It would be the third Renegade Inquisitor in the history of the order, and facilitating the process would either burn many bridges for him or help him cut the scaffolds out from under his political rivals back home if they tried to twist the Inquisitor’s renegadeship into a traitor-revealed story. The coming days would only grow more stressful and meticulous, but as long as the alchemist who produced his Philter remained meticulous in his work, so could Crovacus.

That night, three old men sat playing a board game next to a headless corpse.

That night, three old men came to blows with would-be evidence tamperers and captured them in the same manner as wild beasts.

As the cogs of time ground on, Collier toiled tirelessly in her workshop. She had the manpower, the machines, the resources, the land, everything to set up a production line for her cutting-edge self-defense weapons line of “Tyrant-munchers”. They would be utterly revolutionary, they would bring the firepower of Grekurian scatterguns into the realm of modern self-contained ammunition. She just needed to finish the stamping dies, and she wouldn’t have anything less than glyphic cold-iron… So she had to do it by hand.

By the time the sun rose, the city’s laborers rose from their beds and the farms in the valley awoke one by one.

Some farmers butchered their animals, others milked them. Others still hooked their beasts of burden into plowshares, or even dug up Ignis gems from their fireplaces to fuel the engines of their tractors for the day.

Some plowed their fields in preparation to sow seeds, others scoured weeds from the earth and ensured their irrigation channels weren’t damaged, and others still were already beginning to harvest what had grown.

Some set out sacks of grain or produce for the locust-men, hoping that those would be all the damnable creatures took. Others redressed claw wounds, strapped on sparklocks and sharpened brush hooks, for they knew that swords and plowshares were one and the same.

Some of Willowdale’s farmers couldn’t afford farmhands, or plowshares, or beasts of burden to pull them with - not without produce to sell for these precious tools. Even with the charity of their countrymen, even with the aid of generous donations, there were war veterans who had been fortunate - or perhaps duplicitous - enough to be able to escape the malicious maws of the farcical post-war tribunals.

One such soldier-turned farmer spread healing cream on his innumerable scars, brewed from herbs and clarified boar fat, blessed by a prayer to the land itself under moonlight. He knew not why it worked, why it stopped his old scars from ripping open and bleeding as they so loved to do, he only knew that it did, and how to make it work. So it had been for generations uncounted, and so it would remain for his children and their children’s children.

Crovacus sat in his office, having just received several packages from Strolvath alongside other, more sensitive information. Two letters, two promising and grave letters, and a third - a gift, as well as a message. It was a small revolver with four chambers - it had a brass frame, a cold-iron cylinder, and the rest of it was wrought in mundane steel inlaid with gold. Click. Click. Click. It almost felt comical in his hand, so small it was. Strolvath had humorously remarked that Collier said she’d make him a bigger one once he proved himself to be a man.

Within one chamber was rolled-up a strip of paper that read: “My Work is done. Your Work may now begin.”

The tooling was finished, then. Now it was up to Crovacus to provide secure, discreet transportation of the necessary hardware through the city and to the to-be factory grounds… While his agents were already stretched thin trying to counteract the meddling of Pateirian agents. A small part of him hoped they would try to do something overt so he could bring down the hammer on them, so he could make a big show of it, simultaneously galvanizing himself as a protector of Willowdale and demonizing those wannabe occupiers rooted themselves in his city. That very same small part wanted an opportunity to stretch its muscles, to see if - invigorated by Fivefold Philter - he could bend aether to his will in the same bombastic fashion as he had been able to in his youth.

This gun, though… It was so stubby, even had a short little ramrod, only exacerbated by the overall width of the rod, the barrel, and the chambers that came from the fact the gun was designed to work with standard Ikesian sparklock pistol cartridges. Only Collier would create a work of art such as this for the sake of a small dick joke.

It would be of use. He took a few minutes to load all four chambers and returned to work, for the grand hour and a half of quiet that he did get. Turning the cylinder to feel the haptic feedback and hear the click of the mechanism quickly became something to do whenever he was thinking of how to word a letter or trying to mentally parse the obnoxiously obtuse wording of legal propositions. One of these days he would write the simplest, bluntest law banning the use of overly complex language in legal documents.

A series of knocks echoed while Crovacus was fiddling with the revolver. He put the gun down and called them in. The door to his office swung open, and in walked a scraggly-haired man in dark-blue dress shirt and beige pants. Both were new, both were clean, and neither fit him one bit. His wrists and ankles were shackled and chained. Five guards surrounded him, each pointing a gun to his head. One had a patch sewn to his uniform that denoted his seniority.

“He’s dangerous, sir,” said the guard with fear in his voice.

“I know, I’ll be alright,” the governor replied.