damp rot, mildew, the salty breath of the lagoon: memories unfold here in the way that dense blankets of fog do tend to choke the city, particularly in the cool & wet november, stretching infinitely outward in every direction. engulfing, spreading like a full-body rash. venice is a sore, a chancre in a most-private crease; venice is the malignant growth that devours him from the inside out. by the time armand crosses the garden & pads noiselessly into the old studio, he’s enervated already, spent. driven through by his own sword, it would seem. he has changed, aged, become an altogether different thing than what he was the last time he dragged lazy, meandering fingertips along the now-crumbling plaster walls —— but padrone is perfectly right in saying that time has no value or merit to them, now, and certainly not in a haunted castle such as this one. would armand could have summoned the courage & strength to go bounding across the vast white room and into his creator’s almighty embrace, he knows that within just a moment the centuries would wrinkle suddenly together & become little more than a deep void of constant sensation and hysteria, millions of emotions & passions all occurring in one devastatingly euphoric instant. he opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. there are no good words he could summon for him, no argument that could ever convince marius to absorb the pain of another. “what have i ever known of peace, lord? precious little.” he resents the venom in his words, but marius is more of a fool than armand believed him to be if he’d expected much else from him. “you think me a lost sheep. the gamin you could not tame or refine. i’ve not come to you in search of forgiveness, sir.” his master’s steely expression tells precisely nothing, his grey eyes as cold & austere as ever, perhaps more than. and somewhere deep within, armand wilts. pleading with his eyes, he tells him, “only mercy, lord. only mercy.”