Surus Feiçois lived a pampered life before he was cast out of his father's house. His family kept an estate above the flood zone in the upper terraced hills of Gareen.

His father was a landowner with significant holdings. He rented parcels to two dozen sharecroppers in the outer county. On the outskirts of Gareen proper he licensed a vineyard to an ambitious company of young men, Ninci immigrants, after he retired from maintaining it himself.

Adolescence and early adulthood appeared to be idle time for young Surus to those concerned with his well-being. He spent his time pushing figurines around tactical maps that represented the great battles of the known world.

He even corresponded with other enthusiasts across the Imperium. His maester responsible for his education, IiIlrondas, disapproved of this idleness on the part of his ward.

While Surus' contemporaries were going to university and achieving appointments in the foreign services, improving their lot away from provincial life in Gareen, Surus only seemed concerned with games.

The maester investigated the matter and he attempted to read his ward's correspondence. To his surprise, the letters were not even written in Imperial. They seemed to be a game puzzle in themselves.

"What is this," the maester asked his charge. "It looks like an Haute Elven variant created by lotus-eaters!"

"Cryptograms," came the young man's answer. "It is a game I play with others who share a passion for stratagems."

"Games. All you do is play games!" IiIlrondas admonished. "You are found of recasting all the great battles, studying in excruciating detail the actions taken by our generals, and their generals.

"It isn't too late for you, young Feiçois. Get to University. Get an entry into the Imperium administration. You could be of actual use to someone in the right circumstances."

Surus did not take the maester's advice. A few months afterward, one occurrence caused his entire world to be thrown in discord and his life's trajectory to be radically altered.

He had traveled crosstown one evening with the excuse he needed to retrieve packages from the post master's office when the truth about Surus Feiçois was stumbled upon.

The young brunette housekeeper's name was Jejenua. Her work duties for the Feiçois estate included the master's manor, the maester's study cabin, and a smaller manor on the other end of a vineyard and grove where Surus lived alone.

That early evening, Jejenua put on a pair of work trousers, and lumbered buckets and a mop on her back across the yard to give the floor it's weekly scrubbing. After exchanging pleasantries with the two gardeners who relaxed by a large brew pot she let herself in.

Within minutes, her long skinny arms set to working the mop back and forth with the clincher pole in hand while she hummed a country diddy she had danced to on the fiddler's green the night before.

She thought of handsome Reijin, the strapping Ninci longshoreman whom she sought out that evening to escape the menacing leers of two thuggish foreign men; a pair of inscrutable D'jestre who watched her as she waited for her friends to show up.

One stranger, an elder easterner, stood insolent and prim in a gabardine robe; he wore lavender silk beneath it more befitting an opium den than a country dance.

His companion was a younger man dressed in urbane corduroy. He wore a cap with a red wing raven's quill inset askew on the band.

When she told the big Nincian her fret, Reijin took her into his big arms and wrapped them tight against her rump. He lifted her up, carrying her as he walked over to the D'jestre thugs.

With Jejenua's arms wrapped around his neck in a tight hug, Reijin spat at the ground by the feet of the two men.

"The two of you, take the piss before I whoop the shit out of both you creeping jackals."

The look on their strangely ornamented faces as they shuffled off, throwing menacing glances in impotent challenge to Reijin, made the Nincian the boldest man in all the Imperium in her eyes.

But all was well once he took her out to the fiddler's green where they swooned to the old payson lilt for an entire suite of songs. Jejenua got caught up in her dance while thinking of how she was going to get that boy to marry her when she lost her grip on the clincher pole.

It banged a path on the floor and smacked against a floorboard that indented oddly upon contact. She heard a swishing noise in the parlor one room over.

"That's not right. That's not right, at all," Jejenua muttered to herself, nervously.

She bent down and placed her hand against the board. It pushed back in place as she applied pressure. The swishing noise occurred again, this time followed by a click.

Her curiosity far from satiated, Jejenua pushed down on the panel once more and she heard the swishing motion repeat again.

"I'll be a mumbling to myself, skinny little fool," Jejenua said as she rose up. She steeled her resolve as she turned the corner, "but I do have to know what in the blazes of Shoal is going on."

A small corridor on the wall in front of her was now revealed. She could see the ascent of a stairwell. How did she never notice the displacement of space?

It must be part of the old design when a whole clan of the Feiçois family lived here in several houses and they worked a large vineyard estate a generation ago, she reasoned. It must have been walled off when the property was refurbished a few decades ago.

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Jejenua peered through the nearby windows to see if there was any outside activity. Only the two gardeners, now joined by a friend, pitched a fire under a cauldron, brewing mulberry and malted grains. At the maester's residence, IiIlrondas had only one light on in his study.

If Surus returned early this evening, he would certainly stop by the small gathering to talk, as nothing distracted menfolk like a good fire set beneath a brew.

After grabbing an oil lamp, she climbed the stairs into a long room walled off from the second floor. The secret stairway was located in the back of the manse against the far wall that faced the woods where the beautiful snake dancer crone Ursa lived.

Though Jejenua love conversing with the exotic woman in the market and buying from her the enchanted leather goods she sold, Jejenua certainly would never hazard to venture across the woods to visit.

Wizened women attracted wildlings, and wildlings ravished and devoured pretty skinny girls. That is just the way of nature.

