Madame Dun

There are some places I will never go again; some faces I never again wish to see. Perhaps it's time I traveled to the New World. There's work to be done.

---

It would only be on the eve of a new catastrophe that I pick this battered old journal up again.

I've become a recluse, these last two years. One of those horrible, landed rustics that bury themselves in their isolated estates, swatting at flies with wrinkled, out-dated gazettes. It was that letter that brought me back - and to what? A Tether besieged and overtaken. More familiar, broken bodies littering the ground, and others missing. The hatter, at least, is off the island on business. Vainamoinen was injured on the way through the jungle, but he's under the rebels' care, now. Tannee remains at my side, silent and alert as ever.

I've not asked if it's true, yet. I need to hear it aloud - that she's missing. That they took parts from her.

Siena.

If they've killed her... I will not abide the loss of my only friend.

---

I've received a letter. I must leave the estate at once.

---

So many months since the disasters that shook the island, and it seems I'm only just beginning to pick up the pieces.

Tannee and Vainamoinen dug us from the rubble. I no longer know how long I was trapped there with Lise at my side, though I recall beating my hands bloody against the stone after the hall collapsed around us. I suppose we were lucky to survive.
So much has happened, since then. The scars haven't faded - not entirely. Some, I can still see... knotted and pink, through the fur.

The gift I'd meant for Siena still sits atop my desk, the polished box gathering dust, the leather vines within growing stiff. It sat there the whole of the month she spent in my quarters. In my bed, all the while pining for her mad beau. I no longer know why I keep it there. Perhaps because it aches to touch it.

Never before have I been so grateful for my distractions. The slow business of replacing what was lost. My new endeavours. I shall commission a manor on the island soon, and murals to brighten its walls.

---

MISSING as of Nov 22nd.
FOUND as of Nov 28th. Currently comatose.

Didiane Dun was found unconscious not far from her quarters by the slave Vainamoinen, trapped in a collapsed hallway with a maidservant. She suffers a snapped clavicle, the bone jutting through the skin, and an oozing head wound. Bruising around her arms and legs, and a deep gash across her hip suggest she had been attempting to clear the blocked passages for some days before they collapsed around her. We have been unable to properly examine her hands; maidservant and slave both refuse to allow the removal of the patient's gloves.

She has yet to regain consciousness.
{Tucked between the pages of her journal; a note in sterile, printing-press block lettering.}

---

When I went out to sea, I left this journal behind. I've returned to find my affairs in a state of minor upheaval.

Time did not stop, while I was away. As a child of the aristocracy, I recall expecting it would, whenever I saw fit to take my leave of a place. I was tutored in the natural sciences. Even all those years ago, I knew the unforgiving march of time, but some part of my young mind yet persisted in believing the things I'd left would remain frozen for me. Suspended until my eventual return.

It was Cecile who broke me of such notions. She would turn the corner of her wry little mouth up and say

{Here, the entry ends. A few drops of ink smudge the space below the stricken line, suggesting the Madame sat at her desk for some time, tapping the tip of her pen against the paper. Whatever else she had meant to write, it has gone unsaid.}

---

Last evening, the Tether hosted its annual Golden Hearts Ball. A celebration of the venerable Guildereim and its crowning monument just as much as this most consummate of romantic's holidays.

It was an evening gilded with twinkling rose-coloured lights and festooned with froth and ribbons; overcome by the familiar, over-salted stink of the sea and the cloying sapour of imported sweets. And other things, of course, which I prefer not to detail. It was precisely the sort of fête I tend to avoid. Siena seems to delight in putting me far out of my element. Now and again, she reminds me so keenly of

{The Madame's crisp script breaks off abruptly, the very last bit of it barely legible through a thick, scoring gout of ink. It continues again some lines down, rather more rigidly.}

I was called upon to take my leave before the evening's completion.

At the outset I had thought, perhaps, that there had been some trouble in transferring the slave Orchid to her buyer on the Mainland. I was lead instead to my rented spaces in this establishment's Underhall, to find that several tonnes of earth and rock had burst through one of the stone-hewn walls of my disciplinary chamber, from beyond which yawned the barest crescent of a choked, black hole which nearly resembled a door, the whole mess of which filled the place with a prodigious, septic stench.

I am as yet uncertain how much of the more costly equipment within the chamber has been damaged beyond repair. It's a very small joy that the space will be cleared without further cost. I can only imagine how much will have to be replaced.

---

It is gratifying when I'm not kept waiting too long for the inevitable to occur.

Vainamoinen has lately strangled a patron of the Tether and left him unconscious in his room, opting to roam as it pleased him for the remainder of the time the man had bought. Had the slave not slipped in so monumentally naive a fashion, I might never have learned of this affair; the patron in question rather cravenly refused to admit its occurence.

The Tether's physicians happily have no such regard for the pride of one man.

I have thus begun correcting the slave in question. He seems to have been labouring under the misapprehension that he is possessed of rights similar or equal to those of a free-person. He will shortly be disabused of that notion.

---

If I've escaped last evening's bacchanalia with any dignity intact, I'll be shocked to hear it.

---

The new year has come and gone with barely a ripple, though I understand that there were lavish festivities held in the Great Hall as I worked. I have no time for such frivolity.

My quarters are fully outfitted and sufficiently staffed, my ledgers organized, and the buying prices for more than one of my most recent acquisitions have already been earned back in rental profits, plus notable interest.

Vainamoinen has proven as alluring to potential customers as I had hoped. The average renter likes, in rather a romantic fashion, to assume that the dangerous and lovely creature they've just purchased for the evening will find something all-together different and compelling in them, if only they can smile and coddle sweetly enough.

The creature is playing the demure, obedient plaything for the moment, but the legacy of his former masters' astounding failure to properly discipline him is patently obvious in the subtle, manipulative arrogance with which he carries himself. I feel a misstep on his part is soon to come; and at that point, his training will begin in earnest.

The purchase of the slave Orchid went by rather uneventfully. She will be transferred to my holding cells within the

{Here, the text cuts to a sudden stop, as though the author had been interrupted in the midst of her writing. It begins again shortly after, its scrawl somewhat more ponderous in its slant than it had been before.}

I've just received a letter by way of a harried-looking courier. It seems to have been sent from the Lady Siena. I shall have to ponder this new development.

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