the 'something' in question passed through the Auction House as well. But the records of 'what' had been expunged in accordance with the highest secrecy protocols. The ones reserved only for items that were later deemed of so high monetary or strategic value that they shouldn't have been put up for auction in the first place. These were the auctions that weren't privy to just anyone, things that dukes or kings might sometimes auction off to refill their coffers… or as bait in some manner of scheme.

For Antonidas, this meant he had neither the position nor the seniority to be privy to such information. And when he resorted to the means he'd been allowed outside his cover, he learned that everyone who had been around for the events had long since vanished or been found dead. And, in the case of the security mages, recalled to Dalaran.

He finally brought it up with Krasus in their communications. That was when Antonidas received his confirmation that the Council of Six had, indeed, sent him into this blind.

"We did not want you going into this assignment with preconceived notions," Archmage Krasus at least had the grace to look apologetic. "Now that we have your independent verification, the Council can deliberate on a proper course of action."

Antonidas did his best to keep his feelings off his face. "Am I allowed to know about the inciting incident now?"

"Very well. I suppose you've earned it."

Finding out that humans had finally cracked the secret of dwarven gunpowder was one thing. Deducing that he could have found this out on his own by shifting some of his investigative efforts to the trade guilds, or even just the local Alchemist…

He'd definitely buried himself too deep in his tomes.

"You will be contacted in a week to discuss new directions."

The end of the communication left Antonidas feeling adrift. It was polite of Krasus to warn him he would be reassigned now that the Council had gotten what they needed out of him. Antonidas tried not to begrudge the Six their manipulations, but…

He felt like he'd been set up to fail.

And… Something in all this felt too neat and tidy.

Someone tries to steal the golden goose, fails so many times – and so ruinously, however it happened – that the hired blades make common cause to unilaterally refuse additional hits on the fairy tale hero. Then, months later, some force takes it upon itself to confect the bloody downfall of all involved, thus avenging the saintly protagonist. It was a plot straight from a fairy tale transposed into real life. It was too neat, too fantastical, almost… scripted.

You could try to explain the conclusion as the king trying to secure an asset, failing, losing face, and then going to extreme lengths to eliminate the nobles who grew boldest in their defiance from thinking him weak. But investigations weren't won through speculation. You could try to explain it as the Crown cleaning house somewhat more easily, except the same Crown was now facing war with its greatest rival while its grip on power was the weakest it had ever been.

I need to re-assess.

Antonidas spent a day and night reassessing all his findings. Unfortunately, his evidence only reinforced his initial conclusion of a different party. A malicious will. A will guiding events towards an even more sinister picture than a nefarious noble or king's plot gone sideways.

By why? For what reason? To what purpose? The highest nobles left were walking on eggshells, attempts to claim or take over the assets of the dead were mired in opposing claims (or never materialised), the bloodletting had all the people spooked, the guilds and freelancers were cutting out the middleman as much as possible instead of using the Auction House as freely as before, there was war on the horizon even as the Crown's grip on power was the weakest since Alterac's split from the Empire in the Fowl War. The last was in no small part because the only noble house of genuine virtue got caught up in the purge as well, somehow. Which, conspicuously, might leave the Crown without naval support or even control of much of its coast in the case of a domestic conflict. Never mind the military strength that a ducal family possessed. It was frankly astonishing that the nation had not devolved to civil war after such a purge. Or worse.

For all that there had been (and still were) so many ambitions and designs at play, none of this had worked out in favour of any of these interests and egos.

Antonidas' thoughts finally made what felt like the right course correction.

There was some sort of overarching agenda here, a single will, a will that could only have done what it did by taking the seeming of at least seven different people, in Antonidas' most conservative estimate, more than half of them high nobility. In the process manipulating the Crown of Alterac into the biggest slaughter of its highest echelons of society in the country's entire history. It was a frankly sinister display of… Antonidas wasn't even sure what to call it. Competence, influence, insidiousness? Individual power? Organisational numbers? Was this one individual or a group?

The common people themselves no longer trusted the King's word, when before the Perenolde family had been well regarded among the citizenry. And that was in great part because the remaining nobles, both from the culled families and not, were purposely allowing leaks and rumors to run unchecked, unlike before. Most of them didn't even seem to be manufactured. In a kingdom like Alterac where everyone thought of themselves first, doubly so after such a bloodletting, this suggested either vengefulness or demoralization. Or both. So extreme that those involved no longer cared about the danger to themselves.

No one had gained more than they lost here.

But.

If the aim was to weaken Alterac from within, it had certainly succeeded.

"Audacious aims beget audacious methods," Antonidas murmured to himself as he thoughtfully skimmed the scattered papers summing up his findings one more time.

Was it foreign meddling? Strom was the obvious culprit, but the kind of magical competence at work was uncharacteristic of the place, and King Trollbane had thus far failed to take advantage of the situation. Lordaeron? Same issues. Gilneas? King Greymane was in the process of negotiating a fosterage with King Perenolde, but nothing he'd heard or seen suggested that the Alterac side was doing this under duress. Stormwind? Too far removed and had practically no conflicts of interest with anyone for the same reason.

Whatever the case, there wouldn't be a need to antagonise Dalaran.

"Who are you?" Antonidas murmured as he beheld his dark materials. "What are you aiming for here?"

And how much of everything was this mysterious third, no, fourth party truly responsible for? Given the attestations of the people he talked to, the clergy and even the Archbishop himself, the notion that the child saint was some kind of ruse could likely be dismissed.

But history was rife with evil actors taking advantage of the workings of the good for their own nefarious purposes. In that light, the delay between the gunpowder fiasco and the noble shadow war – never mind its disastrous conclusion – gained a whole new meaning. Especially since it overlapped with whatever troubles managed to drive the young saint to flee the capital permanently. Almost like they were waiting for it. For him to get out of their way.

Or die.

Antonidas' task was only to find the strings and seams, not to pull them, but… he was reluctant to hand over the investigation now that he had come so far. He wasn't one to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, but his superiors wouldn't have assigned him to this task if they didn't trust his skills. They certainly seemed to trust his judgment, even after they themselves impaired it through their manipulations, however well-intentioned.

If nothing else...

He had always been rewarded for initiative.