That explained how she never noticed the secret area as she had good reason to go out of her way to avoid it, but how she had never bumped into the panel that opened the sliding door built into the wall was the greater mystery.

Given it a moment's consideration, it was all but impossible. Someone must have deliberately broken the clamp that kept the floorboard in place.

Her mouth tasted sour as she thought about it. Jejenua already had two culprits in mind. Those damn D'jestre thugs searching for hidden wealth in the manors of Gareen's good people.

At the top of the stairs, Jejenua lifted the oil lamp in front of her steadily. The light flickered, casting dense shadows on a clutter of many things that lined the walls of the long room.

First of which, to her left, a collection of butterflies pinned on frame boards placed nearest her on the wall. Many of the butterflies were exotic to her.

Sharp, dangerous-looking wings in a spew of monochromatic, and nearly metallic-looking colors with long, pincer needles for mouths. Her heartbeat quicken a few paces when she recognized the malefic insects from a long-ago memory.

In her childhood, the schoolmarm spent her early evenings entertaining and teaching the children of servants. Jejenua recalled a time when the children crowded around the woman's chair as she showed them a monstrous picture.

"The butterflies of the Tatatrez archipelago can be taught to attack in a swarm," the schoolmarm informed them; her voice a dramatic whisper.

"Can they kill a man," one fat dumpling of a boy asked.

"Yes, with vicious cuts that drip with the acid of venom that'll boil your blood and stop your heart."

"I don'na wanna die," the same boy cried as the children let out a collective gasp.

The schoolmarm shook her head. Her hair bun sweeping back and forth.

"Not to worry your lovely little heads, my children. The climate of the Midvries is too cold for the butterflies to survive for very long. So long as you never run away to become South Sea pirates, you have nothing to worry about.

"Any of you plan to grow up to go forth venturing in the South Seas?"

"No," they all shouted.

"I don'na wanna die," screeched the boy once more. Jejenua skirted away from his side when Dumpling pissed himself.

The schoolmarm took note of him with a kind smile, ignoring the growing yellow puddle that had the girls screeching and the boys jeering.

"You stay put," she said, scratching his head, "learn to love your plow and your hoe and you'll never need to fret. You'll live to such a ripe old age only the stags will consider your flesh worth tearing into."

More screams as the children mulled over being eaten by deer.

"Hush now, you get your minds settled to the way of nature and stop that foolish screaming. Now, children. One last devilish delight for you. Let me tell you about…-," The schoolmarm flipped to another picture, "... The Foeren yeti that stalks the elves and the Sgoëthe!"

"Crazy old bitch," Jejenua chuckled to herself, mesmerized by the deep blues of the terrifyingly beautiful butterfly.

Then the fear of being caught spying crept back to the fore of her thoughts. She needed to move on.

Besides the butterfly collection was a writing table with a full set of scribner's tools including a red-winged raven quill that could have been the twin of the one in the D'jestre's hat. This one was laid out on a desk with the other tools and several notebooks.

An unlit oil lamp sat in a holding above.

Letters were stuck in a cubby hole and a book lay open. It appeared to be a personal journal written in a language not the Imperium Vulgate she had been taught to read. Many individual letterforms went beyond even those she recognized as Court Imperium.

She turned to take in a workbench beside the writing desk, covered in flasks and chemical apparatus. A long sabertooth with an extracting tube sieve attached caught her eye.

It ended in a slow drip of a green liquid.

"That is most curious, sieur Feiçois," she muttered.

Jejenua raised the lamp so she could better see the accoutrements that lined the back wall. It was then that she knew the truth about her employer's son.

"The Night Visitor," she gasped.

Jejenua ran down the stairs, lungs too stiff to scream. She fled the house. The older gardener, a long thin man named Fîtor caught her as she tried to run by him.

"Let me go," she pleaded as she tried to catch her breath.

"Li'l Bug, wha's the matter," Fîtor asked in a thick provincial accent, as he gave her a reassuring squeeze of her rump.

"The Feiçois sire is a, may the Abysmal Mothers eat his soul, freak of human malady. There is a secret room, full of collectibles. I saw masks of faces on the wall. Made up to appear in the likeness of several girls from Gareen.

"Beneath the masks were tables with their stolen personal possessions. Combs, brushes, nail clippings, dirty undergarments, menses rags, clippings of hair. So, so horrible, sieur."

Fîtor held her by her shoulders in the crook of one arm. The other arm still curved around to her backside.

"It all makes sense now why a lovely girl like you has not been stalked and not had her very own visitation," he continued in a soothing voice.

"Why, you live too close to home for him to creep around you. You don't shite where you eat they say in the thieving trades.

"I wondered why you were so glum of late, Li'l Bug. Why, you just as pretty as the best of those girls he violated."

"Fîtor, I think you may be a tad touched."

She swept his hands from her rump with gentle smacks. Like any sensible girl, Jejenua loved to have her bum tickled, but Fîtor talked his way into being on punishment.

"It's not about that," she continued. "I wasn't even thinking about myself. But those poor girls."

"Horg," he continued. "Take our Li'l Bug to the cabin and get her some tea'n'fortify to calm her nerves. I'll see to this."

She turned to see who Fîtor was watching as his voice turned from a jest to keep her in her good senses to a more somber tone. Maester IiIlrondas stood on his front porch. The rail clenched in his hands to steady himself. He stared at the manse of Surus Feiçois with a look of despair.