Estate Planning
Darkness pulled over the sky above Ishgard. A big black-blue blanket full of stars that just started to peek through as the last rays of the sun disappeared and the orange glow in the west dissipated. Siegwulf was outside in a quiet edge of the housing district. He wasn’t wearing armor but he had his sword as always. He often trained in armor but he wasn’t in the mood tonight, nor was he in the mood to train in the perfectly good sparring pit that was in the heated inside of the huge estate he now lived in. That was the very thing his thoughts were on right now as he went through his drills with the massive slab of steel. Why did they have this place? It wasn’t right and he hadn’t been able to work out why. There was something he was missing. His mind turned it over and it always came back to the same thing. Thorne. Valgard Thorne. SIegwulf growled and stepped over to the nearby bench. He had lost track of time and had been training for so long he was sweating into the jacket he was wearing. He set the sword down and shrugged off his coat and peeled his shirt off before going back to it. Steam rose from his body and his damp warm clothing in the chill of Ishgard’s air. His scarred and scaled torso covered in sweat expanded as he took a deep breath. He had likely been training longer than he should but there was nothing for it when he was stuck on a thought he had to work through it. Sometimes that meant literally working through it.
He repeated his drills over and over then would switch stances and go through a different set. He growled each time he felt a muscle strain and he pushed through it. As the minutes stretched on he lowered the sword and panted as he looked over the horizon and the mountains beyond. His mind stretched back to that day. Meeting Muldoon and Lord Afront Vadard to pick up the contract for rescuing his niece. It wasn’t the first time he had met the man. He had once set Siegwulf up with a drink by the fire in the main hall. It was the same seat he always sat in now. The strangeness of that fact wasn’t lost on Siegwulf even if he didn’t have the words to describe it. Thorne met with him alone upstairs for longer than normal for a fairly standard merc contract. Except there was someone else with them upstairs…there before they arrived. He was with Vadard when they saw them to the door.
He raised his sword again and thrust it forward then slashed up. He repeated the same movements a few times then thrust and slashed outward. Once more but this time he stumbled as he felt his hamstring seize up. He collapsed forward and rolled to the side so he wouldn’t fall on the sword that he somehow managed to keep in his grip. The pain of the cramping muscle caused the exhausted Siegwulf to laugh out like he hadn’t in years. Something about the sharp, sudden, grasping pain was so exquisite it was either laugh or scream. The laughter shook something loose. A thought, half a memory of something that made him laugh even harder. As he caught his breath and the muscle calmed itself he panted and shook his horned head. “The barrister!” He yelled out.
“The barrister.” He said quietly to himself this time with a large grin on his face which he quickly pushed away returning to his normal, neutral, stone face. He tried to get back up but his body wasn’t quite ready for that so he just laid there thinking about what this could mean. There were two possibilities in his head, both were intriguing. Lord Vadard had called for his barrister to work on his will. He was likely the last man to see Lord Vadard alive…he was also likely to have been that third man upstairs. Even if he wasn't, they needed to see this man and find out what they could. Siegwulf had no evidence that he was somehow in league with Thorne…but he had the feeling Thorne was behind all of this and more. Not simply the events that were obvious to him like sending Violetta to the company or the acquisition of this house, but also this assassin company and perhaps other events, other people he saw everyday.
Siegwulf took a deep breath and stared up at the stars as the frozen ground against his back soaked into his overheated skin. Thorne has a reason for everything he does. That was a certainty Siegwulf had seen time and again on the battlefield not to mention in his deals with nobles. Siegwulf at least now had a path before him to try to find out some of those plans. The barrister.
