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Co, I am a dead man

Whatever hope I had for survival vanished the uard came to me just before sunset to tell ether soation and torture That will now be my fate alone to bear

It is difficult to accept that he is gone, having not witnessed his death uide for much of my life, ever since he took h ere kept in separate cells, I felt at peace, sure that he’d have some way for us to escape captivity Now all I feel is despair

His choice h I question whether I have it in ain, I doubt Karsa did it for fear of pain As a trusted spy and confidant in uarded some of the most coveted secrets Maybe he feared that he wouldn’t be able to withstand torture, not that he wasn’t tough as nails

As for me, I know very little, so if I do break, I’ll only have lies to tell I ah not a typical one Karsa was ers and cloaks and also in the art of falconry That was his cover for a long ties along the River Oure

I asked him once what had drawn him into falconry, not that I expected an answer since he very rarely opened up about his past, but tothat he was raised one, so that turned out to be very useful in his life of tricks and deception He trained Elsu, his falcon, to dotheestures

A twinge of sadness enters ine Elsu somewhere beyond the walls of this city and tower, perched up in a tree unaware that his longtiive it so ht Falcons aren’t enize that Karsa isn’t coe on his own again with hardly a second thought

But for a while, he will look for Karsa, and that thought makes it feel like there’s a part of him still alive My father once told me that no one is truly dead who is remembered That’s how he helped me to cope when my mother became ill and passed on

It’s been several days since I saw Elsu, the afternoon that Karsa and I were captured to be precise We were hiding in the hills behind the city of Lyndwald, which sits on the southeast side of a lake beyond the eastern borders of Bayfell Soents of Teuvinna, a powerful city-state by the North Sea, had contacted Karsa and asked him to infiltrate Lyndwald and deterhtfor help

The assignment didn’t seem out of the ordinary to me, but Karsa felt like there was more behind it

“Soone, and that the next e another ees fro to sip from his canteen “The truth is that it doesn’t matter whether or not there’s another invasion The peace here isn’t going to last”

“Why do you say that?” I asked