Antoril's pre-dawn hours felt like they'd been written by a drunken playwright. The magical streetlights still flickered lazily on crooked posts, some tangled with dry vines or scrawled with protest slogans in charcoal.
The wind carried a confusing mix of burnt bread, medicinal herbs, and institutional corruption. And there I was — climbing down the side of the boarding house with more weight on my back than those old walls were probably meant to handle, my cloak catching on every damned hook along the way and my pickaxe slapping against my leg with every badly-judged jump.
"Of course," I thought. "Because doors are for people who don't live inside a never-ending stage play of impulsive teen drama."
