The physical reality of maintaining an empire's paranoia rarely involved blood in an alleyway. It required ink. Rivers of it dried on thousands of pages, stacking higher than a man's head, forming the true walls of the Imperium.
Rethik Myrvalis sat at the center of a circular slate desk in the subterranean depths of the Ministry of Whispers. He was one hundred and two years old. His longevity blessing maintained the dark, glossy brown scales of his youth and the absolute physical precision of his left hand, defying the century he had lived. The blessing preserved his muscles perfectly. It simply refused to alleviate his administrative fatigue.
He adjusted his brass-rimmed glasses. The lenses were thick, ground by Mechanist opticians to correct a deterioration the blessing ignored, remaining entirely indifferent to his ability to read twelve-point font in the condensation-weeping stones of the Sunforge cold.
He pulled a folio from the right-side stack.
