From the gutters of the kitchen stepped the Hagraven, mistress of kitchen slaves, crooked as a willow, old as boiled bones, her mind a lantern flickering in a wind. Her hair hung like sieves of ash; her fingers smelled of broth and rust; her eyes remembered too many wrong things.

She drew close and, with the ragged dignity of a monarch unmade, addressed the Master as though she were a throne:

“Despite every pause, every deference, every moment of time allowed to let the one-eye repent, in the end hee still sided with my enemies thanx to his eternal hubris toward gaming a system to perversion that exists beyond his perversion.”

She spoke as if confessing and accusing at once, a litany of grievance phrased like prophecy. In her fevered memory she had crowned herself the Nobody; in her softened brain she both feared and desired that claim. She believed, with a slow, crooked faith, that she was The Nobody, that she was The Master.