Twentieth Night of the Winter Month of the Gale

"Tonight, Spire is quiet. The world bellows, but I sit here and revel in the silence. In a few too short hours some fat merchant or some guild "diplomat" will be here. They will come and they will pollute this place with their mindless babble. Money! Politics! Nonsense! They spend their time trying to get one sheckel ahead of their neighbors, or one step on the ladder closer to some liege for whom they have no respect; they make me sick. Not one of them has any concept of the great novelty of life, not one can see the value in his own existance. They live and breath assumptions, and must kill anyone who challenges those assumptions or die themselves.

Tonight, Spire is clean. Not even the Guardians, who've forsaken life, are here. I've sent them all away. Tonight, Spire is mine. Tomorrow, one of those lifeless sentinels, or one of those disgusting worlders will find me here. They will wonder and babble about it for months and then forget me, and things are best that way. I would not have their grime and filth probe my motives. I reject them. I reject them and their whole filthy world. I hope they rot as much in life as I will in death."

--Umbras Master Priest Semper, Journal

That night, Spire screamed, but no-one heard. There were screams enough come daybreak, when the naked body was found laying dead, grinning horridly at passers-by as if it knew some frightening secret.