“Look where your big mouth has brought us,” Princess chided, her voice laced with reproach as we crouched beneath a small table in my father’s library. It was late, and the lone candle barely pierced the deepening night. The circumstances were far from ideal, yet we found ourselves ensconced in the flickering light, our clandestine activity unfolding.
I wrestled with the quill, attempting to replicate the handwriting of my former self—a script now foreign to these hands of effortless precision. Each stroke of the pen required a conscious effort to mimic the imperfection of my old style. Every tale I had spun for Rascal needed to be committed to paper in a manner befitting a rough draft. False mistakes, errant scratches—they were all part of the ruse. Kyolhan, demanded nothing less than this charade, and so I toiled. Sleep, alas, would elude us both tonight; Princess was caught in the unfortunate web of my creation. The hour grew late, and our improper attire for such an endeavor added a layer of indignity to the task. We were, in essence, forgers.
“It shall just take slightly longer. Be patient,” I requested.
“This huge waste of time is all your fault!” she complained. “I have nothing to do but watch the candle burning. It’s gone down by three notches, by the way. Three! That’s a quarter of a day, gone!”
This section of the library, cloaked in shadows to preserve the tomes lining its shelves, offered little sense of the passing hours. Notched candles served as the only indicators of time, with each mark representing two Imperial hours. By Princess’s reckoning, dawn approached with relentless inevitability.
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“It is also the ideal moment to include my living will among the documents we are to surrender,” I reasoned, my focus split between the mirror on my lap and the parchment before me. “This will secure your access to my assets. Everything aligns perfectly in the end.” I continued, “Moreover, Kyolhan is pleased with ‘your’ prowess in painting. If he displays it where guests might inquire about commissions, we could potentially secure further funds for our investigation.”
“I almost wish you had not painted that,” she brought up a senseless lamentation I had heard earlier while working. “It’s too good, Dubart! How am I supposed to pretend I have that skill when I’m… when I’m me instead of you?”
“We shall manage,” I distractedly dismissed, worried about phrasing a sentence correctly so I could make a funny delivery of the punchline. “What would be a funny synonym for anus? You know, a vulgar way to refer to the anal cavity. It has to sound like it was said by a low-born. Butt-hole? Shit hole? Shit hole is too much, is it not? Maybe just… ‘your stupid hole’…”
“Asshole,” Princess corrected, and to a very acceptable degree. That was genius! “That’s what you’re being right now. My headache just stopped, and I already feel one coming because of the all-nighter. I only get to be me half the day! I don’t want to spend it in bed.”
“You are young and healthy; this should hardly trouble you,” I remarked, barely suppressing a chuckle. The joke I had just crafted amused me far more than it ought to have, and the sound that escaped my lips—a soft, feminine giggle—caught me by surprise.
“Oh, how clever,” Princess retorted with biting sarcasm. “Someone told another to shove an axe up their rear end. Truly, this is the pinnacle of comedy.” She sighed deeply within me. “Dubart, if you would care for some advice—stick to painting.”
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